Rights go with duties. Every citizen owes much to the society he lives in and the society in turn also owes to him. The citizen should have the right of protection of life, liberty and property, freedom of speech, sanctity of the home, association and religious faith. Education, medical help, employment, disability or old age benefits are also some other rights a citizen should have. Among the other rights are also included the right to exercise franchise to elect the government.

If the citizen has his rights, he has his obligations and responsibilities too. The first and foremost obligation of a citizen in allegiance to the state. He must stand by the government to resist enemy attack to prevent foreign domination. A citizen is further obliged to cooperate with the government in running the administration and maintaining law and order. For running a government, money is needed and the citizens should, pay their own dues properly.

The citizens should observe discipline to maintain a good civic life. Every citizen must extend his or her hands to others who need them. Individual freedom is a precious thing no doubt, but it is our duty not to encroach upon other’s freedom.

Covid 19 pandemic hit the globe unprepared – and then we were forced to transition into the working from home setups. Not being able to physically meet at the workplace, we’ve started to accept having get-togethers and meeting via online video communications platforms. Though we have to accept that the work-from-home scenario has helped in a lot of ways, especially in connecting people from different parts of the globe and connecting them when they were not able to physically travel because of the lockdown. Despite all its advantages, we will have to agree that working from home isn’t equal to the earlier times when we worked inside the office premises. Like every coin has two sides, along with its pros, working from home has its disadvantages. Let’s have at look at them –

1. A lesser balance between work and personal life – When working from the office it’s easier to strike a balance between work and personal life – mostly once you left the office building you didn’t engaged in office work again till the next day. But now with work from home – we find ourselves always busy on a work call even later than office hours. With the physical transition of traveling to the office missing, the line between our work and personal life is also blurred.
2. Lack of social life and feeling isolated – Not getting to meet our colleagues face to face, lesser social and human interaction end up making us feel isolated. More than half of the people have also reported increased loneliness because of working from home.
3. Decreased motivation levels – You would generally make efforts to wake up early and look presentable while you were travelling to office every day. On the contrary, when at home we might just laze around in our pajamas all day, maybe sleep in the time we earlier used to dress up and get ready. This decreases our motivation, and we are generally less interested in the X-factor in the day – as the routine is pretty much the same each day.
4. Lack of teamwork- Evidence finds that working from home can have negative effects on our thinking abilities as a team. When physically together, it’s easier to collate the brilliant ideas from each person in the team, help each other, and build rapport with the members. These seem to be missing when the only mode of communication for the team virtual.
5. Presence of domestic distractions – Working from home has added difficulties, including the distractions from our home and the surroundings. Maybe you have someone in your family watching the TV in in front of you, or your children are demanding your time when you are in the middle of an important meeting. These distractions are absent while you are on the office premises which is designed in a way to let you work at your highest level of productivity.
6. Decreased productivity and increased coordination costs – A study has shown that even though the number of hours worked while working from home has increased post the pandemic, the productivity levels have decreased. Extra efforts have to be made for the communication, coordination, and collaboration between the team in the virtual setting – affecting the productivity levels of the employees.

Though being safe and at home is definitely the priority right now, I’m sure most of us can’t wait to get back to our offices once the pandemic is over. Even with the few cons of working from home, we cannot be less appreciative of it and how it has let us to continue working in these difficult times.

The 20^th and 21^st century have seen ginormous revolution and advancements in the field of industrialization and technology. The volume and amount of technological products and services that we use today and the vast scale of industrial development have surely made our lifestyle luxurious and hassle-free, but this face of evolution has surely taken its toll on the environment. Here, we discuss what is carbon footprint, the causes, how it affects climate change and a few ways and methods to decrease it.

What is Carbon Footprint?

According to WHO, “A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact your activities have on the amount of carbon dioxide produced through the burning of fossil fuels and is expressed as a weight of CO2 emissions produced in tonnes”. The New York Times describes it as “A carbon footprint is the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions that come from the production, use and end-of-life of a product or service. It includes carbon dioxide — the gas most commonly emitted by humans — and others, including methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming.” These emissions are a result of an individual’s usage of basic amenities like transportation, housing and food and other technologies. For millions of years, these greenhouse gases present in proportion in the Earth’s atmosphere have kept the climate warm and conducive for habitation, but their huge emission levels have ended up heating the Earth beyond safe limits and have drastically affected its climate. Greenhouse gases trap heat released mostly from human activities like burning fossil fuels for heat, electricity, transportation, industries as well as agricultural, commercial and domestic activities. These unwanted levels of greenhouse concentrations cause complex shifts in the normal environmental cycle, leading to climate change and rising temperatures on the planet. Climate change has adverse effects on the environment resulting in extreme weather effects, shifting wildlife populations, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, change in precipitation, ocean acidification due to acid rains and a number of respiratory diseases from smog and air pollution due to entrapment of carbon dioxide, monoxide and other gases in the atmosphere.

How can we bring about reduction in the carbon footprint?

Well, a lot of efforts will go into almost restoring the natural balance of the environment and climate. But as they say, charity begins at home! Every individual can take small steps to reduce their carbon footprint and make a huge difference in the years to come. For instance, we can keep a daily check on our personal and household carbon footprint via Carbon Calculators, make a plan based on the provided reduction recommendations, and act upon solutions like limit unwanted use of electricity, heat and other products. LED lights are known to use 85% less energy and run 25% longer than conventional incandescent lights. Switching to energy efficient sources will surely help reduce our greenhouse emissions. Choosing to buy sustainably also helps. We can minimize the use of resources emitting greenhouse gases, reduce discarding non-biodegradable products and create awareness amongst our colleagues and co-workers about the same at our workplace.

Various reports stated that carbon emissions from transportation surpassed emissions from electricity generation as a top source of greenhouse gases. Going carless for a year could save about 2.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to 2017 study from researchers at Lund University and the University of British Columbia — that’s a little more than a roundtrip transatlantic flight. So, to reduce these emissions effectively, we can minimise the use of personal vehicles, keep maintenance of the vehicles regularly, travel by public transportation as much as possible or car-pool to the workplace, or invest into a better option – electric (green) vehicles!

A lot of energy is used up for our food production and consumption methods. We can reduce this energy usage by eating better and less processed food, lessening wastage, using decomposable plates and utensils rather than plastic ones, etc.

On a greater scale, optimizing industrial processes and changing to more sustainable ways of manufacturing goods, adopting renewable energy sources for daily use and creating policies to bring about reduction in the carbon footprint are necessary to reverse detrimental effects to the environment and climate in the coming decades.