OFFICIALLY BANKRUPT

One stove, one pot What eco-development means to people in Nagarhole

Imagining IEDP

The Union government hired the Indian Institute of Planning and Administration (IIPA), New Delhi, to chalk out an 'indicative plan', a proposal submitted by the government to the World Bank to launch formal negotiations, which the department of economic affairs took up with the Bank in 1994.

Lost in transit

Nimati Domohini village in the west of Buxa Tiger Reserve, West Bengal, is on a highway where a side road breaks off and leads to the reserve's Nimati range office seven kilometres away. But the village is miles away from realising the dreams dreamt by its 331-member eco-development committee (EDC) set up in 2001. Each committee member was allocated Rs 10,000.

Conserve or pickle?

Both the Forestry Research Education and Extension Project (FREEP) and its later, larger avatar, the India Eco-development project (IEDP) had a single objective: conserve biodiversity. What also made it a different form of rural development, quite unlike anything government had hitherto done, was the equal emphasis on improving the lives of people in tandem with the forest.

After dosage

IEDP's larger monitoring mechanism, too, seems to have been primarily meant for the government or Bank consumption. The Bank sent its supervisory missions and its supervisors wrote 'aid memoirs' on whether project sites conformed to project conditions. Their memoirs were not made public, and shared only with the government.

Hold tight

There exists a document called Linking Biodiversity Conservation and Rural Livelihoods. It is the Indian government's initial salvo for a new eco-development project, expected to begin late 2005. It will cost approximately US $48 million (Rs 220 crore), with beneficiaries putting in US $2 million (Rs 9.20 crore).

Anomalies galore

We had gone there anticipating trouble -- after all, the previous Global Environment Facility (gef) project we had visited was attended by angry scientists and even angrier adivasis. That was at Nagarahole, Karnataka, where we were threatened with arrest for merely showing a film on the discontent that gef had aroused.