Indian environmental history for young adults

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A migrant helps a customer wash his hands in front of a supermarket in Chennai. 

Station 55

This picture is enlarged and displayed on the wall of my living room. I shot it in a monastery above Thimpu in Bhutan. I was attracted by the nirvana-esque pose of the monk. I was captured by something else too. I will come to that later.

In the mid-1980s I started with student environmental activism. The Sree Kerala Varma College in Thrissur was established in a palace donated by the Kochi royal family. It has a sacred grove, which generations of students called “Ooty”. When the college management wanted to cut old-growth trees to build a wall, some of us students protested.

Even though our protest was unsuccessful, it laid the foundation of ecological understanding in our group. One amongst us went on to become the agriculture minister of Kerala, and admitted to me later during an interview that the roots of his ecological understanding began in those heady days between 1985 and 1987.

It is this understanding that I took into my work as an environment journalist and communicator. I belong to the second generation of environment journalists in the country. We followed the pioneers such as Darryl D’Monte, Claude Alvares, Bittu Sehgal and Anil Agarwal.  It is not as if environment stories were not covered before that but these journalists carved out the environment journalism genre in the early 1980s. Their writings inspired us during our student activism.

Some exceptionally talented and patient mentors trained me early on in my working life. If N.D. Jayal gave me the conceptual framework on India’s environmental issues, Indira Ramesh, Rita Bhatia and Joe D’Souza also left their indelible imprint. What they taught me was that it is not enough to understand environmental linkages, but for the ideas to grow there was a need to pass it on to the younger generation.

Three decades

From the mid-1980s to the present, our generation experienced the country’s political economy undergoing major changes. Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister when I started working. He of the “I am young, I too have a dream” quote, Rajiv put metrics into the development process by initiating national technology missions. For the first time since Independence, the National Technology Mission on Drinking Water computed how many villages in the country did not have access to a safe water source.

Today it is fashionable to lay many of the country’s past problems at Rajiv’s doorstep. However, in the summer of 1988, I saw one of Rajiv’s policy actions that prevented many human deaths. I had joined Action for Food Production (AFPRO), a national-level NGO working on water resources development as a communicator. AFPRO had established a field unit at Udaipur in Rajasthan, in response to the fourth year of drought in the Aravalli hills (1984-1988). Agricultural fields were bone dry, and cattle were dead at multiple locations. Unable to maintain their livestock, farmers abandoned them to die by the roadside, or in the fields. Despite the devastation, human lives were not lost in the famine. The government’s food for work schemes ensured that sustenance reached rural families.

We lived the roller coaster years. We saw the violence that followed the implementation of the Mandal Commission report; the economic crisis that led to the implementation of the economic reforms; the federalism (led by regional parties) of the United Front government; the BJP-led governments of 13 days, 13 months and then a full term under Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee; the second nuclear test; the Kargil War; India failing in its shine during the 2004 national elections; India’s economy growing when the sub-prime lending crisis had tottered the US economy and many others in 2009; a season for scams; the rise of the Aam Aadmi party; and the return of the BJP-led government.

Gandhi as the environmental icon

In the more recent years, we were witness to Mahatma Gandhi becoming India’s official environmental icon. First it was the launch of the Swachh Bharat campaign on Gandhi Jayanthi in 2014, then it was the announcement of the nationally determined contributions that India made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the UN Climate Change Secretariat in 2015. By 2019 the integration was complete, with the media talking about Mahatma Gandhi and national government’s policies in the same breath. It is something like the itihasa-purana of yore, where feudatories new to power validated themselves through discovered or created lineages to the gods.

In a sense it was an ironical justice to the environmental discourse from the mid-1980s. In those days environmental activists articulated a binary between Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. While Gandhi was seen as the ideal for everything small and sustainable, Nehru was personified as somebody signifying everything large and destructive. The famous environmental book, Temples or tombs, written by Darryl D’Monte in 1986, and looking at the adverse environmental impacts of three industrial-scale projects, articulated this dichotomy in its title.

It is this divide that the post-2014 ruling establishment worked upon. They stretched Gandhism to mean everything environmental and the environmentalists’ criticism against Nehru added ammunition to their already-existing tirade against India’s first prime minister. Ironically, in the process the government could clothe environmentally-destructive projects in benign Gandhian ethics. Environmentally, the Gandhian currency has changed hands – the old one demonetised and the new one back with double strength, like the 2,000-rupee note.

The tightening loop

The paradigm shift in Indian environmentalism happened with the economic reforms of 1991. Till then, environment was a concern of rural and marginal communities that fought to conserve their natural resources and also to prevent access to their resources from being taken away from them. So was it when the Garhwali women hugged trees in the Himalayas as part of the Chipko movement in the 1970s. So too with the anti-Tehri dam and the anti-Narmada dam movements that were active in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

However, the post-reforms social economy changed this. The primary objective of the reforms process was to grow the Indian economy through an increase in domestic consumption. It is then the great Indian middle class was discovered. The business newspapers of the day – both pink and white – articulated about the middle class in detail. It said that with 250 to 300 million people, the Indian middle class was the size of the US population.

Irrespective of whether this number was a reality or an overestimation, the truth was that the middle class felt pampered after the economic reforms. With goods and services, and advertisers vying for their attention, they discovered their economic voice, which later blended into a political voice from the time of Anna Hazare’s fast in 2011, leading into the national elections of 2014.

In the meanwhile, environment too had become an urban middle class concern. There were jobs to be had in the environment sector – consulting, designing and constructing effluent treatment plants, green economics, etc. New environmentalists also started using urban tools to fight environmental battles – media campaigns, public interest litigation, internet campaigns and even rap songs.

It is not as if the environmental issues of the rural and marginal communities disappeared, but they were pushed to the periphery of national consciousness. In the more recent years, environmental issues of the voiceless have become further marginalised by strident nationalism and national security. What are petty issues of natural resource access and deprivation when the country is in danger (albeit more imagined than real)?

In the past three decades, I have had a ringside view of these changes. In the 1980s, environment issues were the concern of the tribals of the Narmada valley and the villagers of Garhwal. In the 1990s, environment was a spanner in the nation’s dream of economic growth. Journalists covering environment were the peripheral ones in every news bureau. In the first decade of the 2000s, environment was a middle class concern, whereas the issues of the marginal communities were pushed to the periphery. In the second decade of the 2000s, the middle class bloomed with the sense of their economic and political power. Environment got distanced – to be mentioned as a paragraph sub-head in political manifestos.

But nature did hit back. The changing climate continues to return extreme weather events with a vengeance – with increasing intensity and frequency. So much so that the cyclical monsoons are gradually turning into a string of extreme weather events. From the point where environment was the interest of a few in the 1990s, the feedback provided by the extreme weather events has brought it as a concern for everybody. And for those affected by floods in the recent years, the concern came destructively to their homes.

The extreme weather events of the recent years have been providing increasingly stronger feedback loops. People are connecting the linkages like never before in the past. Thus, when the Maharashtra Government felled trees in the Aarey forest for a metro railway shed, people of Mumbai led an unprecedented protest. Hit by floods multiple times in 2019, the citizens of the business capital city have realised that the trees and the mangroves play a very significant role in maintaining the ecological balance in the megapolis.

Mentoring environment journalists

When I started, it was not fashionable to be an environment journalist. We were the fringe in every publication. We lost out on promotions and were scorned at by our colleagues. Those were the days of the political, corporate and stock-exchange reporters. But a few of us trudged on, changing job descriptions at times, but overall persisting with environmental journalism and communication. Partially it was because we believed in what we were doing, and partially because we were not capable of doing anything else.

Today, environment journalism is an established field in India. In my current assignment at Mongabay-India, I work with and am in touch with some very fine, young environment journalists.

There are multiple reasons for this growth. Environment journalism is not an isolated genre any longer. Journalists have successfully linked environment to politics and economics. This was the way to go. These linkages have made environment stories relevant for the readers.

If the Kerala floods of 2018 led to a loss of Rs 31,000 crores, it was a strong economic story, and was reported as one. And when efforts to move the public discussions away from the floods did not yield political gains, it was a political story.

Environmental journalism started getting recruits when environment became an urban middle class issue. Environment could be linked to health, lifestyle, fashion, tourism and gourmet food. Science journalists have also transitioned to environment journalism in the recent years. A science journalism programme organised by the National Centre for Biological Studies has trained journalists, and some of them have blended science and environment. Today, most of the journalism schools in the country have environment journalism at least as an elective.

The climate change events and the international and national discussions attracted journalists into the field. A continuing study by the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR) at the University of Boulder in Colorado, US, has shown that the Climate Change Conference of Parties held in Copenhagen in end-2009 attracted the attention of international media. It had its reflection in India too. The Paris CoP of 2015 also attracted attention, and more is happening in the recent months.

CSTPR graph on world media and climate change coverage. Source: https://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/icecaps/research/media_coverage/world/index.html

With repeated and intense extreme weather events becoming an annual feature, the reader/viewer/listener interest on climate change and the imperative to maintain ecological balance increased in the recent years. This has given a boost to environment journalists.

However, the most important factor for the growth of environment journalism has been the steady supply of good quality training for young journalists who want to pursue their interest in the environment. Organisations such as the Earth Journalism Network, Centre for Science and Environment, Panos South Asia, Nature India and the Forum of Environmental Journalists in India have been systematically training journalists on various facets of environment journalism for years. And this has yielded results over the years.

Having been associated with the last three organisations in their training activities, I had the opportunity to mentor a few of these young journalists, who have now become respected practitioners in their own right.

At the South Asia climate change media workshop in Kathmandu, August 2012.

Don’t miss the underdog

At 23, when I started working, I wanted to communicate complicated environmental issues in simple language. The dream remains the same today. Every story, every act of communication along the way was and is a step in this direction.

And this is where the picture on my living room wall becomes important. It continues to guide me with the message: “Don’t miss the underdog.” (If you missed it at first, look again and you will see the dog that I am referring to).

You may also want to read Station 50.

Paradigm shift

In the 25 years since economic reforms was launched in India, the urban middle class has found a new economic and political voice. Environmental movements in which poor communities pitted their moral strength against the combined strength of the State and the industry got sidelined in the national mind space. As a result the iron triangle got stronger. MORE …

Let go and live

I drive the highways often. It allows my body and mind to find spaces that I have lost in the city. It allows me to explore the fourth and the fifth gear in my car.

A bit more than a decade ago, the highways were outside my comfort zone. It is not as if I didn’t drive from City A to Town B then, but then that was only when I really needed to.

Those were the days when the highways belonged to the taxi, bus and truck drivers. In short, the terrain outside the city, then, belonged to the professional drivers – the guys who sat at an angle behind the wheel in Ambassador cars and drove with one foot on the accelerator and one finger on the horn. Those were the days when the highway dhabas were patronised by professional drivers, and they had not become travel destinations reviewed in Zomato and Burrp. Rocky and Mayur had not made their television presence.

The Golden Quadrilateral, along with the arteries connecting the north and south, east and west, changed it all. In September 2004 my Maruti 800 quivered with excitement as I raced her along the as yet incomplete arm of the Quadrilateral between Vijayawada and Chennai.

These new highways allow us to find space that we have lost in our cities

The neatly laid out four-lane roads have opened a new getaway opportunity for many like me. No booking train tickets in advance, or searching for the budget seat in a budget airline. No anxious wait facing the tatkal webpage. Just pack up and drive.

The divider separating the traffic flow gives wannabe rally drivers like me adequate protection. We don’t need to dodge the accelerating car heading straight for us before squeezing itself back into its lane. We don’t need to worry about the truck lights blinding us at night.

However, there is something that I worry about all the time driving on these four-lane roads. I check my rear-view mirror far too often. I feel more like a historian rather than a futurologist driving the highways nowadays. I am especially alert when going past a slow-moving vehicle in the adjacent lane. I check the mirror once, twice, to see if there is a smart driver trying to weave through the shrinking space between my car and the other vehicle.

On the highway I am reminded of the amusing title that Rama Bijapurkar gave to her book describing the choices of the Indian consumer – We are like that only. The smart driver does not want to slow down for those few seconds to allow me to pass. It is a dangerous game of get-ahead-at-any-cost. The cost, in this case, can be the lives of all of us in the three vehicles.

In today’s world we love not to wait. Waiting is for misfits, failures and laggards. We are impatient and successful. We want progress – here and now.

Bijapurkar’s book title may need some change if we are to describe our social behaviour in the recent years. It would be more appropriate to describe it by saying We have become like that only.

In 1987, I had moved to the metropolitan New Delhi from the sleepy, laid-back town (then) of Thrissur. The size, scale and intensity of the city hit me on arrival. The peppy Maruti 800 had started scampering on the Indian roads a few years ago and the agile squirrels were slowly replacing the staid Ambassadors and Premier Padminis. Every Kapoor, Thomas and Kidwai who could own one had one.

Having gone to Delhi from the quieter Thrissur, there was something that surprised me those days. And this was at the red light of the traffic signals. After the traffic had stopped and backed-up on the broad roads, there would invariably be at least one M-800 that would squeeze its way and go and stop ahead of everybody else.

What provoked this almost obsessive one-upmanship behaviour?, I used to wonder. Living the city and its social, cultural and economic environment for the next five years gave me an understanding to this question.

Those were the years when Delhi was breaking the boundaries of economic growth. It was building and consolidating on the kick-start of the development activities initiated for the 1982 Asian Games. Enterprise was oozing from every street.

Those who were driving this growth were men and women whose grandparents had been stripped of their property and dignity and had to move to Delhi as refugees. These families worked hard to survive and grow out of poverty. And in the process it was perfectly acceptable to get that one step ahead of the others. What if that business deal or contract that you have worked hard for is only for one person? You certainly would want to be ahead of everybody else. Yours had to be the lone M-800 ahead of the others at the traffic signal.

From metropolitan Delhi I moved to metropolitan Madras (it was not Chennai yet) in 1992. Change again. There were less M-800s in Chennai, which was still in the Ambassador, Bajaj Chetak and TVS 50 age. There was no upstart trying to get ahead of the others at red lights. In fact, the Chennai drivers wanted to be safer than safe and slowed down even as the light turned amber.

The highways I drive today are located south of Chennai. But the behaviour that I see on the roads is similar to that I had seen in Delhi decades ago. At tollgates all too often there would be a car who would come from the side and squeeze into the lane right in the front.

Delhi has spread to all parts of the country. In the past 25 years, the game of one-upmanship has been promoted. This is a result of the very premise on which economic liberalisation has been built on – promoting consumerism. The way to a person’s wallet, or credit card, has been by reaching to him as an individual. Exclusivity sells.

This premise has its benefits. When everybody in the country takes care of himself/herself then the country takes care of itself, is the argument in its favour. Growth and mobility brings in energy into people’s lives. Growth also brings a belief in being in control of one’s lives, adding impatience when something small goes away from the script. It also brings a sense of insecurity – will one be able to continue on a trajectory of growth, always.

So when the smart driver sees my car closing the space between the slow moving vehicle and me, he wants to squeeze through. I could slow him down. Or, I could reach before him at the tollgate. 

My rear-view mirror is my protection. I do not want to be a collateral damage in his impatience.

Harley Davidson and the art of lake maintenance

You can hardly miss a Harley Davidson on the road. It is hardly ever driven alone, but in packs. And if you are driving the highway to Bengaluru during a weekend, you are likely to meet such a pack on the road.

Harley Davidson is not just a bike. It’s a statement – of affluence, power, adventure and leisure. It heralds that its owner has arrived. Not only does the owner have enough money to buy two wheels at the cost of four, but can also afford the leisure time to ride it.

I am a regular visitor to Bengaluru. Last week, in addition to Harley Davidson bikes, I saw citizens’ action to clean up the many lakes in the city. I met Annapurna Kamath of Jala Poshan, a citizens’ group that has taken over the management of the Jakkur Lake from the city administration.

Water birds roost on an island inside Jakkur Lake

But what is it that links Bengaluru city, lake restoration and Harley Davidson bikes? Let us start with Bengaluru. It was the first Indian city that nurtured the growth of the information technology and related industries. It was so successful that Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune and Gurgaon tried to follow in its footsteps. Bengaluru was the first city where the service sector boosted the economy rather than the manufacturing sector, as with the cities of the earlier generation, such as Mumbai and Chennai.

Bengaluru triggered the new kind of socio-economic mobility of the past two decades. This was more broad-based and less discriminating mobility, where young men and women from any background, or any college could aspire to compete and enter into an IT-sector job and then grow on ability and street smartness. If the city lights of Mumbai attracted the young aspirants from the 1960s to the end of the century, it is Bengaluru that attracted the youth in this century.

The city celebrated its young immigrants from other parts of the country in its numerous eating drinking and entertainment spots. In return, the young immigrants celebrated the city. Anjali Menon’s Bangalore days, which was the most successful Malayalam movie of 2014, talks about such dreams of young people from Kerala.

If Bengaluru was the first city to grow in the new economy, it also seems to be the first one growing beyond it. There is a certain restless energy in the urban middle class in the city. It is the ‘now what?’ question that comes after you have made your money, found ‘success’, eaten in the best restaurants and drank in the best pubs. Life, after all, has to have a meaning beyond this. Veena Srinivasan of the research organisation ATREE calls this a post-materialism phenomenon.

It is not as if Bengaluru is the only city where there is this restless energy. It is there in many other parts of the country. However, Bengaluru seems to be a pioneer in trying to put this energy to some use.

This urban middle class energy finds its source from an economic, social and political space that has been growing in the country since the economic liberalisation of 1991, which was re-strengthened with the IT-sector led growth in the economy. The economic restructuring that was initiated 24 years ago to escape a debt trap, created a new class of Indian citizens – the urban middle class.

Increased domestic consumption was one of the premise on which the economic liberalisation was structured. To consume there was need for a middle class. There were limitations to the consumption either by the rich or the poor. The rich were limited in number and the poor were limited in the capacity to spend.

It is in the early years of the 1990s that the great Indian middle class was discovered, or created. Commentators writing in business newspapers – pink and white – estimated this middle class to be between 250 million to 300 million strong. “The Indian middle class is as large as the population of the USA,” they commented.

The consumer became king, for he was giving force to the economy. Corner stores evolved into supermarkets, and then into malls. There were a surfeit of goods and services chasing his money. He participated with greater involvement in industry, through his retail equity participation. Or so he felt. Cheap airlines made air travel possible. The middle class could dream. Through his economic freedom he was also trying to carve out a social and political space. 

In the late 1990s there was another effort at quickening the pace of economic growth by giving a policy thrust for the development of the information, communication and entertainment sector. The aim was to leapfrog the economy by moving focus from the manufacturing (or the secondary) sector to the services (or the tertiary) sector.

Bengaluru was the first city to take benefit of this second push in the economic growth story since economic liberalisation. The city became India’s Silicon Valley. And this strengthened its urban middle class.

However, for an individual, the momentum to economic growth can also take one beyond growth. Both stages come with their own side effects. While the economic growth gives social and political space, going beyond growth can come with a side effect of listlessness. It is a sense of helplessness at not being able to do anything impactful with an individual’s time and energy, but being a small, unknown cog in the large wheels of the economy.

Ennui and space can be a heady combination. It is powerful. It can lead to boredom, frustration and violence; or it can lead to a desire and energy to make positive change happen.

It is this energy that Bengaluru uses – to restore its lakes or to buy and ride Harley Davidson bikes across the country. According to Kamath, on every Sunday a group of citizens living around the Jakkur Lake assemble, discuss, carry out bird and reptile censuses, clean, and design and implement ways to manage the lake.

The five-day working week of the service sector helps. In addition to the money, there is also an extra day for doing something more than the routine. Cleaning a lake or riding a bike with a group provides for social groupings, something that has otherwise disappeared in the days of instant messaging, social media and status updates. 

So while the city searches for its soul, some wear plastic gloves and clean a lake, and others don leather jackets and ride noisily on motorcycles.