ABSTRACT. Grassroots environmental movements following Gandhian nonviolent tradition are expanding in India. These movements differ from the ones in the West in that they are concerned with both environmental preservation and issues of economic equity and social justice. The Chipko movement in the Himalaya, Save the Narmada movement in central India, and the Silent Valley movement in the Malabar region of southern India are discussed as examples.
DURING the past twenty years people in various regions of India have formed nonviolent action movements to protect their environment, their livelihood, and their ways of life. These environmental movements have emerged from the Himalayan regions of Uttar Pradesh to the tropical forests of Kerala and from Gujarat to Tripura in response to projects 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 features, such as democratic values and decentralized decision making, with social movements operating in India. The environmental movements are slowly progressing toward defining a model of development to replace the current resource-intensive one that has created severe ecological instability (Centre for Science and Environment 1982, 190). Similar grassroots environmental movements are emerging in Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Throughout Asia and the Pacific citizenry organizations are working in innovative ways to reclaim their environment (Rush 1991).
Even with limited resources the environmental movements have initiated 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).
In addition, there are local movements against deforestation, waterlogging, salinization, and decertification in the command areas of dams on the Kosi, Gandak, and Tungabhadra rivers and in the canal-irrigated areas of Punjab and Haryana. Local movements like Pani Chetna, Pani Panchyat, and Mukti Sangharsh advocate ecological principles for water use. A movement in the small fishing communities against ecological destruction exists along the coasts of India.
These environmental movements are an expression of the socioecological effects of narrowly conceived development based on short-term criteria of exploitation. The movements are revealing how the resource-intensive demands of development have built-in ecological destruction and economic deprivation. The members have activated microaction plans to safeguard natural processes and to provide the macroconcept for ecological development at the national and regional levels. In the rest of this article I focus on the Chipko movement in the Himalaya, Save the Narmada Movement in central India, and the Silent Valley Project in Kerala as case studies of the nonviolent direct-action environmental movements of grassroots origin in India.
CHIPKO MOVEMENT
The word chipko means to stick to or to hug and refers to the method used to protect the trees of the Himalaya from commercial timber cutters who have devastated the forests. The movement's activists embrace the tree trunks to interpose their bodies between the trees and the axemen. The Chipko movement is located in the mountainous northern segment of Uttar Pradesh, immediately west of Nepal. The area has long been known as Uttarakhand, a term recently revived by persons seeking self-government and perhaps statehood for the region. Persons with this political motive are few in number and are primarily members of the urban elite. In contrast, the members of the environmental movement are chiefly indigenous subsistence farmers, both Indo-Aryan-speaking Hindus of the lower Himalaya who are called Pahari and, in fewer numbers, Tibetan-speaking Buddhists of the higher Himalaya who are known as Bhotiya.
Uttarakhand was a relatively inaccessible land of precipitous slopes, thin and fragile soils, and ample water and forests, populated by subsistence farmers who derived a secure livelihood through their diligence and skills in a combination of terrace agriculture and animal husbandry. After the Indian-Chinese border conflict of 1962 an extensive network of roads was built throughout the region. The motive was clearly strategic, but a significant consequence was the sudden opening of the region to traffic of all kinds, which made its rich supply of natural resources accessible to entrepreneurs in the resource-hungry plains of India. Timber and other products, ranging from limestone for use in cement, the principal building material in India, magnetite, and potassium to rare metals, became the objects of intensive exploitation and removal by corporate contractors. Blasting of mountainsides 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 erosion and landslides caused by road cuts and blast shocks, the resulting loss of soils, forests, and water sources, and the decimation of firewood and other forest products by labor crews and military units, together with social and economic dislocations endured by the local populace--was quickly dwarfed by the same phenomenon on a magnified scale in the operations of the extractive industries.
Hydroelectrical sites along the Ganga and Jamuna rivers and their tributaries were promptly exploited, with similar consequences. Now, for example, the largest earth-filled dam in Asia, the Tehri Dam, is being constructed on the Bhagirathi River, one of the two streams that converge to form the Ganga. This dam will submerge the historic city of Tehri and about one hundred villages and ten thousand acres of agricultural land; forty thousand people will be rendered homeless, and the waters will separate an unknown number of other people from their economic resources and social networks. Widespread protests have been supported by research and expert testimony confirming that dam will be silted beyond use in less than half the projected century lifetime and that the seismic conditions, together with the greater-than-anticipated runoff the dam will capture, make the project a serious threat to people and resources downstream. However, the protests have been to no avail. Significantly, none of the interest groups that will profit from the project are local. In addition, more than twenty other dam projects are under construction or in the planning process in the region.
When the roads came, other opportunities for profit presented themselves to outsiders. Land previously cultivated by local farmers for subsistence crops or devoted to pasture and fodder for livestock suddenly became accessible for cultivation of luxury and commercial crops. Accordingly, large industrial firms vied with lesser capitalists in buying up and exploiting the newfound agricultural bonanza at the expense of local people.
The shrines of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, Jumnotri, and other places sacred to Hindus became accessible to pilgrims and tourists in a day or two of travel by bus and taxi from the plains rather than the weeks or months of trekking formerly required. This new form of mass tourism taxed the capacity of the Himalayan environment heavily by populating the pilgrimage routes with hotels, restaurants, shops, and other businesses (Karan and Iijima 1985). At the same time and often on the same routes secular tourism flourished, attracting plainspeople and foreigners alike to areas featuring snow views and wildflowers, trekking, hunting, fishing, and mountain climbing. The effects of the tourists on the environment and local people receive little or no attention. The consumption of fuel wood alone is devastating because the demand for fires to cook food for the tourists and to warm their shelters far exceeds that of the local residents.
The beneficiaries of these kinds of development are almost exclusively outside entrepreneurs, their customers, and political patrons. Most of them are absentee landowners from the plains; a few are expatriate mountain people; and a very few are elite, educated, wealthy, plains-oriented residents of the mountains. On the whole local people are not even employed in the enterprises brought to the region by development. If employed, they are at most porters, milkmen, guides, or manual laborers.
The usual effect of these development activities has been to deplete the forests, to erode the soil, to dry up water sources, to preempt firewood, fodder, and building materials, and to co-opt or destroy much of the viable agricultural land and pastures. As a result, during the past twenty years migration of men to the plains has accelerated. Most of these men become part of an oversupply of urban unskilled and unemployed. In Uttarakhand villages most of the able-bodied men have emigrated, leaving families behind to run farms with depleted work forces and resources. Village life virtually ceases to be a possibility under these conditions.
The five million inhabitants of Uttarakhand compose about 4 percent of the population of Uttar Pradesh and inhabit about 16 percent of its area. The region has virtually all of the forest, mineral, and hydroelectrical resources of the state, as well as its renowned mountain tourism and pilgrimage attractions. These resources and attractions are exploited with few if any compensatory benefits to the local residents. The region is administered from Luck now by a government composed overwhelmingly of plainsmen who are unfamiliar with the mountains, their people, and their ways of life. Yet Uttarakhand is a distinct cultural area, though small in population, that is rich in resources coveted and extracted by outsiders. The region may be described as a colony within the state and the country that administer it. A term used for this status is fourth-world colonialism, which means exploitation of an internal minority by the majority.
Exploitation of the forest by outside entrepreneurs with governmental approval has been the source of conflict between Uttarakhand villages and the state forest department. This conflict, which includes violent incidents, dates to 1821, when the British instituted the Tribal Forest Settlements in 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 by the government, even as road building programs have facilitated access by timber and charcoal merchants and other profiteers.
The effects of the timber and charcoal contractors have been massive and conspicuous, but the local people are blamed for the deforestation. With the help of Gandhian social workers, local labor cooperatives and small-scale-producer 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 to a sporting-goods manufacturer to make cricket bats and tennis rackets. The villagers were unsuccessful in their arguments to the government, so they adopted Gandhian nonviolent resistance--they attached themselves to the trees to protect them from the axe. They were successful, and the permit issued to the sporting-goods manufacturer was canceled.
From that action arose the Chipko environmental movement. More than a dozen major and minor incidents of confrontation occurred during the 1970s. Each confrontation was nonviolent and successful. The successes led to increasing national and international publicity and recognition for the movement. Going from village to village, the Chipko activists prepared for each confrontation by informing people of the movement's purpose and inviting their participation. Workshops and training sessions were accompanied by rallies and picketing at auctions held by the forest department. The movement is diversifying its activities: it now sponsors research on issues of forest, mineral, soil, and water conservation and publishes the results. Reforestation and afforestation activities now foreshadow the confrontational 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 small-scale sawmills and other forest industries as part of the program of local cooperatives. This model is based on an acceptance of current modes of resource utilization with a new emphasis on conserving and strengthening the natural-resource base. Technology is viewed as the solution to poverty.
The second group follows the deep-ecology paradigm of environmental management (Devall and Sessions 1985). It advocates that no trees be cut. It follows a more symbolic approach to attain its goals--fastings, ritual marches, 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 and Satpura ranges in central India. Between gorges flanked by densely forested basaltic hills, the 1,300-kilometer-long Narmada valley contains large 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 construction of thirty large dams and many small ones on the river and its fifty-one main tributaries. The project will transform the valley and the lives of its residents and will increase food production and hydropower generation in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra.
There has been no detailed assessment of the overall environmental, 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 forest land 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 bank-supported project, the bank continued to fund the project. For various reasons the Indian and state governments could not meet the resettlement and rehabilitation 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 World Bank had noted these relocational problems (Scudder 1983), but little attention was given to them. By linking problems of environmental change and degradation of the valley with issues of economic equity and social justice, the movement forced the bank to withdraw from the project (Estava and Prakash 1992).
SILENT VALLEY MOVEMENT
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 recommended abandonment of the scheme (Swaminathan 1979), which the state government accepted in 1983.
The controversy over the Silent Valley project marked the fiercest environmental dispute in India and established a precedent wherever a major development project, specifically a dam, threatened ecological balance. For example, Save the Narmada Movement cited the decision about the Silent Valley in mobilizing support for its stance against dam projects.
EFFECTS OF THE MOVEMENTS
A main aspect of the three movements is their integrative social effect on the regions where they are active. They cut across social and cultural cleavages that might have been expected to be divisive. They unite people who differ by sex, age, religion, ethnicity, caste, class, and region by stressing shared interests in saving the environment. Women have been prominent as leaders and participants. The high status of women in the Himalayan area and among the tribal groups of the Narmada valley, including unusual freedom of action and movement that accompany their role in the subsistence economy, is partially responsible for their prominence in the environmental movement. The women are accustomed to responsibility and leadership for community survival. Their work involves them directly and daily with forests and natural resources. They are alert to environmental changes, and they respond readily and knowledgeably to the need to protect the environment.
Both young and old participate in the movement. Student participants come not only from Uttarakhand but also from the plains and have been among the most active Chipko workers. They bridge an often difficult gap of age, class, region, and social experiences as they join in a common cause. Likewise the Save the Narmada and Silent Valley movements have drawn grassroots support among urban intelligentsia and through linkages with like-minded groups in India.
The integrative nature of the movement cuts across ancient and powerful ethnic barriers. The two ethnic groups that populate Uttarakhand, the Paharis and the Bhotiyas, occupy land at different altitudes, but they joined forces to protect their forests. The movement also has integrative effects at the national level by bringing together people from various regions of a diverse country and by providing a prototype Of method and organization for similar problems elsewhere in India. In 1983 the method pioneered in Uttarakhand was adopted in Karnataka, in the Western Ghats, by farming people to oppose reckless, illegal logging. Known there as Appiko, the movement encountered commercial exploitation and official apathy similar to those found in Uttarakhand.
During the past century there has been a progressive encroachment by the state on the rights and privileges of the people to forest resources. The people have resisted it in various parts of India, mainly through the Gandhian noncooperative method of protest, well known as forest satyagraha, that was initially applied to environmental concerns by the Chipko movement during the 1970s. This movement had its origin in the politics of the distribution of the benefits of resources, but it has expanded to include the distribution 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.
a Field study for this article was done while the author was a research professor at the Toyko University of Foreign Studies, Toyko, Japan.
MAP: FIG. 1--Locations of activities of main environmental movements in India.
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