Eco Honours

Three years ago,on September 24,2006,as the weather turned dark,a helicopter went down in the hills of eastern Nepal...

Three years ago,on September 24,2006,as the weather turned dark,a helicopter went down in the hills of eastern Nepal,killing all 24 people on board. Nepal lost most of its leading conservationists. Among them was Chandra Gurung,the head of the World Wildlife Fund WWF Nepal. A Boy from Siklis is a warm portrait of Nepals most charismatic advocate of community participation in conservation and a chronicle of its not-so-old conservation history.

A day before the crash,Chandra had overseen the Nepal governments handover of the Kangchanjunga area to its people. Before this,Chandra had pioneered the Annapurna Conservation Area Project ACAP that integrated development and conservation and involved the community in its implementation. The Kangchanjunga project went a step further,giving people full ownership of their forests.

Well before the janajati rights movement took hold,well before decentralisation and federalisation became popularised as slogans,Chandra set about effecting local autonomy through the ACAP,making peoples participation the organisations rallying cry, writes Manjushree Thapa,who worked briefly with Chandra.

He was an accidental environmentalist but once he signed up,Chandra was committed for life. The son of a mukhiya head of Siklis village,he started out life with privileges,but as a Gurungone of the janajatis or indigenous people of Nepal he remained an outsider in the Kathmandu circle dominated by upper castes.

But he didnt let that bother him excessively. Chandra,who had a PhD from the University of Hawaii,was as much at ease at a village dance as he was networking in a party. He was simultaneously a local leader and a worldly PhD,a villager and an internationalist. He had his share of critics too. Since he drew his staff usually from ethnic/indigenous groups outside Kathmandu and instituted scholarships for villagers,he invited charges of communalism. Critics promptly dubbed his ACAP,AGAP the Annapurna Gurung Advancement Project.

Like everything else in Nepal,conservation was not divorced from politics. For much of its short history,it depended heavily on royal patronage. The forests had been the hunting ground of the royals and the British were often invited for the hunts. In one instance,King George V killed 37 tigers,19 rhinoceros and countless lesser game in Chitwan,prompting this breathless New York Times headline in 1912: Cars ran into Tigers.

In 1972,King Mahendra died of a heart attack during a shikar in Chitwan,but by then he had ordered the drafting of conservation legislation and Nepal got its first national park: the Royal Chitwan National Park. So,though the royal family continued hunting,Nepals environmentalists found royal patronage the most expedient way of pushing through conservation policy. The links with monarchy meant that Chandra and his organisation became the Maoists targets. But eventually it was the royalty that was responsible for Chandras leaving the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation. He later joined the WWF.

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A Boy from Siklis is an interesting read of an interesting man,complete with photographs that strangely have no caption. Thapas biography of Chandra doesnt leave out his falling in and out of love with his first wife and a long-distance relationship with his second wife. But,more importantly,its a well-researched account of Nepals conservation history thats still in the making.