33 Environmental Movements in India

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Emergence of Environmental Movements in India: A Short History

3. Forms of Environmental Conflicts

a) Conflicts over Forests

b) Movements in the Mining Sector

c) Movements over Water

4. Typologies and Frameworks

5. Strategies in the Environmental Movements

6. Sociological Significance and Emerging Trends

7. Summary

1.   Introduction

Environmental movements in India have emerged from 1970s onwards as critiques of state sponsored forms of development. Natural resource based conflicts over the access and use of natural resources in different parts of the country lie at the centre of these environmental movements. These movements have resisted ‘increasing commodification and monopolization of natural resources like land, water, forests, their unsustainable use and unequal distribution, exploitative power relations, the centralization of decision making and disempowerment of communities caused by the development process. They asserted people’s rights over natural rights and decision making processes (Sangvai 2007: 111). However we cannot speak of a singular trajectory of the environmental movement in India, as the environmental discourse is constituted of multi-sited events, a range of practices, political and institutional contexts, a diversity of actors and frameworks of thinking and intervention (Brara 2005). The situation gets additionally complicated when ‘actions deemed as environmental cross cut parallel forms of collective actions in the field of ethnicity, gender, regional autonomy, labour and human rights’ (Dwivedi 2001).

Environmental movements in the West have been emphasizing ideas of conservation, deep ecology, quality of life and past-materialistic values. Therefore, they have been understood more as new social movements which are believed to gather support along lines of ‘personal and moral conviction’ and not relate to class per se. But ecological movements in India show continuities with the classical social movements while exhibiting some features of new social movements. Although they appeal to certain universal values, ecological struggles have been found to affect certain classes of people more, giving importance to the question ‘who should sacrifice and for whose benefit?’ In fact, the ecological struggles have acted as a medium through which the tribals, peasants, backward castes, fisherman or people displaced from their means of livelihood due to large projects, along with organized and unorganized workers, small entrepreneurs and manufacturers and all those who are surviving on land, forests, rivers, ponds and sea and other local resources stake their claim to these natural resources. In short, in the words of Ranjit Dwivedi, ‘environment movement is best understood as an ‘envelope’ as it encompasses a variety of socially and discursively constructed ideologies and actions, theories and practices’ (2008: 12).

2.   Emergence of Environmental Movements in India: A short history

The emergence of environmental movements in India can be traced back to the British period, though they were not known as ‘environmental movements’ then. People’s bitter resistance to the taking over of large areas by the colonial state to put it to intensive forms of resource use like commercial forestry are quite well known. This led to prolonged fights and social conflicts between the colonial state and its subjects. The British tried to restrict access to forests, common lands, forest produce which came to be construed as an infringement of customary rights of forest dwellers, hunter gatherers, nomadic and pastoral communities, farmers etc, jeopardized their survival and resulted in peasant rebellions. These uprisings were not understood as environmental movements as such, but they contained elements for which they could be considered as precursors of later day ecological struggles. For example, in the years following the World War I, people resisted acquisition of land by the Tatas for building a dam at Mulshi, near Pune, which would supply power to the city of Bombay. It has come to be known as one of the earliest environmental movements in India. Senapati Bapat, a Congress man, led the local people and succeeded in halting the construction of the dam for nearly a year till the Bombay government promulgated an ordinance that the Tatas could acquire land on payment of compensation. This caused a split in the movement, whereby one section, namely the Brahmin landlords of Pune, who owned lands in the Mulshi valley, were willing to part with their land for the project in return for compensation whereas the cultivators and their leaders were totally opposed to the idea. Peasants had to give in being opposed by the power company, the British government and the landlords; but the movement succeeded in securing reasonable compensation from the Tatas in exchange of land. They did not proceed with dam building in other sites subsequently.

The emergence of the environmental movements in post independent India during the 1970s was a response to the nature of policies of development and governance followed by the nation state. The process of economic development led to more intensive resource use. According to Gadgil and Guha (1994), earlier the conflicts had emerged out of competing claims over the forests, now a distinct ecological dimension was added to these socio-political conflicts as they took place in the context of a dwindling resource base affecting the poor peasants and tribals. In independent India another kind of conflict which has evoked huge popular response pertained to the social consequences of the river valley projects. According to an estimate, given by Gadgil and Guha (1994: 8), till about mid 90s around 11.5 million people have been displaced due to building of dams without any thought of compensation or rehabilitation. Therefore, movements representing dam displaced people have gained in importance over the past 30 years. Although the displacement caused by dams is said to be for greater good, the Indian villager today is reluctant to make way without resistance.

In the contemporary period characterized by globalization, what marks the attitude towards nature and its resources is the profit motive of the private multinational companies. The gradual withdrawal of the state making way for private extractive capital has meant an increase in assault on nature and natural resources and a near total disregard for the ecosystem people who live close to it. Hence we see violent conflicts leading to even deaths of the people who are willing to lay down their lives protecting their land, culture, identities and ways of life.

3.   Forms of Environmental Conflicts

In the Indian context environmental movements have arisen in a number of sectors as a result of the nature of development followed by the Indian state. We may discuss the following major sectors:

a) Conflicts over forests: This issue dominated the early years of the environmental movements’ discourse. For the first 20 years, the question of ‘forests for whom and for what?’ animated a series of protests which swept the Himalayan region in the early 1970s. The Chipko movement ‘reflected the widespread resentment among the hill peasantry directed at State forest policies which had consistently favoured outside commercial interests at the expense of their own subsistence needs for fuel, firewood and timber’ (Gadgil and Guha 1994: 104). It brought into focus wide ranging issues which had environmental implications. It also inspired a series of conflicts in the tribal dominated Central Indian regions like Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Maharashtra where the dependence on the forests was much more direct. This period also saw the growth of commercial forestry in the form of monocultures of eucalyptus. Popular movements which defended customary rights of the forest dwellers (over forests) aimed at two things: a) they claimed that the forests which had been acquired by the State in the name of forest management be returned to the people so that they can manage it without the intervention of the forest department, and b) they opposed the commercialization of forests, emphasizing the subsistence orientation of the communities who were dependent on it. Thus, the period after independence, though marked by greater talk of people’s participation and ecological security, also saw an increase in competing sets of demands over the forests and its produce.

In the context of globalization, India’s environmental resources are under siege. This period has seen an increase in the rapacious intent of the state and private capital to use India’s natural resources without bothering to be accountable in any way. In fact, in February 2013, the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a circular that it would not be mandatory for the Grama Sabhas to give permission for diversion of forest land to be used for linear infrastructural development projects such as roads, canals, power transmission lines etc. This circular violated an important clause of the Forest Rights Act 2006. In another instance, the Minister of Environment and Forests was pushed out to make way for a new minister who by her own admission granted ‘forest clearance’ to 754 out of 828 projects after 2011 within a period of just 18 months (EPW 2013). For example, there is a lot of resentment among people in Sambalpur district of Orissa as the government has granted permission to build roads for laying a water pipeline through a one hundred year old community managed forest. ‘Development at all costs’ with the help of private capital, is the new slogan in support of globalization induced industrialization, which will make India one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Significantly, enhanced mining, exploitation of marine resources, commercialization of agriculture and other processes have been the direct results of trying to rapidly increase export earnings. The logic of the current phase of globalization dominated by profit interest is based on externalization of environmental and social costs of development (Wani and Kothari 2008). Therefore, once again, we have a renewed spate of environmental movements in different parts of the country.

b) Movements in Mining Sector: Exploitation of mineral resources especially open cast mining in the sensitive watersheds of Himalayas, Western Ghats and Central India has caused a lot of environmental damage. People’s protests in these regions opposing the reckless effect of mining leading to their physical and economic survival have been documented by many scholars (Shiva and Bandyopadhyay 1988, Gadgil and Guha 1995). Notable among these was the successful resistance against limestone quarrying in the Doon Valley which led the Supreme Court to pass a judgement circumscribing the area of mining. All but 6 mines were closed. But movements against mining everywhere not managed to garner the same kind of attention either from the media or from the judiciary. For example, mining of soapstone and magnesium in other interior places like Almora and Pithoragarh districts of Kumaon leading to degradation of common forest and pasture land, a reduction in the local access to fuel, fodder and water continued apace. Social activists and villagers in the area have struggled hard to raise the consciousness of the villagers and the state authorities which eventually led to the closure of several mines in the area. Subsequently villagers have turned their energies towards land reclamation through afforestation. In the more recent years, mining in Orissa has been at the heart of many people’s struggles.

Orissa is one of the most mineral rich states and contains more than half of the bauxite reserves and about one-third of the iron ore reserves of our country. Quite like its neighbours like Jharkhand and Chattisgarh, Orissa is expecting large revenues from its mineral resources and is also inviting steel, aluminium and power companies to the state with promises of land, cheap power and easy access to the raw materials. Expectedly so, the state is witnessing a lot of resistance from its people at Kashipur, Niyamgiri, Kalinganagar, Jagatsinghpur who stand to lose their land, livelihood, social, religious and cultural rights to foreign multinational companies like Vedanta and Posco.

In the era immediately after independence, it was the state who led this process of displacement and dispossession due to the building of dams, military establishments, and iron and steel plants and other such public sector industries. Two almost year-long people’s struggles at Gandhamardan Hills in Sambalpur district against bauxite mining by BALCO and at Baliapal in the mid-1980s were successful in stalling large projects and continue to inspire people’s mobilizations thereafter. During the post 1990s, ‘private capital has begun replacing state projects as the major driver of enclosures, displacement and environmental damage’ (Kumar 2014: 67).

c) Movements over Water Resources: Water too has emerged as a major source of social conflict in different parts of India. According to Gadgil and Guha (1995), ‘inequitable control leading to mismanagement of water resources underlies many aspects of India’s environmental crisis.’ Large river valley projects which have come up at a fast pace since independence has been the mainstay of the India’s development. In the name of harnessing the water resources, these large river valley projects have led to submersion of forests and agricultural lands on a large scale. Ecology movements have emerged emphasizing the issue of exploitation of forests and agricultural lands as these have been the material basis for the survival of a large number of people in India, especially the tribals (Bandyopadhyay and Shiva 1988/2013). Most notable among people’s movements against dams on this issue of submersion are Bedthi, Inchampalli, Bhopalpatnam, Narmada, KoelKaro etc. People’s movements against widespread water logging, salinization and resulting desertification in the command areas of many dams like Tawa, Kosi, Gandak, Tungabhadra, Malaprabha etc., have been registered. While excess water led to ecological destruction in these cases, improper and unsustainable use of water in the arid and semi-arid regions also gave rise to people’s protests. The anti-drought and desertification movements have become very strong in the dry areas of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan and Orissa. Water based movements like Pani Chetana, Pani Panchayats, Mukti Sangharsh etc., have been advocating ecological water use.

In the decade of the 80s, the Narmada Bachao Andolan provided ‘an archetype of environmental representation and action’ (Brara 2004: 113). Following this agitation, mobilisation and resistance against big dams elsewhere in the country became more frequent and are also widely reported in the media. The movement has questioned the resettlement of the people displaced by the dam and eventually the model of development pursued by the state.

In the recent years, the Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti in Assam under the leadership of Akhil Gogoi has been fighting against big dams on Brahmaputra and attracting the ire of the government. Ecological groups have been joining hands to oppose the projects and say that they do not support the building of big dams in a highly sensitive seismic zone. Thousands of people including farmers, school teachers, students, daily wage earners have come together to oppose the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project as its impact on a host of aspects like fisheries, agriculture, earthquake etc is not yet clear. Despite these protests, the State government and the NHPC are hell bent on going ahead with the project.

According to a report in Down to Earth magazine published by Centre for Science and Environment, Arunachal Pradesh has been planning about 168 hydroelectric projects both big and small. It has signed numerous memoranda with various private and public sector companies to develop hydel power in the state, so much so that protests against dams are gradually snowballing into political movements in the region. (Dutta: 2010). It is believed that together they will endanger the lives of people both upstream as well as downstream. There is a persistent clamour from the environmentalists for decommissioning the dams as they have limited potential for irrigation, development and flood control.

4. Typologies and Frameworks

Creating typologies that structure empirical social reality in order to provide a clear and precise understanding has been attempted in sociology in its efforts to develop as a scientific discipline. Typologies create order out of the chaos presented by diverse empirical phenomena. Though there are limits that typologizing imposes on our understanding of social reality, social scientists have nevertheless constructed a variety of typologies of social movements.

Social movements have been classified on the basis of issues around which participants get mobilized. Accordingly some of the movements are known as forests, civil rights, anti-untouchability, linguistic, nationalist movements and so on. Social scientists have also classified movements on the basis of the participants such as peasants, tribals, students, women, dalits etc. In many cases, the participants and the issues go together. Some movements have participants who belong to different strata of society. For example, if ecological issues like the preservation of forests are raised by the tribals, should that movement be treated as a tribal movement or an ecological movement? After all, sustenance of forests is important for the livelihood of the tribals. At the same time the tribals are also raising larger ecological issues. Therefore, according to Ghanshyam Shah (2002), ‘issues like ecology and civil liberties are not merely class issues or social group based issues, though in the given system they affect certain classes more than the others’. For example, Ramachandra Guha’s path breaking work on the Chipko movement (1988) drew from two different kinds of traditions, i.e. the trajectory of peasant movements in the region and an ecologically oriented history on the other to understand peasant resistance against commercial forestry in the Himalayas. Similarly Sujata Patel’s work (1989) on the Baliapal agitation mapped the people’s mobilisation against the State’s decision to acquire land to create an Intermediate Missile Testing Range as it would not only lead to displacement, but also to a destruction of the flourishing local agricultural paan economy, loss of bheetamati (home and the hearth) ‘sonar mati’ (of land in general). Therefore, economic, environmental, and questions of community identity came together to reveal the complex and hybrid nature of the social movement. 

Again, a social movement may come to be understood as an environmental movement later as fresh data is unearthed or as the framework of interpretation undergoes change. In such situations typologies too change. For example, Sourish Jha’s work (2012) on the historic forest dwellers movement in North Bengal in the decade of the 1950s and 60s, was directed against the ecologically exploitative, forest management practice of taungya, which was sustained through the collaboration and co-option of the forest dwellers themselves since the colonial period and even after independence. The study questioned the idea of ‘the environmentalism of the poor’ which restricted the understanding of the struggle merely around the issues of livelihood and subsistence. The movement had not only demanded ‘a fair distribution of ecological goods, recognition of rights of the ecosystem people but also a fair system of harnessing natural resources free from corruption, a fair opportunity of employment of those people who were involved in the process of regeneration, felling and maintenance of forests. It was also a movement for restoration of their own dignity’ (Jha 2012: 117).

Therefore, environmental movements defy easy classification, they are never exclusively ecological, they are always aligned with a host of other issues like freedom, justice, human rights, questions of identity etc., which reminds us of the complexities of the situation as well as the limitation of typologies. The same is true about many other types of new social movements as well. It is worth arguing here that as compared to old social movements, new social movements are difficult to classify.

5. Strategies used in the Environmental Movements

Environmental movements over the years have used several innovative strategies of protest which have largely been of a non-violent nature. The environmental movements have adopted non-violence ‘not only as a matter of strategy but almost as a matter of principle’ (Sangvai 2007: 116), as they have been opposing the violence of injustice, inequality and exploitation perpetrated by processes of development. In fact, such an orientation has led them to ‘explore ways of making non-violent satyagraha more effective, intensive and wider.

The forms of protest range from a contravening of statutory laws to spontaneous outbursts like the act of hugging of trees by women in the Chipko movement as an attempt to safeguard them from being felled. Mass actions like demonstrations, dharnas, indefinite hunger strikes, village level actions have been a part of environmental protests. The Narmada struggle has also evolved the satyagrahas against submergence. In the early years of the struggle against the Sardar Sarovar Dam, padayatras through villages which would be affected, were a means used by its leaders for conscientization and mobilization. Sri Sunderlal Bahuguna’s hunger strike as a mark of protest, and also intended to pressurize the government to stop construction of the Tehri Dam during the decade of the 80s is quite well known.

The use of litigation to stop ecologically degrading activities has also been a step which has been taken up from time to time along with other forms of social protests, by social activists and the affected people in an area. This was seen during the course of the construction of the Tehri Dam in the Uttarakhand region in the 1970s-80s when the Tehri Dam opposition committee appealed to the Supreme Court against the proposed dam by identifying it as a threat to the survival of people living near the river Ganga upto West Bengal. The ecological movement against the Silent Valley project in Kerala during the late 70s-early 80s, along with attempts at people’s mobilization also appealed to the Prime Minister for intervention as the building of the dam would be a threat ‘not to the survival of the people directly, but to the gene pool of the tropical rainforests threatened by submersion’ (Bandyopadhyay and Shiva 2013: 326).

In the more recent years, protests against the Polavaram Dam on Godavari river in Andhra Pradesh also used different methods like rallies and dharnas, silent protests and submission of memorandums to government officials, organizing discussion forums and seminars on the issue, keeping the debate alive on the issue, mass demonstrations involving eminent social activists, environmentalists, long marches on foot and cycle yatras to build solidarity and sensitize communities and relay hunger strikes. As many as 2000 tribal women organized and participated in a mahilagarjana expressing their anguish and protest over the building of the Polavaram dam. All these protests took place quite spontaneously in different parts of the tribal belt under the local leadership. A unique method of protest adopted by oustees of the Omkareshwar Dam on the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh was jalsatyagraha protesting the proposed increase in height of the dam and a complete disregard of the promised rehabilitation policy by the authorities. The oustees of the dam were being forced to resettle in stony sites and in forest villages where no employment was available, neither construction of houses was possible.

Non-violent mass action has been an effective political instrument in the hands of the poor, the weak and the dispossessed. There is also a progressive realization within such people’s movements that non-violent mass actions would be effective if accompanied by simultaneous action on other fronts like support from the media and other environmental groups, political lobbying, international campaigning and coordination along with other movements which would create both publicity and pressure on the governments to act.

6.  Sociological significance and emerging trends

The sociological significance of environmental movements lies in the fact that they lay bare the contradiction at the heart of the capitalistic enterprise. Capitalism looks at nature as a resource to be exploited for profit; it regards the human relationship with and dependence on nature as secondary and generates conflicts between competing worldviews and orientations. Environmental movements foreground these conflicts and contradictions.

Secondly, as Gadgil and Guha (1994: 101) articulate, ‘the environmental movement has added a new dimension to the meaning of democracy and civil society’. Environmental movements have been accommodative of a wide plethora of actors and voices namely tribals, farmers, lower caste groups, middle class academics and social activists, women, scientists and experts, traders, political workers, non-governmental organisations and so on. These constituencies have actively forged alliances, and attempted to influence the state’s actions from time to time giving meaning to the idea of a democracy. We find that in the course of their challenge to the State, even a section of the Maoists are also stressing upon these issues.

Thirdly, it posed an ideological challenge to the meaning, content and patterns of development. As Sangvai (2007) has articulated, these environmental movements have established that along with issues like protection against unjust displacement, employment oriented decentralized small units, food security, housing rights, environmental sustainability, agricultural-industrial policy are all interlinked in the quest for equality in a democracy. A few other values which these movements espoused pertained to a non-hierarchical mode of functioning and organizing, a focus on forging alternatives and an increasing emphasis on the small and the local.

7.  Summary

In modern society the relation between nature and society has become increasingly central and complex with wide ranging implications which are not necessarily restricted to a society or a class per se. According to Gunnar Olofsson (2014) among the new social movements it is the environmental movement which manages to bring together issues which are at stake personally along with social issues which affect the reproductive capacity of a society and economy at large.

These movements since their inception have challenged the State in its shifting avatars and its changing modes of governance through resource extraction, increasing use of violence and surveillance over the people and through accumulation by dispossession. Though they came to be known as environmental movements only in the mid 70s or so, there have been protests around access to and the use of natural resources even during the colonial period. Peasants, tribals and forest dwellers rose up in rebellion at different times against the colonial state over the acquisition of their land and the subsequent curtailment of their customary rights. In the post independence period too there have been many conflicts over dams, forests, pollution, mining, tourism, which have highlighted the fact that in most of the cases development has not really benefitted those who have had to give up their resources in the name of development, in fact such people continue to remain marginal as before as their customary rights over resources are taken away, the basis of their livelihood is gradually lost, their knowledge and skills gradually made redundant in a modernising society. In the neo-liberal era, the state has made way for the private capital to mount an assault on the resource rich regions of our country in a much more aggressive and rapacious manner. This has given rise to a renewed spate of environmental movements in these regions, which have seen even the use of physical violence over the protestors. This indicates that though marginalised by mainstream politics, in the near future environmental movements are going to grab centre stage as they highlight some of the basic conflicts of our time over natural as well as cultural resources, over voices, forms of expression and identities. Therefore, we need to pay attention to what they have come to reflect and symbolize.