The
Greying of India
by
Bittu
Sahgal
It
is ironic that living forests that supply us with
billions of tonnes of fertile soil, oxygen and
water can only cause the Gross National Product to
rise if they are destroyed and their timber,
minerals and lands are sold. This fatal flaw in
the calculators of economists is at the root of
India's descent into the pit of ecological
despair.
In
the 50th year of India's Independence, I took the
opportunity to investigate 50 serious threats to
the survival of our nation's natural heritage.
While we march on towards some imagined
development Nirvana, perhaps these might provide
food for thought. The study was conducted with
help from Sanctuary magazine's readers and also
with the aid of various documents, which were made
available to me in my capacity as a member on the
Ministry of Environment, and Forest's various
expert committees.
I
could summarize my findings by stating that, with
official sanction, our government is pushing the
tiger towards sure extinction. In the process, it
is also destabilizing the self-sufficiency of the
nation through the planned destruction of our
water sources. All this is being done because
those who lead the nation have lost contact with
the earth. They seem to have become wrapped in
ambitions of the personal kind, which manifest
themselves in political and financial scams almost
all of which are undertaken at the cost of public
health and cost.
The
forest is the mother of the river. Ancient Indians
knew this. Our present clutch of politicians does
not. What is more they seem ignorant of that small
sentence printed on page 18 of our Constitution.
Article 51A, (g) reads thus: It shall be the duty
of every citizen of India to protect and improve
the natural environment including forests, lakes,
rivers and wildlife, and to have compassion for
living creatures.
The
people of the Indian subcontinent were once
blessed by some of the most profuse natural gifts:
verdant forests, water-stocked Himalayan ranges, a
coastline jumping with fish, productive estuaries,
grassy pastures, rich soils and a bountiful river
system. Abundant rain and fertile soils added to
this plenty. Years of mismanagement have, however,
caused our forests to be degraded, our coastline
to be wounded and our aquifers to be poisoned by
industrial and agricultural effluents. Equally
worrisome is the fact that more than half the
flood-irrigated soils of Punjab, Haryana and
Western Uttar Pradesh have begun to show
diminishing agricultural yields.
And,
as anyone living in urban India will confirm, the
air in our cities is heavy with toxins and tap
water contains faecal matter. This we are being
told by our leaders and planners is 'development'.
In this scenario, few people quite realise just
how large a debt the nation owes to the tiger. Had
the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi, for instance, not
been moved by the plight of the tiger, most of
India's current environmental legislation may
never have seen the light of day for at least
another decade. By which time of course, the
domino effect of ecosystem destruction might have
been too acute to reverse.
To
know just how much ground the environmental
movement has lost today, it is necessary to look
back 30 years to the time that the campaign to
save the tiger was launched. Three decades ago the
era of large dams, large mines and large
development projects was at its apogee. Following
policies laid down by Jawaharlal Nehru Indian
planners decimated our natural heritage even more
effectively than the British had been able to. At
this point, in order to save the tiger and other
wildlife the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972 was
passed through Parliament. Shikar was banned and
ministers and advisors of the government of the
day were categorically prohibited from
commercializing tiger habitats and notified
ecologically fragile areas.
A
forest officer called Kailash Sankhala, supported
by Dr. Karan Singh, helped set up Project Tiger. A
team of dedicated officers was welded together and
they received the political support they needed.
Inside of a decade, tigers were back from the
brink. Streams and rivers that used to dry up by
January now ran full and sweet all the way through
to June. Buoyed by this success, conservationists
of the day were able to convince a government now
basking in international acclaim that protecting
forests was in India's best interests. This laid
the ground for the Forest (Conservation) Act,
1980, which was added to the arsenal of protective
legislation.
When
Mrs. Gandhi died politicians from her own party
began to undermine environmental protection laws
by diluting them through amendments. The Forest
Conservation Act was the first to suffer as
>Madhya Pradesh politicians began denotifying
forest land in exchange for votes. The CRZ Rules
soon followed suit with words such as "if
deemed necessary" being inserted to create
loopholes in well-drafted laws. After the
mid-eighties, however, nature conservation seems
to have gone steadily downhill. In 1998 I can
think of virtually no victories I might consider
celebrating. One tiger dies each day at the hands
of poachers and to World Bank-financed forest
destruction.
Today,
with legislators at the forefront of the assault
on India's natural heritage, more than ever before
we are in need of stalwarts such as Dr. Salim Ali,
Kailash Sankhala, Dharmakumarsinhji and S. P.
Shahi. Two decades ago such people now sadly
departed had the courage to stand up to the
politicians of the day and defend their positions
on wildlife conservation and environmental
protection. In this capacity as the President of
the Bombay Natural History Society Dr. Salim Ali,
for instance, helped save the rainforests of
Silent Valley and their most famous denizens the
Lion-tailed Macaques.
Dharmakumarsinhji
helped save the Asiatic lion. S.P. Shahi managed
to convince the Bihar government to save wolves.
All these farsighted individuals shared a common
belief that if the habitat of such animals was not
protected, the species would become extinct. They
also managed to convince leaders of the day that
the water contribution of such wild habitats for
human societies was reason enough to justify
protection... even if the wildlife species
themselves meant little to politicians.
Even
some of our most precious scientific institutions
such as the National of Oceanography, Goa and the
Wildlife Institute of India, Dehra Dun, began to
be pressured by politicians to "sign on the
dotted line" to produce reports whose logic
could be faulted even by school children. In one
classic example, for instance, the Director of the
NIO stated that dredging a hundred thousand cubic
meters of silt every year in a harbour rich with
dolphins and other marine life would have minimal
and temporary impacts. The WII took to endorsing
industrial projects, often after very cursory site
visits. This erosion of scientific support has
also been a very major blow to the defense of
natural India.
While
the threat to India's wildlife from poaching has
received justifiable attention, a more insidious
and potentially permanent threat remains virtually
unrecognized. This is the dismemberment of
contiguous forests by industrial and commercial
projects that have the Government of India's tacit
approval. These include mines, dams, canals,
polluting industries, new highways, thermal plants
and several other urban constructions including
tourism projects, townships and resettlement
sites. Added to this clutch of disturbances is the
orgy of timber industries that continue their
activities surreptitiously in the face of Supreme
Court orders to the contrary. This is a direct
result of a lack of vigilance and enforcement at
the State Level, particularly in Madhya Pradesh
where more than half the 10,000 saw mills in
operation are illegal. The same is true for
Tripura where just 40 per cent of the 86 saw mills
are licensed.
Strangely,
virtually all commercial use of forests is
categorized by planners as `development'. However,
the hidden, but exceedingly high, costs of such
infrastructures of commerce are never taken into
account. If the nation is to prevent a
biodiversity holocaust from taking place, it is
imperative that a White Paper be prepared on the
true State of India's Environment, particularly
its impending loss of wildlife species and
habitats. The unfortunately truth is that our
permanent infrastructures of survival - rivers,
wetlands, grasslands, forests, mountain slopes and
coastlines - are losing out to the short-lived
infrastructures of commerce. If this trend
continues unchecked, we will be forced to confront
water famines and food crises of unthinkable
dimensions. Planners currently treat the
Sanctuaries and National Parks we wish to protect
with scant respect. They believe these to be of
little value to the nation other than to house
exotic but 'useless' species of plants and
animals. These are, in fact, our water banks and
genetic vaults... all that stands between India's
ecological food security and widespread famines of
the kind so common in sub-Saharan Africa.
Consider
the scenario that confronts us today: The tiger,
our national animal, is being killed at the rate
of one a day at the hands of poachers working in
tandem with international traders. At least one
elephant and two leopards lose their lives to the
same network every day. Rhinos, lions, lesser cats
and birds such as the Great Indian Bustard and
Bengal Florican are faring no better. The actual
extinction of India's endangered wildlife species,
however, is more likely to come about thanks to
the rapacity of developers, than the avarice of
poachers. It might be useful to point out that the
projects mentioned represents the mere tip of the
iceberg. To obtain a full picture, it would be
necessary for us to receive information from
hundreds of sources around India. These involve
toxic dumping, mining, road building in
ecologically sensitive areas, foisting five-star
hotels on unwilling communities and dumping of
huge quantities of fly ash from thermal plants
into pristine rivers. To get a true picture of the
sheer scale on which India, in its 50th year of
Independence and beyond, is being disastered, it
is imperative that the information lying in the
dusty files of the Ministry of Environment and
Forests be made public.
I
have seen some of this information and it scares
me. Under such circumstance, one need not look far
to establish why India's ecological security is on
the brink. At this point in our history, we do
have options and alternatives but in Baba Amte's
words "The silent majority will have to speak
or it become the silenced majority."
(Bittu
Sahgal is the Editor of Sanctuary Magazine)