Green for Stop

A recent visit to Baghpat, which has just suffered one of the worst droughts in recent years, drove home this truth to me. One of the country8217;s most fertile districts in the Yamuna-Ganga doab, Baghpat today has reported a 64 per cent crop failure. The ostensible reason for this is of course the failure of the rains. But why has poor rainfall in a couple of seasons driven a verdant region to the ground? The truth is 8216;development8217; here is innocent of 8216;sustainability8217;. The scramble for canal water, the unregulated extraction of groundwater, even the choice of the crops favoured have been dictated by immediate gains at the expense of long-term interests. Talk to Baghpat8217;s chief agriculture officer and he will express despair over the propensity of farmers to plumb for sugar cane, even though it is a very water intensive crop and its unremitting cultivation over the years has seriously robbed the soil of its nutrients. But sugar cane is popular because it yields quick financial returns and is relatively easier to cultivate. In fact, every time a new sugar mill comes here, another five per cent of the arable land gets diverted to this crop. It is in times of drought that the pernicious effects of these faulty farming practices come home, causing widespread human distress.

It shouldn8217;t have been this way. India was one of the first nations in the world to actually enunciate the environment principle in its policies. The Fourth Plan 1969-1974 set down that 8216;harmonious development recognises the unity of nature and man8217;. In the wake of the Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, 1972, which Indira Gandhi famously enlivened with her clumsy formulation, 8216;poverty is the biggest polluter8217;, there was a flurry of legislation here. The Supreme Court, through its creative interpretation of Article 21 the right to life deepened and widened the scope of these laws. The court stated that it is not sufficient that people have certain rights, but that they should also have the right to vindicate these rights. It also recognised that the right to clean air, water and a clean environment hinged crucially on the right to information.

Somewhere, however, we slipped on all these wondrous words and our response to two important developments symbolised the precipitous slide. The Chipko andolan of 1973, when village women took on Symonds, a sports goods company, for daring to fell the ash trees in their forests, was quickly perceived as the ultimate mascot of our environmental movement. The assertion of local communities, especially women, of their rights over their natural resources was hailed both nationally and globally. But instead of ensuring sustainable social forestry in the region, the state responded with the Forest Conservation Act, which has all but removed the community from the scene. Today, people here are bereft of both their forest and 8216;development8217;, left forgotten in their pristine isolation.

If Chipko highlights the limits of the action taken by the state, the Union Carbide disaster underlines the extent of state inaction. The February 14, 1989, out of court settlement of US470 million presided over by the Supreme Court, gave short shrift to the principle of absolute liability. Instead of using one of the world8217;s worst industrial disasters to create a just compensatory and regulatory regime that would protect both people and environment, we turned our back on the wretched lives of the survivors, even as those responsible made a clean getaway.

If this is the past, will the future be different? Not unless we learn to mainstream some important insights garnered from decades of misgovernance. The most important among them is the need to harness democracy to protect the environment by making people agents of their own destinies, rather than as objects to be manipulated. Take the miracle at Ralegan Siddhi. It all began with a percolation tank built so shabbily by the government that it did not hold water. Anna Hazare got the local people to voluntarily repair it. Soon seven wells in the region filled with water and for the first time the Maharashtra village had water at the height of summer. Water soon translated into prosperity for every household. Or take that initiative in Kerala, begun in 1996, of placing up to 40 per cent of the state8217;s annual budget directly in the hands of municipalities and panchayats and thus ending the sterility of the top-down process of developmental planning.

But if such initiatives are to work 8212; and work they must if we are to come up with a sustainable blueprint for sustainable development 8212; we would need to bind together the power of information, the power of decentralised budgetary allocations, the power of political mobilisation and, above all, the power of democracy.