 Good afternoon. Good to see such a big audience. I'm here with a man who has inspired millions of Indians to work for the environment and particularly to clean up and save the fantastic beautiful big rivers of India. So I think we will explore a little bit what inspires you and then how you are able to inspire others and then later we'll move on to maybe the more practical issues regarding how you can achieve such a such big, big movement in India. But let's start start there and how how you have been inspired to to start working for the environment. Namaskar. Good afternoon to everyone. My engagement with rivers and forests of southern India started very early for me. When I was eight nine years of age, if I got enough money to buy food for three to four days, I just managed this and disappeared into the jungles by myself. Well, it was a big concern for those who bore me, but I just lived in the jungles and and when I was there, I did not experience this as some kind of nature or natural beauty. I just saw it as a life larger than myself. And when I was 17, I floated down Cauvery River for 163 kilometers for 13 days, beating off the river, living off the river, just on four truck tubes and a few bamboo. And the river is a life beyond you and me. People like you and me come and go, but these rivers have been flowing for millions of years and they must flow forever. But such a mighty life, we brought it down to its knees today. The rivers that I saw at that time 50 years ago and the rivers that I see today are just half of what they used to be. They say average depletion is around 44 percent, but many rivers are well below half and many of them, which were perennial for millions of years, have become seasonal rivers. This year, Cauvery did not touch the ocean for three and a half months. It dried up 170 kilometers inland, the entire length of Cauvery in Tamil Nadu. Between these two states, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, there is a big war for water. It's going on for the last 25 years, but the entire length of the river is only 430 kilometers, but it dried up 170 kilometers inland. And the sad part is when we did this painting competition across the country in over 160,000 schools, many children, when we asked them to paint a river, they just painted sand. This is the experience of the people. And why is that? Why are they going so dry? It's actually culture, why is it happening? See, in India only 4 percent of the river water is glacial or ice-fed. Rest is all forest-fed. Forest-fed essentially means we have rains. Unlike in Europe, we have rains for only on an average of 40 to 45 days across the country, which is our monsoon. This 45 days of precipitation, we are supposed to hold it in the land for 365 days and let it go in the river slowly. If this has to happen, substantial vegetation has to be there. There is a serious removal of vegetation, not only in the form of forests, but also in the farm lands there used to be vegetation. For example, in the Ganga basin, which amounts to 25 percent of India's geography and 33 percent of India's agricultural produce. In the last 50 years we have removed 94 percent of the green cover, 94 percent. This has happened mainly because I know this well because 40, 45 years ago I was into farming and at that time when the new movement came of green revolution, where we started using fertilizers for the first time, chemical fertilizers, fertilizers companies openly advised every farmer to remove all the trees because fertilizer gets absorbed by the aggressive root system of the trees and it will not produce yield for the crops. So across the country in the last 35, 40 years a huge depletion of green cover happened. That is the main reason why waters have receded. Another thing is there is a serious exploitation of groundwater. Which is an inevitable consequence of not having enough water in the rivers. In the video you said something like people believe that water brings forest but the opposite is more true, forest brings water. It is so, it is, there is substantial science today to show you that it is the tree cover which attracts rain. And right now we see that wherever the rains happen in India the monsoon is becoming so scattered. Though the same volume of water is coming down in principle. In the last 100 years there has not been too much variation in the amount of water or the precipitation coming down on the Indian subcontinent. But where it is coming down and what patterns it is coming down is completely altered mainly because of lack of green cover. And today there is no more debate about it. Everybody knows that it is a forest which draws water or rain.