Conservation, till very recently, was so top-down and condescending in its approach that conservationists and social activists would forever be at each others’ throats.
Conservation, till very recently, was so top-down and condescending in its approach that conservationists and social activists would forever be at each others’ throats. There was no clear winner and it was evident that it were both people local communities on one hand and wildlife and forests on the other that were losing out in this internecine battle.
That top-down approach is being, to quite an extent, turned on its head by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) which submitted to the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in August 2011 a voluminous report on the ecological status of the Western Ghats and recommended drastic measures to save the region, one of the few remaining biodiversity hotspots in India. The Central Information Commissioner (CIC) has asked the ministry to put the report in the public domain by May 5.
The 14-member panel, headed by eminent ecologist Prof Madhav Gadgil, remarked in its report, “We should move away from such formulas that impart inflexibility to development processes.
Development plans should not be cast in a rigid framework, but ought to be tailored to prevalent locality and time-specific conditions with full participation of local communities; a process that has been termed ‘adaptive co-management’. What should be ‘go’ and what should be ‘no go’ ought then to be decided on a case by case basis, in tune with the specific environmental and socio-economic context, and aspirations of the local communities.”
Wildlife/forest conservationists and rights activists had fought a pitched battle both in the media and other fora over the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006.
The Gadgil report does not take a middle path, and yet staunchly advocates keeping people in the loop. Yet, on one hand, with the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in New Delhi remaining obsessed with growth, the MoEF was increasingly seen as a clearing house for industry. The conservation lobby, on the other hand, was perceived to be anti-development.
Among other areas of the country that were reportedly being ravaged of precious natural resources and subjected to widespread ecological devastation were the Western Ghats. It was in this backdrop that the MoEF constituted the WGEEP and mandated it to make recommendations for the conservation, protection and rejuvenation of the region after a comprehensive consultation process involving people and state governments.
This the WGEEP did and in the process delved deep into the very issue of conservation. The report is scathing, “We are today stuck in a system that forcibly divorces conservation from development. It ends up creating a dichotomy so that our policies at once promote reckless development in certain areas, and thoughtless conservation in other areas. In the process we constitute islands of biodiversity (and social exclusion) - the so-called protected areas- in an ocean of ecological devastation outside of these PA’s.
“WGEEP believes that the insistence on ‘not a blade of grass shall be removed from PAs’ is as inappropriate as the ongoing comprehensive violation of pollution control laws outside of PAs. This has led to a situation such that the majority of people are excluded from fruits of, and decisions relating to, both development and conservation.”
The attempt to redress this fallacious approach to both conservation and development remains at the heart of the WGEEP report.
The panel has designated the entire Ghats as an Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) and assigned three levels of Ecological Sensitivity to different regions. These have been termed as Ecologically Sensitive Zone 1 (ESZ1), Ecologically Sensitive Zone 2 (ESZ2) and Ecologically Sensitive Zone 3 (ESZ3). It called for a graded or layered approach, with regulatory as well as promotional measures appropriately fine-tuned to local ecological and social contexts within the broad framework of ESZ1, ESZ2 and ESZ3.
It is not without reason that the WGEEP report did not go down well with officialdom. In a not-so-obvious dig at the nexus between the government and industry, it asserted, “It is inappropriate to depend exclusively on government agencies for constitution and management of ESZs.
Instead, the final demarcation of the zones (including those surrounding PAs, as also in context of the UNESCO Heritage Site proposal) taking micro-watersheds and village boundaries into account, and fine-tuning of the regulatory as well as promotional regimes, must be based on inputs from local communities and local bodies, namely, gram panchayats, taluka panchayats, zilla parishads, and nagarpalikas, under the overall supervision of the Western Ghats Ecology Authority (WGEA), state level ecology authorities and district ecology committees.
The bottomline of the report is this: develop thoughtfully, conserve thoughtfully.
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