In the summer of 1986, after the classes
and hostels of the Sree Kerala Varma College in Thrissur had emptied for the
holidays, there was an announcement by the college management that got my
friends agitated. The principal had given a statement to the local newspaper
that the college would be cutting some trees to build a compound wall.
The SKV College has a history. The campus
was once a palace for the Kochi royalty, which was later donated for the
college. The trees that the management had wanted to cut for the wall were
old-growth ones that were part of the sacred grove inside the palace. The trees
were part of the college's and the neighbourhood's history. In our youthful
idealism, a few of us students did not want the trees to be cut. We protested
and lost, but in the process I heard the name of N. D. Jayal (NDJ) for the first
time.
A few days into the campaign, I wrote a
letter to Sunderlal Bahuguna. We had heard of him and the Chipko Movement.
Bahuguna responded quickly, telling us of the importance of old-growth native
trees. A day later, I also received a letter from the Indian National Trust for
Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), signed by NDJ, supporting our action.
We photocopied the two letters and
dropped them in the local offices of Malayalam and English newspapers.
Suddenly, from a bunch of impertinent boys protesting against the wisdom of the
college management to construct a compound wall, we became, in the eyes of
local reporters, a group of environmentally conscious students fighting
David-like to conserve old growth trees from the might of the college
management.
Sunderlal Bahuguna was well known with
journalists, and for INTACH the fact that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s name
appeared as a patron on the official letterhead helped. “Prime Minister
supports students’ struggle against tree felling” ran one of the headlines in a
local Malayalam newspaper. Neither the journalists, nor I knew the importance
of the man – NDJ – who had signed the letter, and the role he had played with
quiet determination over years to protect India’s environment. I was to
understand that, first hand, a few years later.
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| N.D.Jayal in his garden chair. A water colour by Indira Ramesh. |
I met NDJ for the first time five years
later in his INTACH office. He had an office with multiple glass windows
that stuck out onto the lawns of 71, Lodhi Estate. This was before the old
colonial bungalow was brought down for the present building. I had worked for
three years in the communication department of a national-level NGO, Action for
Food Production, and was looking for some action. I met NDJ in his book-lined office.
Indira Ramesh, who was to become my boss and mentor, took me to his room and I
was hired to work with them during that very meeting.
I wanted action and got much of it in the
two years that I worked with the Natural Heritage Wing of INTACH. I was in my
mid-20s and was awestruck to have been pushed into the vortex of the anti-Tehri
dam movement. We were also supporting the anti-Narmada dam movement. We had an
active publication programme, where we published environment books, booklets
and a newsletter.
Gentle tiger
From the time I met NDJ in his office in
1990, I was always impressed by the gentleness with which he spoke. But he
never pulled his punches. Perhaps it was a combination of his inherent nature
and decades of experience in the bureaucracy, NDJ always argued his case
softly, without ruffling feathers through a harsh note or a thoughtless word.
The mild exterior, however, always packaged strong arguments ruthlessly
delivered for impact. He was a gentle tiger.
NDJ had moved to INTACH after his
retirement from government service. Despite decades of rich experience he was
never overbearing towards us young people in his team. However, he was not kind
towards ignorant arrogance.
At a lunch, I heard one of our friends,
also in his 20s, tell NDJ that there was no administration in Arunachal Pradesh.
The friend used to work in the next-door office of the World Wide Fund and had
come to the rather momentous conclusion after a quick tour of Arunachal Pradesh
that lasted a few days. Perhaps he did not know that as a civil servant NDJ had
helped establishing the administrative structure in the north-eastern state. I
heard NDJ clearing his throat. Gentle bloodshed followed.
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| When I was part of NDJ's team. Indira Ramesh is at extreme right. |
Facts based opposition
Since I was a general dogsbody in INTACH,
I used to coordinate media relations. The Tehri dam controversy that had gone
silent erupted again after the Uttarkashi earthquake of October 1991. NDJ
called for a press conference to bring back into the conversation the dangers
of constructing a 240-metre tall dam in the Himalayas, which was prone to
earthquakes. Due to the topicality of the subject, more journalists assembled than
expected. While some were veterans who had covered the issue in the past, many
were newbies who asked questions that took the discussions back to scratch. NDJ
answered them patiently, and did not digress from his arguments even while
facing provocative questions.
Of essence for NDJ was an argument built
on facts rather than rhetoric. He had commissioned economist Vijay Paranjpye to
carry out traditional cost-benefit analyses of the Sardar Sarovar Dam and the
Tehri Dam projects. Both his studies were published as books by INTACH, and
they detailed how the costs of both the projects were higher than the benefits
that were to accrue from these projects.
Using conventional cost-benefit analysis
methods, Paranjpye argued that the benefits were shown to be higher by the
project proponents because they had externalised the social and environmental
costs. The government did not accept the findings of the INTACH studies. But it
never refuted them either. By commissioning and publishing these studies, NDJ
took the anti-dam argument from the rhetorical “say no to dams” one to one
based on hard facts.
Similarly, his arguments protesting the
construction of a high structure such as the Tehri Dam in the Himalayas, which
has the probability of being struck by an 8-plus magnitude earthquake, was
based on the opinion of well-known geologists. These arguments were also the
basis for the petition he filed in the Supreme Court, along with Shekar Singh
in 1991, against the Tehri Dam.
During that period the Natural Heritage
Wing of INTACH also commissioned the publication of a book on the biodiversity
of the southern Western Ghats, written by a well-known ecologist from Kerala,
Sathis Chandran Nair. NDJ’s friendship with Nair started during the days of the
Silent Valley controversy. Nair, who had extensively trekked the southern
Western Ghats region had collected persuasive data that proved that there was
reason to conserve the Silent Valley and prevent it from being destroyed by a
hydro-electric dam. NDJ, who then had an important official position in the
national government helped communicate Nair’s message to the policy makers.
Nair’s The southern Western Ghats: A biodiversity conservation plan,
published by INTACH in 1991 was a first of its kind assessment of the
importance of the biological diversity of the Western Ghats south of central
Karnataka to the Agasthyamalai Range near the tip of the peninsula and the need
for its conservation.
In the same period, INTACH also published
a book by Ganesh and Vasudha Pangare. While the rest of the country had not
realised the significance of the transition that a retired army driver – Anna
Hazare – had made to the conservation of natural resources of his village Ralegan
Siddhi, Pangare’s book documented it for the world.
I had missed working on the Parajnpye
manuscripts, but was assisting Indira Ramesh with the editing and publication
of Nair’s and Pangares’ books.
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| NDJ with Edward Goldsmith, editor of the Ecologist, when he had visited New Delhi in 1991-92. |
The Uttarkashi earthquake
In 1990-91 NDJ and Indira had thought of
starting a monthly newsletter that would connect all the activists and kindred
souls supporting the anti-dam movement. I was assigned to make this happen. We
gathered in NDJ’s multi-windowed office to decide on the name for the
newsletter. We had by then decided its periodicity – once a month. The main
purpose of the newsletter was to focus on the Tehri Dam project, which was to
bridle Bhagirathi and Bhilangana rivers at the point where they meet. We called
our newsletter Bhagirathi ki pukar (Bhagirathi’s
call).
After the Uttarkashi earthquake in 1991,
NDJ asked me go to Tehri to see first hand its impact. The aftershocks were
still continuing. Soldiers and Garhwali men were returning to their villages from
their employment posts in different parts of the country, to see what was lost
and to pick up from where the earthquake had left their lives. In villages,
there were men and children with shaved heads – having carried out the last
rights of the dear ones they had lost.
Sunderlal Bahuguna was on a sit-in strike
at the site where the Tehri Dam came later. The killer earthquake, of course,
was no warning to those in power. The dam did come, and the tall column of
water continues to hold out its threat from the mountains. I travelled to
Silyara, where Vimala Bahuguna, Sunderlal’s wife and herself a leader of the
Chipko movement, made us as comfortable as she could under the circumstances. Simple
lives lived with stoic dignity.
Lost in history?
My window to NDJ’s professional life was of
a mere two-year span. It was looking and understanding a man of his experience
and achievement through a keyhole. However, I continued on the path that I had
set out on when I worked with NDJ. I continued being an environment journalist
and communicator.
It was difficult times when I was
adventuring into environment journalism in the late 1980s and 1990s. Economic
liberalisation had just been launched in 1991, and media houses were competing
with each other to sing hosannas to the epochal change that would unleash the
growth that India deserved and was earlier being smothered under a Hindu rate
of growth.
To be an environment journalist in those
days was to assign myself to professional masochism, where everybody around me
happily called me an “obstructionist”. I persisted with the quiet determination
that NDJ had taught me.
As I went about my job of understanding
and reporting India’s modern environment history, I felt that somewhere NDJ did
not get the mention that he should have got for his contributions. For years he
was Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s pointsman on environment. Many others who
held the same position in different parts of Indira Gandhi’s tenure had gone on
to become famous. This list included Manmohan Malhoutra, M.K. Ranjitsinh, Samar
Singh and R. Rajamani. History had not given its due to NDJ.
The only exception, and that too in 2017,
was former environment minister Jairam Ramesh’s environmental biography of
Indira Gandhi (Indira Gandhi: A life in nature. By Jairam Ramesh. Simon and
Schuster, 2017). Ramesh wrote that Jayal played an active role in the N.D.
Tiwari Committee that was tasked with recommending legislative measures and
administrative machinery for ensuring environmental protection. The
recommendations of the committee led to the establishment of the Department of
Environment in 1980, which later went on to become a full-fledged environment ministry.
Gandhi entrusted Jayal with missions that involved travelling to states and
studying and recommending corrective action on the environment – Bharatpur in
Rajasthan, Satkosia Gorge in Odisha, and Mahabaleswar-Panchagani in
Maharashtra. In 1982 Gandhi sent him to study the UK National Trust, an idea
that later developed into the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural
Heritage (INTACH).
However, as Indira Ramesh’s chapter
elaborates, when NDJ retired from the government, he had ended only one part of
his achievement-filled life. There were far more achievements that followed.
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| The cover of the recently published book on NDJ. My blog is a chapter in this book. |
Papers for posterity
In August 2015, I met NDJ at his home in
Dehradun. He was on his reclining chair in his room with books and filing cabinets
spreading across the walls. He asked me if I could think of a public
institution that would be interested in archiving for public and posterity the
environmental papers that he had collected over the years.
Why not the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library (NMML)? His question had to hibernate the night for me to think of this
answer. NDJ found the idea good. I wrote an exploratory email to the then
director of NMML, an environment historian of repute. Within five minutes I got
a response. He was interested, and had also marked the official concerned in
his email. Those papers had a different destiny though. The director resigned
the next day, due to differences with the national government. I am given to
understand that NDJ’s papers have later made their way to a university where
future generation of researchers and students will have access to them. The
NMML director had moved to this university and ensured this transfer.
For NDJ, the priority was always to give
back to the society from which he had drawn. It was with this spirit that he
trained me in 1990-92. He also taught me another important life lesson – I didn’t
need to have a gruff voice to roar.
[I wrote this as a chapter in a recently-published book on NDJ, who turned 92 in February. The book was published by the Doon Library and Research Centre in Dehradun].
