WHEN in Delhi, I always stay in the guest house of the Indian National Science Academy. Here, over breakfast and dinner, one can chat with the country’s leading chemists and cosmologists, number theorists and nutritionists. Very early on one such morning, on December 4, 1984, I was talking to a distinguished toxicologist when a senior technocrat of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research rushed in and asked breathlessly if we had heard the news. Well, he said there has been a terrible gas leak from the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal killing a large number of people. He told the toxicologist that now their job was to strike first and assure the people that this was really no fault of the industry, or else, he said the wretched people and media would make a hullabaloo and bring all industrial progress to a halt.

As the events unfolded, it became clear that the political machine had swung into action to facilitate the escape of the Union Carbide boss out of the country and that both the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Council of Medical Research were systematically dragging their feet and not doing their job of honestly investigating the incident.

Although momentarily stunned, I was not at all surprised at this systematic suppression and distortion of information especially relating to environmental issues by various wings of the government including scientific agencies. After all, rulers all over the world have been for ages following the advice of Lao Tzu, a Chinese contemporary of Buddha:

The ancients who practiced the way did not enlighten people with it,

They used it, rather to stupefy them,

The people are hard to rule when they have too much knowledge,

Therefore, ruling a state through knowledge is to rock the state,

Ruling a state through ignorance brings stability to the state.

The ruling classes everywhere promote the interests of the rich and powerful as national interest. Following the industrial revolution, these have predominantly been the interests of the industry and of ancillary activities like mining and construction. Post independence, India too equated development with the building of what the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz terms manmade capital while chanting the mantra of development at all costs. But as Stiglitz points out, this is a very partial and distorted view of what development ought to mean, namely, a harmonious development of a nation’s four capital stocks: the manmade capital that gross domestic product (GDP) highlights, and also the natural, human, and social capital. This GDP-centric viewpoint focuses exclusively on economic activity in the organized industries-services sector.

Thus, in Bhopal’s case the boosting of sale of drugs and a demand for hospital care as a result of the terrible ill-health caused by the poisonous gas, counts as positive development gains. At the same time, this perspective ignores the on-going grave depletion of natural, human and social capital. In Bhopal’s case, large stretches of soil and reservoirs of groundwater have been poisoned by mercury that even today continues to drip from the structures at the abandoned factory site.

Health, education and employment are three important components of human capital. In the Bhopal case, health has suffered terribly. Infants are being born with serious defects. As for education and employment, there is little for local community members, especially for the large numbers suffering from ill-health. Social capital resides in social harmony, cooperation and trust. These too have suffered greatly with the kind of injustice meted out to the victims.

 

Gautama Buddha, a contemporary of Lao Tzu, believed in rejecting all authority other than that of reason and common sense, preaching to his followers: Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason, and your own common sense. Common sense has to be based on objective evidence, and this became the basis of the modern scientific methodology as it developed in renaissance Europe.

Science based technologies permitted Europe to overwhelm and exploit the rest of the world; naturally Europeans came to value scientific progress. Such progress vitality depended on openness, on sharing of information and encouraging all to scrutinize and raise questions about both the evidence and the logic. Gradually the culture of open sharing of information spread to other fields, in particular on environmental issues. It was the drive to open all environment related information that led to the Swedish Freedom of Press Act of 1760.

In the mediaeval period, Europe was afflicted by large-scale deforestation and waves of plague, century after century. The scientific revolution and the attendant democratic culture facilitated Europe overcome this and rebuild its natural, social and human capital. Thus, the extensive forest cover of Switzerland today has been restored over the last 160 years. By 1860 this had been reduced to a mere 4%, with accompanying landslides. It was then that Switzerland turned the tide, rebuilding its forest cover entirely under the custodianship of the local communities, the cantons. Citizens of these cantons today practice direct democracy with all the important decisions being made through voting by the entire citizenry. Of course, at the same time, Europe drained the natural capital of the rest of the world and degraded its human and social capital with large-scale genocides and slavery.

The two maxims that best characterize the scientific method come from A.N. Whitehead and J.D. Bernal. Whitehead was a distinguished mathematician and philosopher of science and Bernal, a pioneer of molecular biology and of history and social organization of science. Both believed in communicating with the general public and wrote for the lay reader. In his Science and the Modern World, Whitehead asserted in 1930: ‘Science anchors itself to hard bedrock of objective facts, however unpalatable they may be’, while in his 1939 book, Social Functions of Science, Bernal characterized science as a ‘systematic enterprise of scepticism.’

 

Science is the most democratic of all human enterprises and as democracy took root in independent India, there emerged movements to take science to the people. The earliest and the most significant of these was the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP) established in 1962, with the motto ‘Science for Social Revolution’. KSSP naturally began to scrutinize available information, especially that relating to environmental issues. One of the gravest related to a rayon factory, Grasim Industries, at Mavoor on the banks of Kerala’s Chaliyar river. The industry was promoted by the communist government of E.M.S. Namboodiripad.

In 1957, it was granted bamboo at one rupee per ton when the market rate was around one thousand rupees per ton. The factory started production in 1962 and was given a free hand to pollute the Chaliyar river. This resulted in large-scale fish mortalities, provoking people to protest. The ruling Communist Party presumably had the people’s interests at heart and reportedly E.M.S. Namboodiripad offered the following intriguing justification for these perverse subsidies to the industry: ‘The suffering of people will lead to an intensification of the class conflict; in the end people will be victorious and everything will then be set right.’

 

The pollution continued unabated and there were reports of widespread incidence of cancer. The factory claimed that there was no pollution, and as has been the experience all over the country, government agencies supported the industry. Indeed, one of my students was for a time the chairman of the Karnataka Pollution Control Board. There have been pollution related large-scale fish mortalities all over the country, including in the Tungabhadra river in Karnataka.

When I asked him if the Pollution Control Board had records of these mortalities, he told me, no, the government ordered that no such records be maintained. Furthermore, he reported that the same instructions had been given to the Pollution Control Boards in every state in the country. There has been absolutely no improvement over the years; for instance, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board continues to deny serious pollution of the Panchganga river in Kolhapur district.

This situation naturally attracted the attention of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad which established an Environment Brigade and undertook an interdisciplinary investigation of the river pollution that led to the publication of the first people-oriented, transparently honest, public assessment of an environmental issue in India in 1978.

Around this time, a hydroelectric project was proposed to be constructed in Silent Valley on the Kunthipuzha river. This was a treasure trove of biodiversity, one of the last remaining, largely untouched, tropical rainforest vegetations in Kerala. KSSP put together an interdisciplinary team to look into this project and produced another remarkable people-oriented, transparently honest, public assessment of an environmental issue. I became fascinated with these exercises by KSSP, for I had similar experiences in Karnataka with the exhaustion of the highly subsidized bamboo resources and the pollution of the Kali river by the West Coast Paper Mill at Dandeli in Uttara Kannada district.

 

In connection with my bamboo studies, I had acquired numerous friends among the people of this district, many of them spice gardeners in the Bedthi and Aghanashini river valleys. In 1979, I served as a member of the official committee to assess the environmental impact of the proposed hydro-electric project on the Bedthi river. The project document had a number of serious lacunae. Furthermore, no inputs were sought from the people of the Bedthi valley. When I suggested that the committee hold open hearings in which the local people could present their views regarding environmental impacts of the project, it was vehemently opposed by the officers of the Power Corporation. In the end, the committee submitted a report clearing the project with some safeguards.

The hostility towards involving local people in the decisions, and the great haste with which the environmental impact assessment was completed (36 hours), left me very dissatisfied with the process. So, I readily agreed when an organization of the local villagers, mostly spice gardeners, approached me to help them in questioning the project. The circumstances for such a questioning were favourable because many of the locals were highly literate and their well run cooperative society was affluent, with an annual turnover of several crores of rupees. I, however, made it clear that I was not opposed to the project per se, but was concerned that the project document was highly defective.

 

Our first step, therefore, was to critically examine this document, fortunately accessible to me as a member of the EIA committee in those pre-RTI days, and to carry out a proper evaluation. The pertinent field data was collected by enthusiastic volunteers, mostly local college students. We enlisted the help of a number of economists and engineers in examining and analysing this data. It revealed that the benefit-cost ratio of the project was less than one, i.e. the project could not be justified even on plain economic grounds.

These conclusions were publicly discussed at a seminar at the cooperative society in Sirsi in January 1981. It brought together local people and their leaders, many environmentalists, a number of reputed scientists, engineers and social scientists, and government officials from the forest and planning departments. The three day seminar was a lively affair with an open discussion on a whole variety of views – both for and against the project, as well as on the extensive concrete data.

The pertinent points made by the seminar led the government to constitute a committee to re-examine the project, which accepted our data and conclusions leading to the eventual withdrawal of the project. This, probably the first successful open, participatory assessment of an environmental issue in India, not only saved large amounts of money being wasted on a project that was not justified on any economic grounds, but also helped build up human capital with many community members understanding the methodology and value of scientific data collection and analysis and of social capital with the fostering of a cooperative knowledge enterprise. This stimulated local community members to undertake a number of constructive eco-restoration and eco-development activities in the days that followed.

 

Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad was a major player in the literacy campaign, one of the GoI technology missions launched in 1986. This resulted in Ernakulam becoming the first fully literate district in India. KSSP then launched on an ambitious Panchayat Level Resource Mapping (PLRM) programme to put the newly acquired skills of neo-literates towards addressing issues of interest to them. The Panchayat of Kalliassery was the first panchayat chosen for an experiment of Panchayat Level Participatory Planning as a follow-up of the PLRM. Later, this became a role model for Kerala’s ambitious statewide People’s Planning Campaign (PPC), launched in 1996.

Regretfully, this campaign failed to make headway because of bureaucratic stonewalling as well as resistance by politicians to empower people at the ground level. Other similarly unsuccessful attempts because of the same hurdles include the People’s Biodiversity Register Programme mandated by India’s Biological Diversity Act (2002).

But India has a vigorous, deep-rooted democracy and a peaceful revolution is in progress in Maharashtra’s Gadchiroli district grounded in the Community Forest Resource (CFR) Rights provision of the Forest Rights Act. Over 1300 gram sabhas of the district now have ownership rights over NTFP like bamboo, tendu, mahua and honey in more than three lakh hectares of CFR areas. Earlier, bamboo was granted to paper mills at highly subsidised rates; now with gram sabhas having rights over bamboo, they can pay three times the earlier wages to their own citizens and still have substantial savings that they can use for development works providing gainful employment. Given these positive developments, it is vital to strengthen the hands of gram sabhas to undertake sustainable management of the CFR resources, in particular to prepare CFR working plans as a basis for their management activities.

 

To build such capacity, Maharashtra’s Tribal Development Department sponsored a five month training programme for nominees of CFR-holding gram sabhas during 2018-2019 at Mendha (Lekha), the first village in the country to be assigned CFR rights. The training programme involved periodic lectures and practical demonstrations in Mendha (Lekha) CFR area, followed by practical work by the trainees under supervision of their gram sabhas in their respective CFR areas. All the 24 trainees possessed a great store of personal experience based knowledge of the plants, animals and the forest ecosystem and were tremendously enthusiastic about field work.

Little of the knowledge pertinent to the management of NTFP resources has been incorporated in the framework of formal science. All that seems to be officially available is anecdotal experiential knowledge and educated guesses, unlikely to be much advanced over that of the local communities. There are at least 80 different NTFPs of economic importance available in Gadchiroli district, and there is a great deal of variation among different CFR areas. It is essential that this variety be managed by taking on board locality specific conditions. Hence, good CFR management depends greatly on accumulating proper information on particular localities.

 

The modern discipline of landscape ecology is very pertinent to organizing such information and the trainees have quickly absorbed and learnt to put to good use such new knowledge. At the same time, smartphones with high levels of computational power have now reached the remotest villages of Maharashtra, and the trainees are now competent to record latitude and longitude of any locality, track the boundary of any area and upload it on the Google Earth satellite image. They have also learnt to make accurate ground level observations on the vegetation and upload the information using new facilities such as mobile based data collection software, Epicollect-5, that permit the use of Indian languages besides English. This is facilitating the organization of data collected in different localities and at different times in a properly designed database.

More significantly, the trainees are not only collecting information in prescribed formats, but providing very useful suggestions as to what to look for and how to organize the information based on their own substantial experiential knowledge. Thus, as in the case of the Bedthi hydroelectric project, the Gadchiroli exercise is building up human capital with many community members understanding the methodology and value of scientific data collection and analysis and of social capital with the fostering of a cooperative knowledge enterprise. Good practices of forest management are, at the same time, leading to an augmentation of the natural capital.

 

This very positive experience is now serving as a foundation for organizing a Jan Paryavaran Dakshata Manch, a People’s Environment Watch, by a group of socially oriented activists working with farmers, fisherfolk and forest dwellers. To develop the methodology, the group is initially focusing on one particular issue, namely the substantial damage to the cultivated crops by wild pigs. The prolifically breeding wild pigs are in no danger of extinction and are a much-needed protein source of great value to the people. Yet governmental regulations have now rendered the traditional means of controlling such damage, like hunting them, as illegal. In turn, the farmers are supposed to be compensated, but this is a tedious process, much hampered by the lack of good information and riddled with widely prevalent corrupt practices.

The farmers are therefore motivated to collect and organize information relating to such damage, supported by sound evidence in the form of geotagged photographs that record the exact location and date of the picture. This attempt is just two months old and is slowly gathering steam. Hopefully, it will not only serve the purpose of farmers in this particular context but help take to the people a set of powerful and now readily and freely accessible tools. These tools can be easily handled by people with little formal education and no knowledge of English and will help us combat the rapidly accelerating degradation of natural capital of our country, while at the same time help us build human and social capital through an active involvement of people at the grassroots in a cooperative knowledge enterprise.