The most important gain of India’s environmental movement is the voice it has given to its citizens. This is the soul of the movement
Illustration: Yogendra Anand / CSE
As the nation gets ready to celebrate its 76th year of Independence, it is time to take stock of the role that the environment movement has played in shaping policies and the practice of development.
The movement has three distinct tracks where we can record its mark on history. One, where environmental action has played a role in defining developmental strategy for natural resource management.
Two, where action has opposed developmental projects and from this contestation a consensus has emerged in terms of action. Three, where environment movement has pushed and prodded changes in policies when it comes to pollution and human health.
The “nature” of the movement is complex. In the last 75 years, it has remained divided on the practice of environmentalism as development and as conservation.
This schism was visible even at the birth of the movement in the 1970s. In 1973, the country launched Project Tiger—a programme to identify land for sanctuaries for the flagship species based on the western concept of conservation.
At roughly the same time, women in the high Himalayas launched Chipko movement, where they resisted the axe of woodcutters. Their movement was not about conservation; they needed the trees for survival and so, wanted the right to cut them and grow them.
This difference has played out in our policies that vacillate between extraction and conservation of natural resources. In all this, the rights of communities have not been realised.
Project Tiger reached its low point in 2004 when Rajasthan’s Sariska national park lost all its tigers to poachers. The Tiger Task Force then set up the agenda for reform, which included strengthening protection of the reserves and relocation of villages from the core areas. Tiger numbers in the wild have stabilised since. However, questions remain if local communities are benefitting from this conservation effort.
Similarly, the Chipko movement inspired the country for forest conservation and afforestation. By the 1980s, the Forest Conservation Act was enacted, which decreed that forest land could not be diverted without the permission of the Centre.
This law has worked to stem the tide of forest diversion to some extent but has led to alienation of communities from the forests they protected. Today the question is how forests will be grown and then cut and then grown again so that India can move towards a wood-based economy and in ways that benefit local people.
In the 1980s, the project to build a dam on the river Narmada became a flashpoint for “destructive” development. This came after the 1983 decision to stop the Silent Valley hydroelectric project in sub-tropical forests of Kerala to protect the region's rich biodiversity.
In the case of the Narmada project, the issues were also about the loss of forests and rehabilitation of displaced villages. This movement has been much revered and reviled, but it raised issues of how to find balance between environment and development in policy and then, most importantly, in practice.
These 1980s high-profile projects led to the setting up of the paraphernalia of environmental impact appraisal and clearance in the decade of the 1990s. But this balancing act is still a work in progress.
It was the drought of late 1980s that prompted our colleague and environmentalist Anil Agarwal to look at reinventing the water management paradigm.
The book, Dying Wisdom, documented the technological ingenuity of traditional water management in different ecosystems. It brought to the fore the idea of decentralised and community-based water conservation, which then led to the change in policy towards regeneration of waterbodies to improve livelihoods and to capture rain where it falls.
The industrial disaster in December 1984, when gas leaked from Union Carbide’s factory in Bhopal and instantly killed thousands, led to improvement in legislations for combating industrial accidents and, to an extent, improved preparedness of companies. But we have not provided justice to those who still suffer from health problems and lack livelihoods.
In the 1990s, the fight for the right to clean air began in Delhi. This battle has led to improvements in the quality of fuel and technology—Delhi leapfrogged to cleaner compressed natural gas.
But as vehicles on the road and combustion of dirty fuel continued to increase, air pollution grew enormously. The good news is that today, there is widespread anguish against pollution and its impacts on health. The bad news is we are not doing enough to reinvent mobility systems; to stop the use of dirty fuels for industry, power or for cooking.
There are other events that must be noted in the environmental history diary. However, the most important gain of India’s environmental movement is the voice it has given to its citizens. This is the soul of the movement. Environmentalism is about deepening of democracy, not techno-fix.
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