Professional Documents
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Environmental Movements in India
Environmental Movements in India
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DURING the past twenty years people in various regions of India have
that threaten to dislocate people and to affect their basic human rights to
land, water, and ecological stability of life-support systems. They share certain
a new political struggle for safeguarding the interests of the poor and the
marginalized, among whom are women, tribal groups, and peasants. Among
the main environmental movements are Chipko Andolan (Barthelemy 1982
and Save the Bhagirathi and Stop Tehri project committee (Manu 1984) in
Uttar Pradesh; Save the Narmada Movement (Narmada Bachao Andolan) in
Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat; youth organizations and tribal people in the
Gandhamardan Hills whose survival is directly threatened by development
of bauxite deposits; the opposition to the Baliapal and Bhogarai test range
in Orissa, the Appiko Movement in the Western Ghats; groups opposing
the Kaiga nuclear power plant in Karnataka; the campaign against the Silent
Valley project; the Rural Women's Advancement Society (Gramin Mahila
Shramik Unnayam Samiti), formed to reclaim waste land in Bankura district
and the opposition to the Gumti Dam in Tripura (Fig. 1).
* Field study for this article was done while the author was a research professor at the Toyk
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33
500 Km
300 Mi
GUJARAT BhopalUMTIDAM
Ahmedabad ? NARMADA ?
\ | -"--'*
MADHYA PRADESH
SAVE THE NARMADA
IN GANDHAMARDAN HILLS
\ SILENT VALLEY
' \, MOVEMENT
Punjab and Haryana. Local movements like Pani Chetna, Pani Pan
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34
India.
CHIPKO MOVEMENT
The word chipko means to stick to or to hug and refers to the meth
used to protect the trees of the Himalaya from commercial timber cutt
who have devastated the forests. The movement's activists embrace the tree
trunks to interpose their bodies between the trees and the axemen. T
Chipko movement is located in the mountainous northern segment of
Pradesh, immediately west of Nepal. The area has long been know
built throughout the region. The motive was clearly strategic, but a significan
consequence was the sudden opening of the region to traffic of all kind
which made its rich supply of natural resources accessible to entrepreneu
in the resource-hungry plains of India. Timber and other products, rangin
from limestone for use in cement, the principal building material in Indi
magnesite, and potassium to rare metals, became the objects of intensiv
exploitation and removal by corporate contractors. Blasting of mountainsid
and felling of trees to make roadbeds and hundreds of vehicles and thousands
of laborers used to build the roads were soon replaced by blasting, felling
vehicles, and laborers employed in extracting the resources. The overall
environmental degradation wrought by road construction-the massive ero
sion and landslides caused by road cuts and blast shocks, the resulting los
of soils, forests, and water sources, and the decimation of firewood and other
forest products by labor crews and military units, together with social an
economic dislocations endured by the local populace-was quickly dwarfed
extractive industries.
Hydroelectrical sites along the Ganga and Jamuna rivers and their trib
utaries were promptly exploited, with similar consequences. Now, for e
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35
form the Ganga. This dam will submerge the historic city of Te
tating because the demand for fires to cook food for the touris
their shelters far exceeds that of the local residents.
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36
Kumaon. The conflict has been accompanied by denial of forest use to the
villagers who traditionally depend on its products. The policies have been
rationalized by the long-standing assertion that indigenous agriculturalists
and herders caused deforestation by misuse and overuse, but these practices
rarely could be observed. Trees were not cut for fuelwood; instead, dead
trees, fallen branches, and brush were used. Branches were lopped for fodder,
but trees were felled only to obtain material for house construction and the
making of implements. It is true that new agricultural land was cleared, but
unlike the situation in nearby Nepal, the practice has been closely controlled
conspicuous, but the local people are blamed for the deforestation. With the
help of Gandhian social workers, local labor cooperatives and small-scaleproducer cooperatives were established by the villagers in each of the Himalayan districts of Uttar Pradesh during the early 1960s. The goal was to
allow the local people to share in the benefits of development. As a result
of confrontations between the villagers and social workers and the timber
contractors, their employees, and forestry-department personnel, a series of
incidents began in 1972 near Gopeshwar in Chamoli district. A local cooperative was denied permission to cut its small annual allotment of twelve
ash trees to use in construction and for tools. The government sold the trees
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37
the trees to protect them from the axe. They were successful, and
1970s. Each confrontation was nonviolent and successful. The successes led
frontational practices.
By the late 1980s the movement had splintered into two groups that have
broad grassroots support and advocate participatory methods which respond
to local issues in the context of local social and cultural traditions. One group
pursues a strategy that emphasizes ecologically sound development of forests
by local people to meet local needs (Sachs 1984). Activities include smallscale sawmills and other forest industries as part of the program of local
pilgrimages-and accentuates its public profile by participating in conferences and mass media. The rebuilding of nature's productivity is seen as the
solution to poverty.
SAVE THE NARMADA MOVEMENT
The Narmada basin covers 94,500 square kilometers between the Vindhya
alluvial plains in Madhya Pradesh. To the west the Narmada River, which
is sacred to the Hindus, meanders through Gujarat, widening into a 25-
kilometer-long estuary as it flows into the Gulf of Cambay. More than twenty-
one million people live in the valley, mostly in villages. Many tribal groups,
such as the Bhils and the Gonds, occupy the forested uplands.
The Narmada valley is the site of one of the world's largest multipurpose
water projects: the Narmada River Development Project, which involves the
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38
construction of thirty large dams and many small ones on the rive
fifty-one main tributaries. The project will transform the valley and
of its residents and will increase food production and hydropower gen
social, and technological effects of the Narmada project, but the construction
of dams and reservoirs will displace an estimated one million people and
will submerge 350,000 hectares of forestland and 200,000 hectares of agricultural land (India Today 1992). The Sardar Sarovar Dam in Gujarat, which
is under construction, is facing major opposition from tribal groups that hunt
and forage in the jungle canyons and from villagers who are being displaced
by the inundation from the reservoir, which will submerge almost 40,000
hectares of land and 250 villages. So far the engineers have built only part
of the dam and have dug only some 130 kilometers of canals. The reservoir
behind Narmada Sagar Dam will be the largest man-made lake in India,
submerging 91,348 hectares and displacing 120,000 people from 254 villages
(Shiva 1991).
Financial assistance for this massive project came from the World Bank,
which approved the loans in 1985 before environmental-impact studies were
completed. The bank is committed to environmentally sound development
and has issued guidelines for resettlement and rehabilitation of persons
displaced by the dams. Despite its commitment and operational guidelines,
which assert that no affected person should be made worse off by a banksupported project, the bank continued to fund the project. For various reasons
the Indian and state governments could not meet the resettlement and re-
habilitation guidelines, and social and environmental issues went unaddressed (Kothari and Singh 1988). In 1992 the bank decided to cease funding
the project, but the Indian government pledged to complete it (Miller and
Kumar 1993). Nevertheless, the government may have difficulty obtaining
the vast sums needed for completion of the project.
Save the Narmada Movement began in the 1980s as a struggle for just
resettlement and rehabilitation of people being displaced by the Sardar Sarovar Dam, but the focus has shifted to preserving the environmental integrity and natural ecosystems of the entire valley. The movement has used
the project as a symbol of Indian development planners' fascination with
costly projects at the expense of the environment and the poor. The withdrawal of World Bank funding was a moral victory for the movement.
Field surveys in July 1993 revealed considerable antiproject sentiment
among the residents of the basin in Madhya Pradesh. In Gujarat dissatisfaction exists among people whose homes and lands were expropriated without
adequate compensation by the government (Appa and Sridharan 1992). There
was also concern about inequitable compensation: the rich receiving more
than the poor farmers for identical amounts of similar quality lands. The
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39
The Silent Valley, one of the few remaining undisturbed rain-forest areas
in India, lies in the Malabar region, the least-developed section of the state
of Kerala, at the southern end of the Western Ghats. Remote from main
urban centers or highways, the valley has experienced relatively little timber
cutting and almost none of the peasant or tribal farming that characterizes
the rest of rural southern India. Many rare species of plants, ferns, and
endangered fauna survive in the valley. During the early 1960s the state
government began planning a dam for the Kuntipuzha River, which flows
through the valley, to generate hydroelectricity as the basis for regional
economic development. The project offers a classic example of the dilemma
between environment and development.
The Kerala People's Science Movement (Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad) is
a network of rural school teachers and local citizens that promotes environmental scientific projects in the villages. The movement acknowledged the
obvious economic needs of the people of Malabar but concluded that the
Silent Valley project would make only a marginal contribution to regional
development. Thus the group opposed the project with a campaign that
brought into sharp focus the ecological consequences, specifically the possibility of extinction of species that had evolved over millions of years.
Villagers in Kerala also learned that new industries and clear cutting of
timber in the upper watersheds of the river were contributing to the disruption of streams and water supplies. The movement began to challenge
the idea that energy generated by the dam would benefit the rural people
of Kerala. Most of the energy from the project was to be exported to industrialized areas of Kerala and surrounding states. The movement asserted that
the local environment would be disrupted with benefits going to Trivandrum, the state capital.
The state government favored the project, but other environmental groups
expressed doubts. After years of activism the movement persuaded the Indian
government to appoint a high-level committee to examine the project's environmental and socioeconomic effects. The committee subsequently rec-
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40
who differ by sex, age, religion, ethnicity, caste, class, and region by stressi
and among the tribal groups of the Narmada valley, including unusu
freedom of action and movement that accompany their role in the subsistenc
economy, is partially responsible for their prominence in the environmen
The integrative nature of the movement cuts across ancient and power
ethnic barriers. The two ethnic groups that populate Uttarakhand, the Pa
and the Bhotiyas, occupy land at different altitudes, but they joined
to protect their forests. The movement also has integrative effects
national level by bringing together people from various regions of a
Uttarakhand.
people have resisted it in various parts of India, mainly through the Gandhia
noncooperative method of protest, well known as forest satyagraha, that was
initially applied to environmental concerns by the Chipko movement dur
the 1970s. This movement had its origin in the politics of the distributi
of the benefits of resources, but it has expanded to include the distribut
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41
of ecological costs. The three movements provide a model for the resolution
of conflicts over natural resources and a strategy for human survival of
ecological disaster.
REFERENCES
Appa, G., and R. Sridharan. 1992. Report on the canal affected people and the downst
of the Sardar Sarovar project. Series in operational research 1, London School of
London.
Barthelemy, G. 1982. Chipko: sauver les forets de l'Himalaya. Paris: Editions L'Harmat
Centre for Science and Environment. 1982. The state of India's environment, 1982. New Delhi.
Devall, B., and G. Sessions. 1985. Deep ecology: living as if nature mattered. Salt Lake City, Utah:
Peregrine Smith Books.
Estava, G., and M. Prakash. 1992. Grassroots resistance to sustainable development, lesson from
the banks of Narmada. Ecologist 22(2):45-47.
India Today. 1992. 15 November:40.
Karan, P. P., and S. Iijima. 1985. Environmental stress in the Himalaya. Geographical Review
75:71-92.
Kothari, A., and S. Singh. 1988. The Narmada valley project: a critique. New Delhi: Kal
Manu, B. 1984. Between two sacred rivers, Tehri dam project. India Magazine 4(2):44-51
Miller, S. K., and S. Kumar. 1993. Narmada dam fails World Bank's final test. New Scientis
10 April:5.
Rush, J. 1991. The last tree: reclaiming the environment in tropical Asia. New York: Asia Society.
Shiva, V. 1991. Ecology and the politics of survival: conflicts over natural resources in India. Tokyo:
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