Ecology and Equity

The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India

Madhav Gadgil, Ramachandra Guha

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135634957
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Environmental destruction is seen a matter of worldwide concern but as a Third World problem.
Ecology and Equity explores the most ecologically complex country in the world. India's peoples range from technocrats to hunter-gathers and its environments from dense forest to wasteland. The bookanalyses the use and abuse of nature on the sub-continent to reveal the interconnections of social and environmental conflict on the global scale. The authors argue that the root of this conflict is competition within different social groups and between different economic interests for natural resources.
Radical both in its critique of the causes of crisis in India and in its proposals for ecological reform, Ecology and Equity is essential reading for all concerned for the Third World's in the world.

Part I
THE INDIA THAT IS

1
CORNERING THE BENEFITS

The Colonial Legacy

India is a natural geographical entity bounded by the great ranges of the Himalaya, the Thar desert and the Indian Ocean. Over the centuries, people have flowed in and out of it through passages to the northwest, the northeast and across the seas; but cultural exchanges have been especially intense within the boundaries of the subcontinent. While India has thus been a cultural entity for over two millennia, it was politically constituted as a state under the British colonial regime only about two hundred years ago.

The British who conquered and unified India were at that time the world’s premier omnivores, drawing resources of the entire biosphere to their tiny island kingdom. The men presiding over the British Empire perched on chairs of Burma teak at tables of African mahogany, consuming Australian beef washed down with French and Italian wines. Their women were decked in Canadian furs and clothes of Egyptian cotton, dyed with Indian indigo, glittering with diamonds from South Africa and gold from Peru.

These levels of resource consumption among the British elite were attained by draining their many colonies, including of course India, of their natural resources. In order to accomplish this the pattern of land use within India had been so organized as to maximize the revenue it yielded to the British crown, and the commodities it could produce to feed the British economy. Since village communities could not conveniently be held responsible to pay taxes, land either became private property or was taken over by the crown. The privately held lands were primarily cultivated lands that were taxed heavily. In much of north and east India the ownership was handed over to feudal landlords, with the peasantry reduced to the status of much-exploited tenants and sharecroppers. In parts of south and west India cultivators were assigned lands, but, unable to pay the high taxes, quickly became chronically indebted, losing their lands to moneylenders. The peasants were forced to cultivate cash crops such as cotton, jute and indigo to feed the expanding British textile industry; but whatever the crops cultivated, they often could not make ends meet. While more and more land was brought under cultivation, the productivity of agriculture remained utterly stagnant under the colonial regime. There were several disastrous famines under British rule with millions of deaths. With population beginning to grow after the First World War, per capita food production in India was at its lowest ever at the conclusion of the Second World War (see Guha 1992).

Peasants in India cultivate tropical soils, most of which are poor in nutrients. They compensate for this by maintaining a herd of cattle that convert the vegetation on the surrounding non-cultivated lands into manure for the crops. Peasant families must also cook their meals with fuelwood, and construct their huts and weave their baskets from the small timber and bamboo gathered from these lands. Such lands, as well as irrigation ponds, used to be managed for the most part by village communities. This involved restraints on overuse and contributions to maintenance, such as the periodic desilting of ponds by communal labour. However, the British had scant sympathy for community-based management systems. Where they contributed to higher levels of agricultural taxation as with irrigation ponds, they were permitted to continue. Otherwise, as with wood lots and grazing lands, the state took them over, declaring community control illegitimate. These lands were then either dedicated to producing timber on reserved forest lands or were constituted into open-access lands that suffered overuse and degradation. While in theory the reserved forest lands were supposed to be managed in a sustainable fashion, their takeover by the state merely amounted to confiscation, not conservation, as a dissenting colonial official eloquently put it in the 1870s. The tremendously diverse tree growth of India’s forests was liquidated to build British ships and lay extensive railway lines. Mixed forests were replaced by single-species stands of a handful of commercially valued trees, such as teak, sal and deodar. This deprived the tribals and peasants of the forest produce they depended on, and even British experts pleaded that a certain relaxation of the wooden-mindedness of forest departments would greatly help the productivity of Indian agriculture and thereby permit higher levels of taxation (Voelcker 1893; Gadgil and Guha 1992).

The British wanted to retain India as a supplier of cheap raw materials and a market for higher-priced manufactured goods. Industry was therefore discouraged, as was scientific and technical education. A few industrial enclaves did develop regardless, such as the textile mills of Bombay and the Tata iron and steel mill in Jamshedpur. But these enclaves merely remained parasitic and did not serve as foci of modernization. The textile workers lived in miserable tenements in Bombay, leaving their families behind in the countryside, so that no broader, educated working class could emerge. The electric power that fed these mills came from hydroelectric projects built by summarily ejecting peasants, whose lands were submerged without due compensation. Little indigenous technological innovation accompanied this industrial development.

The fluxes of resources between India and Great Britain were highly asymmetrical under this regime. Out of India flowed large quantities of biological produce, rice and cotton, jute and indigo, tea and teak, as well as gold and precious stones. These commodities were produced cheaply; tea plantations in northeastern India, for instance, were set up by taking over tribal lands without any compensation; on them worked labour under conditions approximating slavery. There was little processing of these out-going biological and mineral produce to add value to them. The return flows were of much smaller material quantities of value-added products of British manufacture.

As rulers, the British assiduously gathered and transmitted back home information on India’s landmass, its plant wealth, its people and their customs. The topographic survey of India, the compilation of floras of British India, district gazetteers and ethnographic memoirs consumed a great deal of effort on the part of the colonial rulers (Viswanathan 1984; Desmond 1992). But very little technical information flowed from Britain to India. The Indian elite learnt the English language and read English literature. There was, however, a systematic attempt to keep scientific and technical information from reaching India. When J.N. Tata, one of the pioneers of Indian industry, proposed that an Indian Institute of Science be established to promote indigenous industry, he was consistently discouraged by the British administration. But the institute did come into being in 1909 and in its first decade actively helped establish indigenous technical enterprises. Its council then discouraged interaction between the institute and industry, forcing the faculty to concentrate on basic research. In the event, it accomplished hardly any innovative or original research either (Subbarayappa 1992).

The British omnivores were of course assisted in the task of mobilizing and draining the country’s natural resources by representatives of the Indian omnivores of pre-colonial times. Indian society is an agglomeration of tens of thousands of endogamous communities, mostly Hindu caste groups, that observed a hereditary division of labour. In this traditional hierarchy the surplus, primarily of the agricultural produce of the countryside, was appropriated by the three upper strata of Indian society: the Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors) and Vaisyas (traders). The two lower strata, Sudras (a category which included peasants, herders and fisherfolk, and the more skilled or prestigious service and artisanal groups) and erstwhile untouchables (i.e. the least skilled and prestigious service and artisanal groups), made up the bulk of the population and subsisted as ecosystem people. During colonial rule the upper strata helped serve the British objective of appropriating the surplus of the country’s resource production, just as they had earlier collaborated with the many Indian chieftaincies and kingdoms in a similar endeavour, albeit at a less intense rate and on a more limited spatial scale. The task of collecting and transmitting agricultural land tax was assumed principally by the warrior and priestly castes, who became owners of large tracts of land. The trader castes became partners of the British in the task of exporting natural resources and importing and distributing the goods of manufacture. The priestly castes came to man the lower echelons of the bureaucracy that ran the state apparatus.

At this time, the function of the state apparatus was relatively simple. It chiefly consisted in the collection of revenue and the maintenance of law and order. A small number of Indians were selectively educated to assist in these functions, but very few had access to science and technology. The Indian masses, whether peasants, fisherfolk, artisans, nomads or tribals, were left out, with very limited opportunities of education or of jobs in the bureaucracy, in the learned professions or in the slowly developing industrial sector. The tiny organized services and industries sector thus remained the monopoly of upper, literate and trader castes whose traditional divide from the primarily rural lower castes was further reinforced. Meanwhile, the colonial administration remained deliberately alienated from the people at large, with provisions such as the Official Secrets Act shielding it from any public scrutiny. This all-powerful state apparatus bore down heavily on the impoverished peasantry, with the once well-organized village-level systems of management and self-governance largely destroyed. Also gone was the traditional basis of subsistence of a large number of artisanal and service communities. Thus weavers were deliberately forced out of work to ensure a market for British textile mills, while river ferrymen went out of business with the building of bridges and nomadic traders with the expansion of roads and railways. A large populace therefore came to depend on cultivation of land and agricultural labour for subsistence, a populace that began to grow rapidly after the First World War, following the stagnation caused by serious famines and epidemics that characterized the period between 1860 and 1920. All this meant that the traditional network of mutual obligations characterizing Indian rural society was seriously disrupted. Of course, different communities in this network had always formed highly inequitable relationships with each other, but now the fabric itself was greatly strained.

One expects an imperial power to withdraw from a colony when the value of resources usurped is no longer attractive enough to offset the cost of such usurpation. When the British conquered India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it had a substantial surplus of agricultural production. This surplus had largely disappeared by 1920. With the spurt in population growth that followed this period, a serious deficit developed. India’s forest resources had also been seriously depleted by the Second World War (see Guha 1983), while its mineral resources were not very promising. At the same time the Indian elite had become increasingly conscious of the drain of the country’s resources, and come to appreciate the possibilities of diverting these resource fluxes in their own interest. A section of the elite therefore took up the cause of Indian independence, a cause that came to be increasingly supported by the wider population as well (Sarkar 1983). For the British this meant that the costs of usurping the dwindling resource base of their colony were becoming excessively high.

A Nation in the Making

It was at this low point that the British departed from India in August 1947. State power now passed into the hands of the landowning warrior and priestly castes of the countryside and the priestly and trader castes of the cities. This alliance was committed to the ideal of halting the drain of India’s resources abroad. At the same time it was eager to refashion the pattern of resource use to serve its own interests. There were obvious limitations to what could be achieved in the framework of a low-input agrarian economy, one no longer capable of yielding much of a surplus. The solution obviously lay in industrialization; in tapping the energy of coal and petroleum, of hydroelectric power, in producing steel and cement and using the resources so generated to promote manufacture. The way forward also lay in the intensification of agriculture, by irrigating large tracts of land under river valley projects and supplying them with synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. Such a process of development could create a substantial new base of resources whose surplus could support the urban-industrial sector and the rural landowning elite.

This was the model of development India opted for, rejecting the alternative, once offered by Mahatma Gandhi and some of his followers, of crafting an agrarian society of village republics making low levels of demands on the resources of the earth by living close to subsistence (Kumarappa 1938, 1946). The latter path promised no surplus resources that could be channelled to the elite. On the contrary, it called on the central apparatus of the state to surrender its powers in favour of the masses in the countryside. It is possible that the rural masses would have opted in favour of the so-called Gandhian model. Under India’s democratic system they had, in theory, an opportunity to do so. But people at the grassroots have so far ended up having very limited influence in India’s parliamentary democracy. Under this system politicians are able to go back with impunity on most promises made at the time of election. Once elected they can vigorously pursue their self-interests without hindrance. When political power was quickly monopolized by the rural and urban elite after independence, this elite saw its interests as being far better served by the model of rapid industrial development.

‘There is no free lunch in this world’ is what the biologist Barry Commoner (1971) once termed the First Law of Ecology. Somebody had to pay for the wholesale intensification of resource use in independent India. In 1947, the state had substantial monetary resources, in part thanks to the contribution made by India in assisting the British in the Second World War. However, the nascent industrial and organized services sector had far fewer resources at its command. Thus the process of intensifying the indigenous use of country’s natural resources would have taken off at a rather slow pace if it had had to be paid for only by private enterprise. But there was already a well-established tradition of the British colonial state stepping in to subsidize private enterprise – albeit those units largely under British control. Then the state had readily assigned tribal land to tea plantations and conferred draconian powers over plantation labour to the British estate owners. The state had stepped in to acquire farmland cheaply to set up river valley projects and to quash peasant resistance to such projects. On independence the Indian state elaborated a new model of a mixed economy to take this process of state intervention much further.

This model was inspired in part by Soviet communism. Under Stalin the Soviet state had mopped up the surpluses of the countryside to build heavy industries. This was accompanied by tremendous suffering by the masses of people and degradation of the environment, but at that time the world was little aware of the magnitude of these problems (see Conquest 1968). The Indian political elite under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru held the Soviet Union as the model to be followed, with state-run enterprises taking over the task of producing electricity and steel, fertilizers and radio broadcasts, and running trains and aeroplanes. But unlike in the Soviet Union, private enterprise was allowed to function under state regulation, with freedom to amass private property. Indeed, on the eve of independence leading Indian industrialists not merely supported but actively urged the acceptance of an interventionist role by the state apparatus (Thakurdas et al. 1944).

The process of the intensification of resource use in independent India thus became the charge of a bureaucratic apparatus inherited from the British. This was an apparatus fashioned primarily to better organize the drain of resources from the Indian countryside. The British were interested in acquiring these resources as cheaply as possible. They had no interest in the sustainable use of these resources, viewing with little concern destruction of extensive tracts of forests in the vicinity of railway lines or waterlogging of croplands in new irrigation projects (Howard 1940; Whitcombe 1971). This apparatus with its historical baggage was now put to the service of a new set of political masters.

In this framework, the process of development has come to be equated with the channelling of an ever more intense volume of resources, through the intervention of the state apparatus and at the cost of the state exchequer, to subserve the interests of the urban and rural elite. As a result, state subsidies have become a central element of the development process in independent India. These subsidies have served to lower the prices of many goods and services primarily for the more privileged segments of Indian society. They have also absorbed a large fraction of the costs of transporting these goods and services to the centres of concentration of the country’s elite.

An Ecosystem Perspective on Development

The coast

The process of development in free India may be illustrated in terms of fluxes of material, energy and informational resources among the six major ecological regimes and urban centres of the country, as well as the outside world (see Table 1). Until independence the coastal waters of India were fished by artisanal fisherfolk employing rowing boats and sailing boats, with the fish consumed largely along the coastal towns and villages. Since fish was relatively inexpensive, part of the catch was employed as manure, notably in coconut orchards.

Table 1 An ecosystem perspective on development: a summary

Note

This table depicts the principal material, energy and informational flows within different ecological regions in India and the outside world

The fisheries development effort following independence supported mechanization, with the introduction of trawlers and purse seiners, the development of cold storage and canning facilities and the promotion of export of marine products. Other developments have included the establishment of a series of chemical industries on the coast, for instance a petrochemicals complex at Baroda and a rare-earth plant near Thiruvananthapuram, and the rapid growth of several coastal towns and cities.

All these developmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• UNRISD
• Introduction
• PART I. The India that is
• PART II. The India that might be
• Glossary of Words in Indian Languages
• Glossary of words referving to Indian communities
• Bibliography
• Index