
As the news of the devastating Wayanad landslide and the humongous death toll hit the headlines on July 30, I was flooded with phone calls and requests for interviews. Had we not discussed such possibilities and the way ahead in our Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) report submitted in 2011? What is it that we had to say?
The theme of our report was that any nation, including India, can be viewed as harbouring four types of capital: natural (water, vegetation, biodiversity, agriculture, animal husbandry, fish production), social (cooperative behaviour, sense of security), human (education, health, employability), and man-made.
India sadly is exclusively focused on building up highly subsidised man-made capital at the serious expense of natural, human, and social capital. This approach worsens economic, social, educational, and health disparities, thereby jeopardising overall social welfare and reducing the ability of our industrial enterprises to compete internationally. This is associated with increasing frequency and intensity of human interventions. The standing testimonies to this are the mines and quarries, roads, and buildings on hill slopes everywhere including in highly ecologically sensitive regions.
The only way to bring these unfortunate trends under check will be to follow WGEEP's carefully drafted guidelines for regulation as well as promotion of developmental activities graded with respect to zones with three different levels of ecological sensitivity, high, moderate and low. These are not meant to be as final, rigid prescriptions but are meant to initiate a bottom-up process of democratic decision-making beginning with the gram sabhas (local village bodies).
WGEEP's guidelines include, among others:
1) No special economic zones
2) No new hill stations
3) Rescheduling reservoir operations to improve downstream flows
4) Participatory sand auditing and strict regulation of sand mining
5) Rehabilitation of mined areas with special focus on reviving water resources
6) River basin planning to be supported by suitable legal institutions to coordinate working of different departments currently dealing with rivers in a compartmentalised manner
7) Promoting organic agricultural practices, encouraging participatory breeding programmes and precision agricultural practices, introducing incentive payments for [a] sequestration of carbon in soils and [b] maintenance of select traditional cultivars
10) Redeploying subsidies for chemical fertilizers towards maintenance of livestock and production of biogas and generation of organic manure
11) Strictly controlling use of dynamite and other explosives to kill fish
12) Providing fish ladders at reservoirs
13) Introducing incentive payments as 'conservation service charges' for maintenance of indigenous fish species in tanks under the control of Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) or fishermen’s cooperatives
14) Implementing the Forest Rights Act while reaching out to people to facilitate their claims
15) Making special funds available to BMCs for disbursal in relation to wildlife-related damage
16) No mining in areas demarcated as ESZ1; where mining exists, it should be phased out in five years, by 2016
19) No new mining in ESZ2; existing mining to be conducted under strict regulation and social audit
20) New mining may be taken up in ESZ3 under strict regulation and social audit
21) Illegal mining to be stopped immediately
22) No new red and orange category industries in ESZ1 and ESZ2; existing industries to switch to zero pollution by 2016 and be subject to strict regulation and social audit
22) Promoting small-scale, micro- and pico- hydropower systems that are people-owned and managed and are off grid
23) Strict regulation of existing thermal power plants; obligation to promote alternative uses of fly ash such as in making roads
24) No new railway line and no new national highway/state highway/ expressways in ESZ1
25) Tailoring environmental education projects to serve as an instrument of participatory environmental monitoring involving local community members; connecting such exercises to the preparation of People's Biodiversity Registers by BMCs.
The governments set these aside since they have no interest in protecting nature and empowering people.
The bane of crony capitalism
In fact, we are locked in a system of crony capitalism. Under crony capitalism, businesses profit from a close relationship with state power, either through an anti-competitive regulatory environment, direct government largesse, and/or corruption. Examples include obtainment of permits, government grants, tax breaks or other undue influence from businesses over the state's deployment of public goods, such as mining concessions for primary commodities or contracts for public works.
In India, most businesses thrive not through free enterprise but through collusion between the business class and the political class. Wealth is accumulated not by market profits, but through profiteering and rent-seeking using monopolies or oligopolies.
Entrepreneurship and innovative practices, which reward risk, are stifled because crony businesses add little value and create few significant products. This crony capitalism spills over into the government, politics, and media, distorting the economy and corrupting public-serving economic, political, and social ideals.
In this context, the report of the Justice Shah Commission on illegal mining in Goa is revealing. To quote: 'Part IV Section 24 of the Mines and Minerals (DR) Act, 1957 was not observed at all and that no inspection was carried out resulting into fear-free environment which has caused loss to the ecology, environment, agriculture, ground water, natural streams, ponds, rivers, biodiversity, etc.' It estimated that illegal mining has resulted in gains to the tune of Rs 35,000 crore in Goa alone from 2006 to 2011.
This 13-year delay in acting on WGEEP's suggestions is impacting the region more and more adversely resulting in an increasing frequency of floods and landslides. A careful study of landslides at all scales on Maharashtra Western Ghats has shown that their frequency has gone up 100-fold from 2011 to 2020. It is high time we begin to take stringent actions to protect nature and empower institutions of decentralised democracy from gram sabhas and mohalla sabhas upwards to turn the tide around.
Kerala is the country's most literate state and in fact has a notable tradition of empowering people that led to the People’s Planning Campaign of 1995-96. It is high time we revive that spirit.
(Padma Bhushan Madhav Gadgil is an Indian ecologist, academic, writer, columnist and the founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences. He was the head of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP).)