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ShareThe return of the Congress-led alliance to power has led to expectation of serious and urgent action on an issue of critical global and national importance: the environment.
Part of this has to do with critical initiatives of the previous government, notably the Tiger Task Force that called for conservation in alliance with science and citizen participation. Some also stems from the realisation that with regional parties being elbowed out and an all India party again in charge, this may well be a time for fresh initiatives in policy.
There are both global and local reasons for action. India is not only one of the four economies generating 60 per cent of the new wealth on the planet. It is also a country that has to grapple with how to feed and clothe a sixth of humanity with only five per cent of the world's fresh water.
In striking a balance of growth and ecological sensitivity, this country eschewed the path our giant neighbour China once took, putting economic expansion before ecological integrity. Even her detractors are now willing to concede that Indira Gandhi in her Stockholm address of September 1972 was in step with the idea that earth was a spaceship, where harmony was not a choice but an imperative.
The 1970s and 80s were a time of innovation and consolidation in conservation. The idea that forest or grassland, marsh or mountain pasture was more than mere resource was still new in the official mind. It was also crucial that key animals, the crocodiles in the rivers and coasts, the tiger in the mature forest and the bustard in the desert became flagships for programmes with a singular aim: to give nature a space to breather and recuperate.
It was the singularity that enabled success. India unlike China and much of East Asia still has intact assemblages of its mega
fauna. Parks like Kaziranga with rhinos and buffaloes in high grass wet savannah exist nowhere else on earth.
Yet, such work came at a human cost. Today, there are not one but three pressures bearing down on the Protected Areas and some five
per cent of the landscape. These pressures also afflict the fifth of the country run by the Forest Department.
One is simply that the land and its mineral wealth have become more valuable economically than the standing timber. There is also a temptation to put highways and pipelines through the small but critical zones which are essential to preserve the integrity of the ecosystem. It is less like destroying the Ajanta temple and more like burning the library of a Nalanda or Alexandria.
Here, the second major threat is from the management style of the foresters. The British and German founders of the department may have been at the cutting edge of 19th century science, but in today's world much of the management practice is less than modern.
While the areas where preservation must take precedence are small there is a vast land area where creative partnerships can generate livelihood and harmonise these with ecological security. India now has a host of such pilot projects. But these will require a very different approach from those in the top down style.
Finally, there is the issue of landscapes themselves. Much of the work in the early years was in high forest. But over 40 per cent of the country is semi arid. It is also critical to protect 8500 km of coastline. The Trans Himalaya and Himalaya rarely impinge on our consciousness though they cover a greater part of the land mass than the Ganga basin.
In such environs, the older policy of drawing lines around protected zones may be inadequate. What works in the mature forest cannot and should not be given up. But in this milieu a very different set of approaches will need to be tried out. For any of this to work, India has to draw on its first rate expertise in the natural and humanistic disciplines. The one is needed to study and comprehend how natural systems work. The latter is critical to defuse the conflicts that now polarise society and threaten to erode both livelihood and ecological security.
The challenges of the current day are very different form those when Indira Gandhi spoke at Stockholm. The economy is in high gear and the tendency will be to cut corners and assume that ecological issues will fall into place.
But such views are myopic. Careful land use planning is easier today than then, assisted by modern satellite imagery and ground truthing (information collected on location). This is a time for innovation but it should not be at the cost of hard-won successes of the past.
The author is an environmental historian
His edited book, Environmental Issues in India was published in 2007.
