THE GREEN ROAD TO PROGRESS

In 75 years of independent India, the environment movement has played an important role in shaping policy and defining the practice of development.

- SUNITA NARAIN

The movement has taken three distinct tracks through which we can highlight the change-makers. First, where environmental action played a role in defining the development strategy for natural resource management. Second, where action has opposed development projects and, from this contestation, a new consensus has emerged in terms of action. Third, where the environment movement has pushed and prodded change in policy when it comes to issues of pollution and human health.

The ‘nature’ of the movement is complex. Not only because there are separate ideologies that drive environmentalism in the country, but also because there are differences in class. For instance, in the past 75 years, India’s environment movement has been deeply divided on the practice of environment as development and/ or conservation.

This schism started even at the very birth, in the 1970s. On the one hand, the country launched Project Tiger to identify land for sanctuaries for this flagship species, a programme based on the western concept of conservation. At roughly the same time, poor women in the high Himalayas launched the Chipko movement, where they resisted the axe of the woodcutters. Their movement, though, was not about conservation but an assertion of self-determination—they needed the trees for their survival, and so wanted the right to cut them or grow them. This difference has played out in policy over the past 75 years as it vacillated between extraction of natural resources like forests, and conservation. And in this, the right of communities to manage local natural resources has not been realised. Given these inherent contradictions, it is nearly impossible to call out the most important environment initiatives of the past 75 years. I will leave it to you, discerning reader, to ponder upon the significance of the ones chosen here.

Chipko movement