For many who have followed the tortured journey of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel report to the Web site of the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF), any initiative to protect the environment will appear loaded with irony.
Last weekend, a section of the media reported on an initiative by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) to map sacred groves in the Western Ghats and North-east with a view to their effective conservation.
The news on the five-year project came a few days before World Environment Day. It also came against a larger context of India's position at the United Nations debate on “Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Paradigm” on April 2 in New York. Ms Natarajan, the Union Environment and Forests Minister, said that India shared the “belief that human development should be based in equal measure on material progress, social inclusion, cultural life and living in harmony with nature.”
And, yet, when one sets these happy sentiments against the Ministry's treatment of a report that addresses all of these sentiments within a broad context of democratic processes, one wonders where spin ends and earnestness begins.
The short-sighted view
The Report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel was submitted by its chairman Prof. Madhav Gadgil last August, but was not accepted by the Ministry or posted on its Web site for public discussion till May 23 this year.
This betrays short-sightedness in handling what should have been a routine matter — reports of expert panels mandated by ministries can hardly be subversive either of national security, or inimical to economic interests just by the mere fact of their existence. In the event it couldn't have been pleasant for the government to be reminded of its duty to encourage public knowledge and debate with a view to policymaking.
First, the Central Information Commission, in response to an appeal asked for the report to be made public, and the Delhi High Court agreed that “The scientific, strategic and economic interests of the state cannot be at cross purposes with the requirement to protect the environment.” Both the CIC and Delhi High Court were in agreement that all expert panel reports must be made public. Why did the government need this primer on governance? Why did Ms Natarajan have to be asked to follow in practice what she had intoned at the UN meet, about the need to combine economic, social cultural interests and a harmonious existence with “nature?”
An expert on call
Prof Madhav Gadgil was mandated by the MoEF's previous chief, Mr Jairam Ramesh, to examine the bio-diversity of the Western Ghats on the basis of his vast experience in the field, his erudition and intimate knowledge of the resource-rich but endangered Ghats and his international standing in environment studies. He is the founder of the Centre for Ecological Studies at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he served for decades till retirement and has been a Visiting Fellow at prestigious western universities.
“The Ministry was on board all through (the preparation of the report),” Prof. Gadgil says matter-of-factly in his apartment below the Pashan Hills in Pune.
He does not see his work on the Western Ghats, exhaustive as it is in its environmental details, as an exercise in simple mapping of environmental degradation and ways to prevent further damage.
“Economic development has to go hand in hand with informed public debate,” he stresses with quiet conviction.
For Prof. Gadgil, the public has to be the guardian of the environment. The report puts it thus: “The experience is that the world over it is not the government or industry but people's movements that protect the environment.”
This is the heart of the report. The idea was not simply to suggest steps for immediate action by the Centre and state governments but to create the grounds for “informed public debate on resource management', he asserts. His faith in proper decision making draws from the “devolution of powers outlined in the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments.
“The exercise has to begin democratically, not by simply implementing what the Centre tells local bodies but in their involvement in what has to be implemented.”
Deficit in governance
Armed with this perspective, Prof. Gadgil finds “deficits in environment governance” beginning from the top with the faulty Environment Impact Assessment surveys, down to the complicity of officials with powerful mining and power project lobbies.
Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg districts in Konkan Maharashtra where the Jaitapur nuclear plant is proposed bear testimony to environmental loss.
Gadgil points out the deficit starts at the very top in the incompleteness of EIA mappings of bio-diversity in ecologically rich regions called sadas , laterite plateaus. “Yet these regions are sites for projects…”
“Social discord is widespread in Ratnagiri”, says Gadgil. “Resources, proposed fishing ports are being diverted for power mining, and now the proposed Jaitapur site nuclear plant “will endanger the livelihoods of not just farmers but fishermen.” The loss of traditional livelihoods, the scant regard for the bio-diversity that locals have lived off generations, “really constitute the grounds for the agitation against large-scale modernisation.”
But Gadgil is no Luddite. For him, modernisation projects have to be based on a “complete and overall assessment of the environment.” And that's not all.
That can be done best through participation of grass-root governance community groups into processes of environmental and development policymaking.
Gadgil makes this clear: His report “is a guide on how to use existing democratic decision-making processes from the grassroots up to work for the environment, to plan for their own development.”
The report on the Western Ghats then is a guide on the practice of democratic governance.
That is why the report was not accepted. That is why, bulldozed into posting it on the Web site, the Ministry pins the disclaimer: “The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel Report has not formally been accepted by the Ministry and that the report is still being analysed and considered by the Ministry.”
That disclaimer makes the government so much the poorer in wisdom.