Modes of Existence (i) Modes of existence and resource use: hunting - gathering; pastoral; agricultural; industrial.
(ii) Their impact on natural resource base: energy resources; material resources; scale of catchment; quantity of resources used.
(iii) Their social organisation: size of group; kinship; division of labour; access to resources.
(iv) Their ideology and idiom of man-nature relationship.
(v) Their ecological impact: land transformation; habitat; diversity; modification of biogeochemical cycles; modification of climate; substantial use.
(vi) An appreciation of the coexistence of all four modes of existence in contemporary India .
(vii) Ecological conflicts arising therein.
Ecology
(i) Concept of an ecosystem: definition; relationships between living organism, e.g. competition, predation, pollination, dispersal, food chains, webs; the environment - physical (soil, topography, climate); biotic - types of relationships (competition, mutualism, parasitism, predation, defence); soil types and vegetation; co-evolution and introduction of species.
(ii) Habitats and niches: Gause's competitive exclusion principle; resource partitioning.
(iii) Flow of energy: efficiencies - photosynthetic - tropic - assimilation - production; tropic levels; generalised model of the ecosystem; ecological pyramid (numbers and biomass); food webs.
(iv) Nutrient cycles: generalised model; a study of carbon, nitrogen cycles (biological and geological); man's intervention; pollution as disruption of these cycles; ecosystem as a source of material and sink waste for human societies; ecological succession - causes (autogenic, allogenic and human) - patterns of successions.
(v) Biomes: terrestrial; fresh water; marine; a survey of the biomes of India and their inhabitants.
Pollution
(i) Disruption of nutrient cycles and habitats: atmospheric pollution; human activities that change the composition of the atmosphere; connection between pollution anddevelopment; local and global effects (greenhouse effect, ozone depletion) and their impact on human life; burning of fossil fuel products - effect on ecosystem and human health.
(ii) Pollution control approaches - prevention and control: as applied to fossil fuel burning; the role of PCBs; industrial pollution control - principles - devices - costs - policy incentives; combating global warming; the international political dimensions; third world interest; impact on economic growth.
(iii) Water pollution: water cycle; pollution of surface water, ground water, ocean water; industrial pollution and its effects; domestic sewage and its treatment - techniques and appropriate technology; marine ecosystem protection and coastal zone management; soil pollution - sources - effects.
Legal Regimes for Sustainable Development
(i) National legislative frameworks for environment protection and conservation; survey of constitutional provisions (including directive principles); national laws; state laws in India .
(ii) International legal regimes: on trade and environment (GATT, WTO, IPR, TNC's, regional arrangements and preferential trade arrangements); on climate; on common resources (forests, bio-diversities, oceans and space); international institutions (UNEP, UNCTAD, WHO, UNDP, etc.); international initiatives (Earth Summit, Agenda 21).
Technology and Environment
(i) Technological evolution and models: hi-tech; low-tech; intermediate; appropriate; traditional; interaction between technology, resources, environment and development; energy as a binding factor; the need for reorienting technology.
(ii) Renewable energy: limitations of conventional sources; sources of renewable energy and their features (solar, wind, biomass, micro-hydel and muscle power).
(iii) Health: incidents of disease as an indicator of the health of the environment; prevention of diseases by better nutrition, sanitation, access to clean water, etc.; communicable and noncommunicable diseases; techniques of low cost sanitation; policy and organisation to provide access to basic health service for all; the role of traditional and local systems of medicine.
(iv) Biotechnology: potential; limitations.
Design and Planning for Environmental
Conservation and Protection
(i) Ecosystem analysis: understanding complex systems; critical and state variables as system indicators; indicators of inter-relationships; successions and systems resilience; predicting and assessing system responses to impacts and their interventions; rapid appraisal methods.
(ii) Human environment interactions: quality of life vs. quality of environment; environmental issues and problems; role of belief and values; analysing brief statements for underlying values; issues analysis - separating symptoms from problems; problem identification; identifying the players and their positions; understanding interacting problems and identifying critical control points; problems analysis; identifying variables (human behaviours, values, ecological, etc.); determining the relationships between variables; formulating questions for research; planning research; generating problems, solution, briefs and specifications.
(iii) Evaluation and assessment of impacts: approaches and techniques of environment and social impact assessment; environment impact assessment as a planning tool and a decision making instrument; interpreting environment impact assessments
(iv) Design of solutions: generating solution options; overcoming blocks in thinking; generative and lateral thinking; using criteria (social, political, ecological, technological, economic) to rank and prioritise solution ideas; check solutions for economic, social and technical viability; collation of solution into coherent plans; planning sequence and cost.
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