Development versus Ecology: Environmental Movements

Development and Its Discontents: The Rise of the Environmental Movement

Why a Developing Nation Came to Question the Costs of Growth

Why this matters: The early republic equated progress with the big dam, the steel mill and the harnessed river, and it cleared forests and moved people to build them. Within a generation a counter-current arose, asking at what cost that progress came and on whom it fell. The environmental movements gave this question a national voice, and turned it from a private grief into a public cause that the state could not ignore.

What is the significance of these movements: They forced a poor and developing nation to weigh its hunger for growth against the forest, the river and the communities that lived by them. From the villagers of the Himalaya to the scientists of Kerala, citizens with little power reshaped policy, drove new law and changed the very idea of development. This part follows that argument from its older roots to the movements, the laws and the continuing debate.

The Roots of Conservation: From the Bishnoi to Stockholm 1972

How an Ancient Ethic of Protection Met a New Global Awareness

Distinguishing the older roots: The protection of nature was not new here. The Bishnoi of the Rajasthan desert long held the felling of a living tree to be against their faith. In 1730, at Khejarli near Jodhpur, 363 of them, led by Amrita Devi, embraced the khejri trees and were cut down rather than yield them to the ruler's axe. Groves of forest were set aside as sacred and protected by custom, an ethic older than the modern state.

The modern awakening came with a global turn. The pressures of population and of post-war development pressed hard on the forests and rivers, even as a worldwide concern for the environment rose. In 1972 the world gathered at the Stockholm Conference, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, where the country argued that poverty and need were themselves great spoilers of the environment, and that the poor could not bear the whole burden of conservation.

The conference marked the moment when the protection of nature entered national policy.

Observable outcome: The awakening was soon written into the framework of the state. The 42nd Amendment of 1976 added to the Constitution both a Directive Principle, Article 48A, directing the state to protect the environment and safeguard the forests and wildlife, and a Fundamental Duty, Article 51A, laying on every citizen the duty to protect the natural environment.

With the early statutes, the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 and the Water Act of 1974, these gave the new concern an institutional home.

The Chipko Movement: Embracing the Trees of the Himalaya

How the Villagers of Garhwal Stopped the Axe with Their Bodies

Distinguishing the Chipko movement: The most famous movement began in 1973 in the Garhwal Himalaya, in the hill district of Chamoli, where the forest department gave ash trees to a distant sports-goods company while denying the same timber to local people. Under Chandi Prasad Bhatt and the village workers, the people resolved to stop the felling by embracing the trees, so that the axe would fall on them first.

From this embrace the movement took its name, Chipko, meaning to cling or to hug.

The movement was carried by its women. In 1974, when the men of Reni were drawn away on a pretext and the loggers moved in, it was the women, led by Gaura Devi, who stood between the axe and the trees until the contractors withdrew. The cause was carried across the country by Sunderlal Bahuguna, whose marches and whose saying that ecology is the permanent economy gave the movement a philosophy and a national audience.

The women's leading part tied Chipko to the bond between the forest and those who live by it.

Observable outcome: The protest won a real and lasting victory. In 1980 an appeal carried to the Prime Minister led to a long ban on the commercial felling of green trees in the high Himalaya, and Chipko became the model that later movements would follow. It showed that an unarmed and local protest, rooted in the daily dependence of the village on the forest, could halt the commercial axe and shift the policy of the state.

The Silent Valley Movement: Saving a Rainforest in Kerala

How a Campaign of Scientists and Poets Halted a Dam

Distinguishing the Silent Valley movement: In the Palakkad district of Kerala lay Silent Valley, a tract of undisturbed tropical rainforest in the hills of the Western range, rich in rare species such as the lion-tailed macaque. A proposal of the state electricity board would have built a hydroelectric dam across the Kunthipuzha river that runs through it, drowning a large stretch of forest.

The choice was posed starkly, the power a dam would bring against the loss of a forest that could not be replaced.

The campaign was led by scientists and writers. The Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, a people's science movement, marshalled the technical case, while poets and writers gave it a moral voice and the cause drew national attention. The project was abandoned in 1983, and the forest was declared a National Park in 1984.

Silent Valley lies in the hills of Palakkad, not in the Nallamalai range of the east; the Kunthipuzha flows through its rainforest; and a later proposal to revive a dam nearby, the Pathrakkadavu project, was also resisted.

Observable outcome: Silent Valley was the first great victory of biodiversity over a power project, the first time the value of an irreplaceable forest was held to outweigh the benefits of a dam. It established that ecological worth could override a development scheme on its own merits, and it gave the movement a confidence that carried into the larger and harder struggles that followed.

The Narmada Bachao Andolan and the Politics of the Big Dam

How the Question of the Oustee Reframed the Idea of Development

Distinguishing the Narmada Bachao Andolan: The longest and most searching of the struggles gathered around the great dams planned on the Narmada river, above all the Sardar Sarovar in Gujarat. From 1985 the Narmada Bachao Andolan, led by Medha Patkar with the moral support of Baba Amte, organised the people whom the rising waters would displace, many of them tribal villagers and farmers of the valley, and made their fate the centre of the argument.

The dispute set two genuine claims against each other. On one side stood the promise of the dam, drinking water for dry lands, irrigation for the fields and power for the towns of a wide region, gains its supporters held would lift millions. On the other stood the cost, the submergence of forest and farmland and the uprooting of the valley's poorest people, whose resettlement the movement held inadequate.

In its judgment of 2000 the Supreme Court, by a majority, allowed the work to proceed subject to conditions on the rehabilitation of the displaced, balancing the project against the duty owed to the oustee.

Observable outcome: Whatever one's view of the dam, the andolan changed the terms of every large project that followed. It made the rehabilitation of the displaced, and the honest counting of the human and ecological cost, a condition no scheme could ignore. It stated, more sharply than any movement before it, the genuine and unresolved tension between the development a poor nation needs and the burden it so often lays on the poorest.

Beyond the Famous Campaigns: Appiko, Tehri and the Wider Movement

How the Environmental Movement Spread Across the Country

Distinguishing the spread of the movement: Chipko found a southern echo in the Appiko movement, which began in 1983 in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka, where the forests of the Western range were falling to commercial logging and single-species plantations.

Pandurang Hegde, who had learned from Bahuguna, led the villagers to hug the trees in the way of Chipko, for appiko in Kannada means to embrace, and the protest helped win a ban on felling green trees in the natural forests of the state.

Not every struggle ended in victory. The long protest against the Tehri dam on the Bhagirathi in the Himalaya, in which Sunderlal Bahuguna undertook fasts of great length, raised the dangers of a high dam in an earthquake zone and the loss of an old town, yet the dam was in the end completed. Other struggles arose around mining, the rights of fishing communities and the felling of forests, some prevailing and some not.

The movement was never a single body but a wide and varied current of protest with many local sources.

Observable outcome: The diversity of the movement, in its causes and in its fortunes, was itself its strength. Some campaigns saved a forest or a valley and others could not, but together they planted an environmental conscience in public life that could not be uprooted. By the close of the century the protection of nature had become a permanent claimant in every decision about land, water and forest.

The Legislative Architecture: From the Wildlife Act to the Environment Act

How the State Built a Framework of Environmental Law

Distinguishing the legal turn: The pressure of the movements, and the new constitutional duty, drove the state to build a framework of environmental law, treated in full in the environmental material and summarised here.

The Wildlife Protection Act of 1972 protected species and created the sanctuaries and national parks; the Water Act of 1974 and the Air Act of 1981 set up the pollution control boards and standards for clean water and air; and the Forest Conservation Act of 1980 checked the diversion of forest land.

The framework was completed after a disaster. The escape of poison gas from a pesticide plant at Bhopal in 1984, one of the worst industrial catastrophes the world has known, exposed the weakness of the law and pushed the state to a single comprehensive statute. The Environment Protection Act of 1986 became the umbrella law, arming the central government with wide powers to set standards and act against pollution.

Later came the Biological Diversity Act of 2002, the Forest Rights Act of 2006, which gave forest-dwelling communities a voice over their forests, and the National Green Tribunal of 2010.

Observable outcome: Within four decades the country had built a dense body of environmental law, from the protection of a single species to the umbrella power to regulate any source of pollution. The statutes are treated in full in the environmental material; their place in this account is as the institutional answer that the movements, and the disasters, forced from the state.

Environmental Justice through the Courts: Public Interest Litigation and the Green Doctrines

How the Supreme Court Made a Clean Environment a Fundamental Right

Distinguishing the judicial route: Alongside the street and the statute ran a third road to environmental protection, the court. Through public interest litigation, examined in the part on constitutional evolution, citizens and groups could bring the degradation of the environment directly before the Supreme Court.

The court read the right to a wholesome environment into the right to life under Article 21, holding in Subhash Kumar against the State of Bihar in 1991 that the right to life includes pollution-free water and air.

The court built a set of guiding doctrines. In the litigation pursued by the lawyer M. C. Mehta and others, it laid down that an enterprise in a hazardous activity bears an absolute liability for the harm it causes, a rule framed after the oleum gas leak in Delhi in 1987.

In the Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum case of 1996 it made the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle part of the law, the first requiring action against likely harm even without scientific certainty, the second placing the cost of pollution on the one who causes it. It later held that the state holds the rivers, forests and air in trust for the public, the doctrine of the public trust.

Observable outcome: The most lasting achievement of this work was the constitutionalisation of the environment, the making of its protection a fundamental right and a settled doctrine rather than a matter of policy alone. With the National Green Tribunal, the courts became a permanent and powerful forum for the cause, able to halt a polluting industry or order the cleaning of a river, a role examined further in the parts on the judiciary and in the environmental material.

Development versus Ecology: A Genuine and Continuing Debate

How the Nation Has Sought to Reconcile Growth with the Environment

Distinguishing the genuine tension: The conflict between development and ecology is real and not easily resolved. A poor and populous nation needs energy, minerals, roads and industry, and the growth that lifts its people from want, and much of this cannot be had without cost to the forest, the river and the air.

Yet the ecological case is equally serious, for the loss of a forest or the fouling of a river is often irreversible, and the cost falls most heavily on the poorest and those to come.

The nation has sought a path between the two claims. The idea of sustainable development, given its classic form by the Brundtland definition of 1987, that the present must meet its needs without robbing the future of the means to meet its own, became the language of the reconciliation.

In practice this has meant the environmental impact assessment of large projects, the requirement of forest clearance and the consent of the village assembly under the forest rights law, and the long debate over fragile regions such as the Western range, where the Gadgil and Kasturirangan reports offered competing balances. The argument now extends to climate change, which sharpens every choice between growth and restraint.

Observable outcome: There is no final settlement of the debate, and there is unlikely to be one, for the claims of growth and of the environment are both legitimate and often in tension. What the movements achieved was to ensure that the ecological voice is always heard, that no large project can proceed as though the forest and the river had no value, and that the reconciliation, however imperfect, is attempted in every case rather than ignored.

Significance: The Environmental Movement and the Meaning of Development

How the Movement Changed What Development Means

The larger significance of the environmental movement is that it changed the very meaning of development in the national mind. Where the early republic had measured progress by output alone, the dam built and the forest cleared, the movements taught the nation to count also the forest lost, the river fouled and the people displaced. The protection of nature became a permanent axis of policy, a claim that every plan and every project must answer.

Contemporary linkages carry the argument into the present. The crises of climate change and of the polluted city, the transition to clean energy, the fragility of the Himalaya and the Western range, the continuing dispute over the impact assessment of projects and the rights of forest communities are all the descendants of the movement traced here.

The deeper lesson is that development cannot honestly be measured without counting its cost to the natural world and to those who depend on it, and that this counting was the gift of the environmental movement to the nation's idea of progress. The next part turns to contemporary India since 1991, in which the question of development and ecology runs through the whole story of liberalisation and rapid growth.

• The Bishnoi of 1730 and Chipko of 1973 rooted the defence of the forest in the lives of those who depend on it.
• Silent Valley and the Narmada Bachao Andolan made the big dam the central question of development against ecology.
• The 42nd Amendment, the Environment Protection Act of 1986 and the National Green Tribunal built the green legal framework.
• The courts constitutionalised the environment, reading a clean environment into Article 21 and laying down the polluter-pays rule.
• Sustainable development became the language of an unfinished reconciliation between growth and the protection of nature.

Sources and Further Reading

• NCERT, Politics in India since Independence (Class 12)
• Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change
• India Code: the environmental statutes
• Wikipedia: Chipko movement
• Wikipedia: Narmada Bachao Andolan
• Wikipedia: Silent Valley National Park
• Press Information Bureau, Government of India
• National Portal of India