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FOR INDIA’S six hundred million poor people, its ministry of the environment
is totally irrelevant. The government would do better to relinquish most
of its power to what Mahatma Gandhi called ‘village republics’ if it really
wants to manage its environment properly.

Coming from anyone but Anil Agarwal such arguments might be considered
crackpot. But Agarwal, founder and head of the Centre for Science and Environment
in New Delhi, has spent the major part of his life studying India’s environmental
problems, and has done more than almost anyone else to publicise them.

Economists, says Agarwal, must redefine poverty as a shortage of biomass
rather than a shortage of cash. Gross natural product is more relevant to
the poor in India than gross national product because the poor depend on
their immediate environment for water, food, fuel and fodder. Making that
distinction is particularly relevant today.

By the end of this century India will have to feed 1 billion people.
It will need to increase its production of food grains from 170 million
tonnes to 240 million tonnes. It will need to triple its production of fuel
wood and green fodder. Yet, of the 260 million hectares of India’s cultivated
land and pastures, only irrigated crop lands show a slight increase in productivity.
The productivity of the rest of the land is low or even declining.

Small-scale harvesting of water, and the building of earthen walls,
weirs and tanks as well as reforesting catchment areas can transform a barren
village to a verdant and fertile one. But, says Agarwal, the environment
ministry does little to manage the local environment. Governments are good
at nationwide environmental projects, but these take the initiative away
from people and so usually fail. Agarwal cites the example of Rajiv Gandhi’s
national reforestation programme of 1985.

Gandhi began what was perhaps the world’s largest reforestation programme,
aiming to reforest 5 million hectares of degraded land per year. The Indian
government spent about Pounds sterling 1 billion (at current rates) between
1980 and 1989 and claims to have reforested 11.82 million hectares – an
area the size of the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark put together.

Agarwal says that most of the trees planted were species of commercial
importance, such as eucalyptus for the pulp and paper industry. They are
of no use to most people, who are desperate for fuel wood, bedding and fodder
for animals.

The reforestation was largely on private lands. The programme neglected
the so-called common lands upon which poor Indians depend for grazing their
animals and collecting fuel wood. These are as barren today as they were
in the early 1980s.

The government scheme failed to prioritise its lands scheduled for reforestation.
The more fragile ecosystems – the hill and mountain regions – came second
to the reforestation of the plains.

Many of the trees may not even have survived. Between 1980 and 1988
the state forest departments claimed to have distributed more than 20 000
million seedlings, or an average of 35 000 seedlings per village. But villages
with large numbers of new, government-sponsored trees are rare, says Agarwal.
He sees the scheme more as a national agency for unproductive employment:
‘Dig a hole, plant a sapling, fill the hole with earth, wait till the plant
dies, re-dig the hole, replant a sapling and so on.’

To cap it all, says Agarwal, people in many parts of India need pasture
grasses more than trees. His explanation for this grand failure is simple:
‘There is too much governance and too few rights for people themselves.’
If you want to rehabilitate India’s degraded environment, you must rely
on villagers and not on government officers to do the job, he says. But
people will care for their environment only if they have legal rights to
manage it and to its products, says Agarwal.

Agarwal’s statements sound like a mixture of anarchy and communism.
But they are not. He becomes increasingly heated as he illustrates from
his observations how people have been stripped of their rights to manage
their environments and, therefore, their futures. The history of the common
lands is particularly relevant as it is these that the poor depend upon
and that are probably the most degraded lands in India.

Common lands are community lands which were traditionally managed by
villages until British colonial rule put them under the jurisdiction of
the government. The Indian government inherited laws designed for a colonial
ruler and has failed to change them to those necessary for an independent
nation. Instead of managing local forests and ponds, streams, watersheds
and pastures for the benefit of the whole village, people have grown to
treat them as a free-for-all.

Agarwal visited villagers of Gopalpura, in the Aravali hills of Rajasthan,
who fought for two years against an absurd law that prevented them from
protecting their watershed. In June 1987 they were assisted by Tarun Bharat
Sangh, a local voluntary agency, to plant trees on a ridge at the top end
of their watershed and to build a wall to prevent animals destroying the
saplings.

A local government official saw the trees and wall and reported them.
Within days the administration served the villagers with a legal notice
for planting trees on government land, despite the fact that the land lay
within the boundaries of the village. A court case went on for two years.

Meanwhile the saplings died from successive droughts. But, because the
villagers had protected the area from grazing animals, trees began to regenerate
naturally. Several hundred dhak (Butea monosperma) trees began to shoot
up. In June 1989, however, the administration fined the villagers 4950 rupees
for planting trees and ordered that the wall they had built be destroyed.

Agarwal does not mince words. ‘This is the legacy that the British left
us. All the community management systems were destroyed one after the other
by the British in a careful and calculated manner. Today, the net result
is that everything is managed by the government and therefore the people
have no interest in management. The whole process has to be reversed. We
have to create democratic institutions which are going to be fair and equitable.’

Agarwal talks of an ‘open, participatory democracy’ that extends from
the village level to the parliament. ‘For Mahatma Gandhi this was an old
dream – that every Indian village would be like a village republic,’ Agarwal
says. Each village republic would have its own little government. This would
essentially be all the villagers together, who would form the village assembly
– the gram sabha – which would take decisions for the whole village.

Though the idea might sound idealistic and unrealistic, it is already
working in some parts of India. Agarwal’s own investigastions show that
conservation is successful only where people have planned and carried it
out for themselves, and in the full knowledge that they will be the beneficiaries.
Similarly, voluntary agencies have succeeded only where they have managed
to create an effective village institution to implement conservation measures.

The village of Seed, in the denuded Aravali hills of Rajasthan, illustrates
how villagers can transform a barren wilderness into a green village . In
the unprecedentedly severe drought of 1987, Seed villagers still managed
to harvest 80 bullock-cart loads of grass, of which each household got an
equal share. Sukhomajri, in Punjab state, was poor and barren less than
10 years ago. It had one of the highest rates of soil erosion in India.
The villagers formed a village society which laid down laws for environmental
protection and which shares out the produce of the land. Sukhomajri now
exports food.

But what prevents local elites from dominating the gram sabhas, thereby
maintaining the status quo and the unfair advantages they enjoy over the
rest of the villagers? According to Agarwal, inequality is not a problem
in half of India’s villages. Interestingly, the half he speaks of are all
in ecologically fragile areas such as the cold desert of Ladakh, on the
Tibetan plateau, the hot desert of Rajas than and the mountains of Himachal
Pradesh. Perhaps because these environments are so very harsh and unfor
giving, cultures have evolved in which mutual support, between individuals
and between villages, is a strong characteristic.

For the other half, Agarwal agrees that the villages may be dominated
by local elites but claims it would be difficult to practice corruption
in the ‘open democracy’ he advocates. Today, he says, people are unaware
of their rights and of the benefits accruing to the village, which may be
anything from government grants to the produce harvested from common lands.
In a gram sabha formed from every adult in the village the more powerful
could neither hide corruption nor be openly corrupt for very long.

The villages of Seed and Gopalpura in the Aravali hills of Rajasthan,
Sukhomajri and Nada in the Siwalik hills and Adgaon and Ralegan Shindi in
the Deccan plateau all owe their environmental well being to village institutions
that are really democratic. Agarwal calls them the ‘true temples of modern
India’, borrowing the phrase from India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, who used it in the 1950s to refer to hydroelectric dams and industries.

‘People already have the knowledge,’ Agarwal says. ‘What they must have
are the rights over their local environments. If they have not, they remain
passive observers. This is the big problem in the world today. The vast
majority of people have become passive observers and a few people are taking
decisions for everyone else. That is the prime reason why the environment
in the Third World is being destroyed.’

* * *

Villagers police themselves to protect their land

he tribal village of Seed, near Udaipur in Rajasthan state, is probably
the only village in India which has a self-imposed plan for land use, according
to the report by Agarwal entitled Towards Green Villages. It is registered
under a law unique to Rajasthan, called the Gramdan Act of 1971. The act,
inspired by early Gandhian leaders, such as Vinoba Bhave, allows the gram
sabha to manage the resources within the village boundary and provides it
with legal powers to judge, penalise and prosecute.

The gram sabha is made up of the adult population of the village. It
elects an executive and a chairperson and has several committees concerned
with water, agriculture and forests.

Seed’s gram sabha divided common lands into two categories – those on
which villagers are not allowed to graze animals or collect leaves and those
on which they are permitted to graze animals but not allowed to harm trees.
‘The first category,’ says Agarwal, ‘is lush and green and full of grass,
like an oasis in the denuded Aravali.’ Villagers are allowed to cut it once
a year.

Seed’s gram sabha also has a system of penalties. It has levied and
collected fines worth nearly 5000 rupees (Pounds sterling 170), an enormous
sum for a once poor tribal village. The gram sabha fines people for cutting
trees, grazing in prohibited areas and even for plucking leaves. Because
the gram sabha is a legal and officially recognised part of government it
is able to fine neighbouring villages if they break any of the laws of Seed.

Left to their own devices, but given the rights to manage their futures,
Indian villages devise effective means of protecting their environment.
In the Rajasthani village of Gopalpura, for example, villagers had agreed
among themselves, since 1983, that any person found cutting branches, plucking
leaves or grazing animals in the protected area would be fined 11 rupees.
A villager who witnessed another breaking those rules but failed to report
it would be fined 21 rupees.

Towards Green Villages: A Strategy for Environmentally Sound and Participatory
Rural Development by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain is published by the
Centre for Science and Environment, New Dehli, India.