"Another book on climate change!", surely many of us would lament.
Understandably, this might be the feeling of ardent audience surfeited by the flooding of literary circles by books on global warming, climate change, pollution, deforestation and a never ending list of issues related to environment. While the situation is a positive indication of how serious the problem is for all humanity, with majority of the books on the subject speaking almost same language readers are bound to lose interest.
"Convenient Action: Gujarat's Response to Challenges of Climate Change" talks about how the resolve of people of a state, to reverse and rectify environmental problems, when supported by visionary leadership can deliver unprecedented results. This book by Narendra Modi, a path-breaking leader, is a compilation of what has been done to reverse impact of climate change. The book is a pleasant change for all those who were reading & re-reading same story again and again including environmental issues & problems, causes & effects and what needs to be done. Another very evident fact, which has made this book an excellent read, is that the book is more of a master class from a practitioner rather than a passive discussion and commentary by those who don't need to execute their own suggestions and walk their own talk.
Narendra Modi, who is Chief Minister of Gujarat by designation and Chief Executive Officer of Gujarat by actions, offers something entirely new to the audience, presented in an easily readable manner and creates immediate connect with the reader. Although Modi does address some questions raised and dealt with elsewhere, he adds the most significant topic of all - best practices, actions which had already benefited millions in Gujarat and can be easily replicated across the world.
The book is a compendium of actions undertaken in Gujarat during the last decade which have positively contributed to environment and sustainability. He has elaborated on how the state has kept a constant emphasis on mitigation initiatives, exploiting the clean and green energy potential through promotion of wind and solar energy and state-wide gas grid. As a policy maker, Modi has extensive experience of identifying successful policies which can have long term beneficial outcome, by creating this book he has created a reference work which can guide those who are genuinely concerned by Climate Change issues and are serious about resolving them.
Modi has once again displayed his keenness to break conventional mindset by first providing an exemplary leadership to make Gujarat a carbon-neutral state through sustainable development and saving wastage of energy at different levels and then authoring a book which provides excellent insights of how he achieved such feet. As Modi is the second political leader in the world after Al Gore, who authored Inconvenient Truth, to have written a complete book on climate change but as far as the knowledge mass is concerned Convenient Action easily outclasses Inconvenient Truth.
Although this is not the first book by Modi, who is a well published author with substantial fan following, Convenient Action is his first book in English. While many of his previous books are available in translated versions, with his first English book Narendra Modi has impressed a sizable number of English reading audiences. I, myself being an author with environmentalist inclination would surely recommend everyone to read this book, which is a "Convenient Action" which they should take if they want to see a prosperous future for mankind.

This article is written by Social Technopreneur, Deepak Pareek. Deepak is an author, columnist, speaker and environmentalist. He can be reached at [email protected]