Politics of Environment — II by Anil Agarwal It Looks As If Environment Is

Politics of Environment — II By Anil Agarwal It looks as if environment is an idea whose time has come. Newspapers give prominent display to environmental horror stories. Editorials demand better management of natural resources. Government statements on the need to preserve the environment are commonplace. Government programmes, too, are quite numerous and increasing in number day by day. There are massive schemes for afforestation, for instance. In the last four years, some 1,000 crore seedlings are said to have been distributed or planted. There are new laws for control of air and water pollution and for the conservation of forests. India has been praised all over the world for what it has done to preserve tigers. Nearly three per cent of India’s giant land mass is now protected national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, and there are demands to strengthen their protection and increase their area. Plan documents and party manifestoes take care to mention the importance of environment. But there is a major problem with this entire range of activities and concerns: it does not appear to be based on a holistic understanding of the relationship between environment and the development process in this country. The programmes are ad hoc, without clear priorities, and there is too much of a policeman’s attitude. They seem to be based on the belief that concern for the environment essentially means protecting and conserving it, partly from development programmes but mainly from the people themselves. There is little effort to modify the development process itself in a manner that will bring it into greater harmony with the needs of the people and with the need to maintain ecological balance, while increasing the productivity of our land, water and forest resources. The post-independence political debate in India has centred on two major issues: equity and growth. The environmental concern has added a third dimension: sustainability. India’s biggest challenge today is to identify and implement a development process that will lead to greater equity, growth and sustainability. The environment is not just pretty trees and tigers, threatened plants and ecosystems. It is literally the entity on which we all subsist, and on which entire agricultural and industrial development depends. Development can take place at the cost of the environment only upto a point. Beyond that point, it will be like the foolish person who was trying to cut the very branch on which he was sitting. Development without concern for the environment can only be short-term development. In the long term, it can only be anti-development and can go on only at the cost of enormous human suffering, increased poverty and oppression. India may be rapidly approaching that point. Amongst the hundreds of voluntary groups working at the micro level in India, there has been a remarkably rapid growth of interest in environmental problems. So rapid has been this growth that sometimes it is loosely described as the beginnings of an environmental movement in the country. Hundreds of field-level groups today take a keen interest in environmental issues and their experiences and interests are extremely diverse. Some are interested in preventing deforestation. Others are interested only in afforestation. Many want to prevent the construction of one dam or another. There are others who want to prevent water pollution. 1 There is the famous Chipko movement in the UP Himalaya, probably the oldest and most famous of all the groups, which has played a major role in bringing the issue of deforestation to the forefront of public opinion. There is its counterpart in the south, the Appiko movement2 in the Western Ghats of Karnataka. Dams like the Silent Valley3 and Bedthi4 have already been stopped because of strong people’s protests, and the well-known social worker Baba Amte is leading a major campaign against the proposed Bhopalpatnam 5 and Inchampalli dams on the borders of MP, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. The Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad6 has had a long acrimonious battle over the pollution of the Chiliyar river in Kerala by a rayon mill. The India Development Service finds itself embroiled in another case of river pollution by a rayon mill in Karnataka7. Meanwhile, the Shahdol Group has worked against the pollution of a river in Shahdol district by a paper mill8. There is, also, the Mitti Bachao Abhiyan9 to organise farmers against water-logging caused by faulty irrigation systems. While all these are relatively well known groups and have attracted varying degrees of media attention, there are many others which are doing excellent work in mobilising people, both to prevent further ecological destruction, often in the face of determined government policies, and to bring about ecological regeneration. One thing, however, that binds most of these groups is their concern to put the environment at the service and the control of the people, the people usually being defined as the local communities who live within that environment. Environmental protection per se is of least concern to most of these groups, including the well known Chipko movement, for example. Their main concern is about the use of the environment: how should the environment be used and who should use it and benefit from it. It is this growing understanding of the relationship between the people and their environment, born out of a concern for a more equitable and sustainable use of the environment, that is probably the most fascinating development in India today. Environmental destruction by the rich To understand the nature of the environmental problems in India, it may be useful to compare and contrast certain environmental trends and concerns in India with those in the West, especially since the environment crusade began in the West and since many groups in India, including political parties, have for long dismissed it as a petty Western concept. The argument has always been that too much concern for the environment can only retard economic and industrial development. The UN Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972 was the landmark conference that created worldwide consciousness about environment. No UN conference has ever been able to collect so many luminaries at one place. Many delegations from developing countries had argued that the solution to environmental problems lay in economic development. “Smoke is a sign of progress,” the Brazilian delegation had thundered, then representing a country witnessing an economic boom. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who made a major impression on the conference, is still remembered for her oft-quoted statement: “Poverty is the biggest polluter.” In all those who came from the Third World, both leftists and rightists, there was a sneaking suspicion that the Western countries were up to some trick. The West may simply be pushing the environmental concern onto an unsuspecting Third World to retard its technological modernisation and industrial development. It was even argued that having got their riches and their affluent lifestyles, Westerners were now simply asking for more affluence: clean air, clean water and large tracts of nature for enjoyment and recreation, many of which were going to be preserved in the tropical forests and savannas of Asia, Africa and South America. But exactly 10 years later when the UN organised a meeting to commemorate the Stockholm conference, few non-governmental groups from the Third World were prepared to argue in favour of the development process as it is. The Third World today faces both an environment crisis and a development crisis, and both these crises seem to be intensifying and interacting to reinforce each other. On one hand, there does not seem to be any end to the problems of inequality, poverty and unemployment, the crucial problems that the development process is meant to solve. On the other, environmental destruction has grown further apace. But what is interesting is that while many environmental problems, expecially those related to air and water pollution have tended to become less severe in many parts of the industrialised world, because of the introduction of highly capital-intensive pollution control technologies, these problems have continued to grow and become critical in many parts of the developing world. In other words, while the economic development process in the world is only worsening our environmental problems, it is tending to solve them in the West. Michael Heseltine, then minister of environment in the anti-environment British government of Margaret Thatcher, even went so far in a UN meeting in 1982 as to say that all environmental problems in the West have been solved and they now remain mainly in the Third World! Heseltine, indeed, had a point. London, for instance, has not seen for years any of those smogs it saw regularly in the 1940s and ’50s, which led to thousands of deaths, and the Thames now even boasts of salmon. But Michael Heseltine, like all representatives of vested interests, was only hiding something of deep significance: the role of the Western world in destroying the Third World’s environment. Very simply speaking, the major environmental problems in the West are those arising out of waste disposal — problems of air and water pollution and of disposal of highly toxic industrial and nuclear wastes. Though problems of acid rain have definitely increased and there does not yet seem to be any solution to the problem of toxic wastes, it is true that some cities and rivers do look cleaner. In the Third World, however, as its own industrialisation proceeds, these waste disposal problems are getting worse day by day but they are still not the major or the only environmental problem. In the Third World, the major environmental problems are those which arise out of the misuse of the natural resource base: the soils, forests and water resources.

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