Nature, Environment and Society: Conservation, Governance and Transformation in India 9788125054276

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NATURE, ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY

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NATURE, ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY Conservation, Governance and Transformation in India Edited by Nicolas Lainé & T. B. Subba

Orient Blackswan Private Limited Registered Office 3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029 (A.P.), INDIA e-mail: [email protected] Other Offices Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, Ernakulam, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Patna © Nicolas Lainé & T. B. Subba, 2012 First Published 2012 eISBN 978 81 250 5427 6 e-edition:First Published 2014 ePUB Conversion: Techastra Solutions Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests write to the publisher.

Contents

List of Tables, Figures and Maps Foreword by Jacques Pouchepadass Introduction List of Abbreviations PART I: CONSERVATION OF NATURE Introduction JOËLLE SMADJA

ONE Megalithic Landscapes, Cultures and Identity in Northeast India RAPHAËL ROUSSELEAU

TWO Transforming Rural Livelihoods through Ecodevelopment in the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve SARAH BENABOU

THREE Wildlife Conservation and Tribal Livelihood in the Brahmaputra Floodplains EMILIE CRÉMIN

FOUR Effects of the 1996 Timber Ban in Northeast India: The Case of the Khamtis of Lohit District, Arunachal Pradesh NICOLAS LAINÉ

PART II: NATURE’S GOVERNANCE Introduction FRÉDÉRIC LANDY

FIVE Women, Self-Governance and Local Political Representation in Bastar, Chhattisgarh M. A. IQBAL AND SAMUEL BERTHET

SIX Forest Conservation, Public Goods and Incentives in the Central Himalayas CARINE SÉBI

SEVEN Unpacking Policy Discourses and ‘Scientific’ Management of Forests in Meghalaya SANJEEVA KUMAR

PART III: TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE Introduction LORAINE KENNEDY

EIGHT The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and Some Issues of Environmental Governance DAVID KONG HUG

NINE The Gosikhurd Dam Project and Transformation of Rural Social Space in Vidarbha, Maharashtra JOËL CABALION

TEN Consequences of Road Construction in Padum, Zanskar Valley, Northern Himalaya SALOME DEBOOS

About Ajei Contributors

Tables, Figures and Maps

Tables 6.1 Demographic Classification of Experimental Sample 6.2 Composition of Free-riders according to Gender and Caste Figures 1.1 Stones at Nartiang 1.2 Various Khasi and Jaintia monuments 1.3 Contemporary Nartiang site 1.4 Lineage Ossuary near Shillong 3.1 A Mising Chang ghar (traditional house) in the new relocated village called Borbeel Mising gaon, situated near the Kaziranga National Park. 3.2 Transect of the agro-ecological zones in the Brahmaputra floodplains. 4.1 Timber operations in Lohit district 6.1 Aggregate Contribution to the Common Pool over Periods 6.2 Individual Contribution to the Common Pool by Gender 6.3 Individual Profits by Gender 6.4 Individual Contribution to the Pool according to Caste over Periods 6.5 Cumulative Distribution of Amount Contributed by Group’s Sex and Caste Composition 8.1 Billboard in Ahmedabad 8.2 Fire at Ankleshwar exposed careless handling of Waste 9.1 The Gosikhurd Dam 9.2 JabranJot Andolan, Bhoodan Bhavan, Nagpur 10.1 Census of the Main Villages in Zanskar Valley in 2003 10.2 Tourist flow in Zanskar 1990/2007 Maps 3.1 Map of the Kaziranga National Park and Mising fringe village in the Bokakhat subdivision 4.1 Location of Lohit district in Arunachal Pradesh, Northeast India 9.1 Location of the Gosikhurd Dam/Nagpur district/ Maharashtra

Foreword

In May 2002, the world leaders present at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (a convention created at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, 1992) agreed on the target 'to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth'. The United Nations accordingly designated 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. It is 2011 already, but the Biodiversity Target has not been met, the over-exploitation of biological resources continues, and the risk of dramatic biodiversity loss and degradation, if ecosystems are pushed beyond certain thresholds, remains as high as ever. In addition, as everyone knows, the earliest and most severe impacts of such changes will be faced by the poor. Some would say, as the phrase goes, the Titanic is sinking, and we are still playing the violin. One of the major stumbling blocks on the road to sustainable use of natural resources is the fact that the social cost of biodiversity conservation policies is very unevenly distributed both among the nations of the world, and among social classes in each of them. It is now clear to everyone that the Promethean model of economic growth born in eighteenth-century Europe, which postulated that natural resources are inexhaustible, cannot be generalised at a global scale. But how to persuade the countries of the South, which have been pillaged, exploited or at best marginalised all along the growth process of the North, that they are now to put a brake on their own development policies for the common good? Equally unfair is the fact that, overpopulation in tropical areas—the Earth's greatest biological treasure—being commonly considered as the major threat to what is left of the world's biodiversity, it is the poorer classes of the poorer countries who bear the brunt of the protection and reservation policies decided by the governments. According to the dominant conservationist rhetoric, the global patrimony of Nature is everyone's birthright, and the Earth's environmental resources are a common inheritance of all humankind, which should be held in shared trust for a common future. Thus attention is diverted from the fact that environmental degradation, in each country, is to a large extent an outcome of the disparities in income between the urban-based social elites and the rural underclass or the forest-dwellers, and that, on a global scale, it is the consumerist lifestyle of the affluent countries that uses up and squanders the larger part of the natural resources. In this sense, the North's pressing call for common sacrifices to save the Earth has sometimes been viewed as an elitist 'sacred groves for the rich' strategy.1 Every human being, of course, has a stake in environmental preservation, and all local commons are fragments of a global commons. In addition, there is little doubt that the impact of a worldwide 'tragedy of the commons' will weigh most heavily on those least able to adjust, so that it is in their interest to adhere to conservationist policies. But the environmental politics of the countries of the North can nonetheless be justifiably criticised as biased, inasmuch as it implies blatantly unequal burdens on the South (see Sawyer and Agrawal 2000: 93-94). The reasons why state biodiversity conservation measures are so often bitterly resisted by the resident rural folk on whom they are imposed are fairly obvious. The issue is first of all economic. The populations concerned mostly live from hand to mouth, and depend on their natural surroundings for sustenance. The key question for them is day-to-day survival, and it is a fact that their increasingly precarious economic circumstances in the contemporary context may lead them into ecologically unsound patterns of resource use. For them, the long-term development strategies and global conservation targets which follow from the transnational elite environmental narrative are understandably remote, if not plainly unintelligible concerns. As Erik Eckholm remarked in an influential 1975 publication concerning the ecological issue of firewood consumption, 'for more than a third of the world's people, the real energy crisis is a daily scramble to cook dinner' (Eckholm 1975). In India, the dislocation of traditional methods of resource exploitation consequent

on the imposition of state regulations was already a constant source of popular disaffection and unrest under British colonial rule. A Deputy Commissioner of Garhwal significantly reported in 1907 that 'forest administration consists for most part in a running fight with villagers' (qtd. in Guha 1989: 105). This tension has continued unabated after Independence, since the modernising and productivist national development policy set in motion by the Indian government has only accentuated the pattern. But the misunderstanding is not only a matter of conflicting material interests. At the root, it is also a question of conflicting worldviews. Implicit in the international conservationist discourse is a western principle inherited from the Christian tradition, that of the radical discontinuity between man and the natural world.2 This opposition between nature and culture is by no means a universal conception. As Emile Durkheim already noted a century ago in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) with reference to Australian Aborigines, most traditional societies view humankind as a constituent part of nature, although human society is recognised as more complex than any other form of social grouping. A case in point is the traditional Hindu cosmology, which holds that both the human and the cosmic domains are constituent parts of the all-encompassing order of dharma, and as such organically interdependent. More specifically, the social segments into which humankind is divided according to Hindu conceptions, namely castes, subcastes, lineages, clans or tribes, are so many different species of human beings belonging to a continuum which encompasses all existing varieties of living beings (jati originally means 'kind' or 'species' in the biological sense, and only secondarily 'caste'). Standard conservation thinking has in fact long conveyed as much implicit ideology (such as the deeply ingrained myths of 'virgin nature' and savage 'wilderness') as explicit—and occasionally debatable—science. This discourse, with its underlying concern to restore 'nature' to its primeval self-regulating functioning by controlling or excluding the resident country or forest folk, all categorised as inherently improvident and wasteful, often hardly makes sense for the latter. These folk are in many cases among the world's most vulnerable, destitute and politically disempowered indigenous populations. Conservancy regulations as they see them simply jeopardise the ecological base of their daily livelihood and traditional lifestyle in the name of objectives which pass their comprehension. No wonder that, when frontally exposed to the authoritarian approach and material dictates of state environmental agencies, they respond and fight for their survival as best as they can, using those everyday forms of popular resistance which James C. Scott has labelled as 'weapons of the weak'. Hence the endless story of those 'crimes against nature' which have been everywhere the obverse of the history of environmental conservation.3 Incidentally, these repetitive stories of transgressions against environmental regulations are a sign that the state, after all, is not as omnipotent as it may seem when it comes to controlling immense and at times hardly accessible expanses of wild terrain and their inhabitants. The gradual emergence, in the final decades of the last century, of alternative approaches advocating the participation of the local populace in the task of safeguarding the ecosystems on which its way of life is based, is at least partly due to this plain fact: the unilateral assertion of bureaucratic state authority is a difficult and costly solution, probably not viable in the long run, and an engine of social hardship and disaffection that may prove politically dangerous. The idea that a participatory and democratic or community-oriented system of natural resource management is a necessity is by no means a recent discovery. It appeared in the mid-nineteenth century around the social theorist and reformer Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) in France, a country with a strong tradition of centralised state power and the birthplace of modern scientific forestry. Le Play's advocacy of participatory forest management was a reaction against the punitive methods usually followed by French foresters since the beginnings of state forestry two centuries earlier, and their ideological postulation that the peasant way to manage natural resources was necessarily erratic, short-sighted and destructive. The same option in favour of community forestry and joint management of natural resources was defended at the time by Dietrich Brandis, the German founder of the Indian Forest Service and first Inspector General of Forests in British India in the 1860s and 1870s. But this option was cast aside by the colonial government while the Indian Forest Act was under discussion in the late 1870s, and the alternative adopted was the constitution of huge areas of state forests controlled and regulated by the Forest Department, in which legitimate dwellers were requalified as squatters (Guha l996). The same Act, with minor modifications, is still in existence in India today, and state forests now cover 24 per cent of the country's forest area.

A decisive step in the opposite direction was however taken in India when the new National Forest Policy was presented to Parliament in 1988. This was at least partly a result of the action initiated by activists working among tribals and forest-dwellers (Fernandes and Kulkarni 1983). The new policy emphasised the necessity to safeguard the customary rights and interests of the tribal people, and proposed to associate them closely in the protection, regeneration and development of forests, as well as to provide employment to residents living in and around forests. Thus the older tradition associated with Brandis and others was, so to say, reinvented, and the fact that some forms of collective resource management may have existed in the past in the Indian countryside, among specific groups having survival interests in nature, was acknowledged (see Gadgil 1989: 249-51). This notable evolution was not specific to the Indian environmental scene, but correlated with the slow emergence since the late 1970s of the theme of community forestry at the global level, including in the policy discourse of major international agencies such as the World Bank and FAO.4 It is no secret, however, that there has long been a lack of enthusiasm on the part of Indian forest officials towards the implementation of this new orientation. But the policy directives issued since then from time to time by the government of India have nevertheless showed its determination to press for its enforcement and expansion throughout the country, and this emphasis was built into the Eighth Five Year Plan in 1990. By the beginning of the present century, notable progress had been made in terms of the number of Forest Protection Committees formed (nearly 62,900 in 2003) and the area covered (over 14 million hectares). It is true, however, that the number of committees actually functioning is very low. The causes analysed in the many reports produced on the subject are always the same: ineffective leadership, lack of community awareness and involvement on the part of the local people, deficiency of institutional government support, inadequate planning, etc. (Murali et al. 2003). The basic difficulty with these committees is that they are, like many other grassroot rural development structures, instituted by the state from above, and that popular awareness of the need for natural resource protection cannot emerge out of nowhere. Moreover, ensuring a fair representation and participation of subordinate groups (especially the poor and women) and an equitable sharing of benefits between all members of the local communities is always a difficult issue, and this often threatens the progress of joint management of protected areas. The implementation of this new paradigm of conservation is still in its experimental stages, and we lack sufficient hindsight to assert with confidence that these efforts will prove a success in the long-term. That poverty is often associated with ecologically unsound patterns of resource use can hardly be denied. But there is no simple answer to the question: is poverty the primary cause of biodiversity destruction, or is it a result of such destruction? In support of the second hypothesis, an enormous amount of militant socioecological literature has been produced the world over since the 1970s on the theme of the supposed spontaneous ecological wisdom or ethos of traditional societies. This literature logically implies that the main culprit for the depletion of the world's natural resources is the intrusion over the last centuries of the global capitalist economy, which has destroyed the ageless harmony between people and nature.5 This genre of ecological thinking which romanticises the 'traditional' has also flourished in India. It has certainly been an important counter to technocratic arguments about the environmental incompetence and irresponsibility of 'traditional' societies, and has inspired a lot of well-intentioned and meritorious grassroot social activism in favour of the empowerment of local communities. But it is also at times ideologically loaded with more disputable nativist, anti-modern or nationalist preconceptions. It is fundamentally based on belief, not on a truly unbiased and all-embracing scientific examination of facts. It overlooks much historical evidence which conclusively shows that pre-modern peasants and forest-dwellers were not born conservationists, as precolonial deforestation and the chequered history of sacred groves show, and that their social structure and behaviour was never modelled according to a superior and timeless unwritten law guaranteeing a perpetual homeostatic relationship with their natural surroundings. Such essentialising characterisations are of little help today in the search for appropriate solutions to biodiversity loss and environmental degradation, because they ignore or underrate the fact that the peasant or tribal groups concerned are not forlorn relics of an ecologically friendly golden age, but have had a long history of successive adaptations to contextual changes, and, more importantly, that they are not socially homogeneous, but strongly differentiated and stratified according to economic standing, local power, gender and other factors, as most societies are. In short, to correctly grasp the problems posed by the regulation of biomass consumption and the protection of biodiversity, and to devise appropriate solutions, we have little use for top-down ideological

generalisations and preconceived categorisations. What we mostly lack is a sufficient base of careful grassroot-level inquiries, because every local case is specific in important ways, and bottom-up perspectives on how to evolve workable conservation and development policies. The state itself, which is so often seen as more part of the problem than of the solution, should not be systematically essentialised as a monolithic agent of oppression of helpless subalterns, as it may also prove to be a potentially benevolent, if distant institution. The papers collected in this volume, written by dedicated young scholars as part of their doctoral researches, precisely belong to this genre of solid, unprejudiced, and consequently useful and inspiring, analyses of the complexities of local situations. They contribute in their own right towards the advent of the only acceptable type of responses to our present environmental anxieties, those that incorporate equitable trade-offs between ecological sustainability and social justice. Jacques Pouchepadass October 2011, Paris

References Fernandes, Walter, and Sharad Kulkarni (eds). 1983. Towards a New Forest Policy: People's Rights and Environmental Needs. New Delhi: Indian Social Institute. Gadgil, Madhav. 1989. 'On the Diversification of Common-Property Resource Use by Indian Society'. In Common Property Resources: Ecology and Community-Based Sustainable Development, ed. Fikret Berkes. London: Belhaven Press, 249-51. Guha, Ramachandra. 1989. The Unquiet Woods. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1996. 'Dietrich Brandis and Indian Forestry'. In Village Voices, Forest Choices: Joint Forest Management in India, ed. Mark Poffenberger and Betsy McGean. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Jacoby, Karl. 2001. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Krech III, S. 1999. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York: Norton. Murali et al., K. S. 2003. 'Evaluation Studies of Joint Forest Management in India: Social and Institutional Implications'. International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development 2(1). White, Lynn T., Jr. 1967. 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis'. Science 155 (3767), 10 March. Sawyer, Suzana, and Arun Agrawal. 2000. 'Environmental Orientalisms'. Cultural Critique 45: 93-94. Eckholm, Erik. 1975. 'The Other Energy Crisis: Firewood'. Worldwatch PaperI. Washington: Worldwatch Institute.

Introduction NICOLAS LAINÉ AND T.B. SUBBA

Even an illiterate person knows that nature is under tremendous stress today. One also knows that if the plundering of nature continues, the future of humanity is uncertain. The entire world will be a loser no matter who wins the debate on carbon footprint—the North or the South. Nature does not recognise the division between the North and the South, the rich and the poor, the informed and the ignorant, etc., no matter how important they are for the people living in different parts of the globe. It has its own ways of teaching man. Its lessons are most of the times described as calamities, disasters, global warming and so on; but instead of trying to learn from and understand this face of nature, the modern man merely tries to manage, control and create ‘preparedness’ against nature’s ‘fury’. How can he learn from that which he is supposed to control, manipulate, and manage? Even if he wishes to learn from it he is seldom capable of doing so for he is trained to acquire only compartmentalised knowledge and anything that is holistic, symbiotic, and symbolic is bypassed by his system of knowledge. In order to be able to learn from nature he first needs to unlearn whatever he knows because this requires a different kind of learning from the one we receive from educational institutions. The latter take us away from nature rather than connect us with it, it tells us about nature but does not allow us to be part of it, it teaches us how to protect ourselves from the nature’s ‘vagaries’ but not how to live with it. Nature and man live on the same planet, but they do not seem to live on the same plane. Human attempts to come closer to nature have seldom been with a pious motive. We present this book to keep such concerns alive. The overall theme of this volume may not appear novel for many. In India or elsewhere a lot of books have been published on environment in the past decades by people who have a lot more knowledge on the subject than we possess but they are perhaps as callous about it as we all are. We have abiding interest in matters of nature but we do not pretend to be ‘experts’ ourselves in the field. This book just happened, but we are happy that it did. This volume is divided into three parts, each dealing with different ways of apprehending nature and from which result specific forms of interactions between nature and society, or between the ecological and the social systems. By using the terms ‘nature’ and ‘society’ in such a manner, our aim is not to lend credit to a dichotomy that we consider insignificant nor is it our aim to revive the epistemological debate which has opposed nature and culture in western countries and has animated social sciences and humanities from the beginning. This debate is now outdated; many publications with flourishing examples1 have shown how ‘nature’ is socially and/or culturally constructed and finally remains an artifact (Dwyer 1996: 157). What we wish to focus on is what we consider as new manners of thinking and acting on nature today. Since the second half of the last century a worldwide movement towards our relations with nature was initiated and this has resulted in a global consciousness regarding the importance of natural resources, biodiversity, etc. Thus we believe that with it the modalities of interaction between man and nature have changed. We have identified three of them by using the terms conservation, governance and transformation. They may not be the most appropriate ones, but we have selected them because they reflect the content of this volume and our initial intentions. One of the consequences of this global movement is the emergence of new actors—like NGOs working towards environmental protection. In India, like across the world, they represent today almost every level of decision-making from local to supranational. The apparition of such groups and their growing role in nature’s management today are here to remind us of the complexity of what we call ‘nature’ in our modem

world and the various ways it is represented in people’s minds. As stated by Marie Roué, one should always keep in mind that ‘indigenous peoples, NGOs, developers, when they share the same place, have radically different practices and visions with regard to nature’ (Roué 2003: 597). This is not only true for the conservation of nature but also for its use, management, transformation and development, as shown in the three different parts of this book. In India, the history of environmental protection from British rule and beyond is well-documented and known since the accomplished work produced by Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gagdil2 (1992), and yet we thought it necessary to exemplify the ongoing process which finds echoes in every part of the country. Our book is thus a humble contribution to the understanding of the changes in the modalities of interaction between nature and society in contemporary India. Most of the chapters from the first two parts, dedicated to conservation and governance of nature, deal with major decisions taken in the country regarding nature after Independence. Of these, the decision of the Apex Court to impose a ban on timber in 1996, and the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (STOTFD) are perhaps most important, as they have impacted the nation as shown by many case studies in Parts I and II. Indeed, although the decision to ban timber felling was taken more than 15 years ago, the consequences of it are not over and there are still weekly petitions debated in many Indian courts in the country. On the other hand the historical and unprecedented decision concerning the rights of forest dwellers and local population on their surrounding environment was received with a lot of criticism because of lack of clarity in the initial proposal (see Roy Burman 2008). There is no doubt that with its implantation in the entire country, STOTFD has the capacity to redefine Indian landscapes and serve as a tool to thwart development projects. If we take a wider view of what happened in India since 1996 we can say that the latter is the consequence of the former. In other words, the ban motivated (if not accelerated) the local people to get back the rights they had been deprived from. Apart from the conservation and governance of nature, the large-scale transformation of landscapes inducted by the rapid economic growth and the new aspirations of the country is also an important phenomenon in modern India. Human interventions on natural environment redefine inhabited spaces as well as identities. As shown in the last part of the volume, the urban explosion and/or the construction of infrastructure such as dams or roads has had consequences on the relationships between different social groups and their territory. This part also deals with the set-up (policy and stakes), process and consequences (often the displacement of populations) of such projects in three different states of India. Finally, this volume offers a wide variety of case studies representing a large panel of approaches and methodologies (from Sociology, Economics, History, Anthropology, and Development Studies), using different levels of analysis and representing different points of view. As editors, we are satisfied to note that the volume reflects current environmental debates in India and concerns for the twenty-first century. We shall feel more satisfied if the present volume can stimulate some debates on issues of our common concern and motivate new researches in the field of nature. This book has emerged from the proceedings of the 11th workshop of AJEI in India, which was hosted by North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) in Shillong in February 2008. Initially we wanted the workshop to provide an opportunity for French and NEHU doctoral students to meet, interact and learn from each other, but when we held it NEHU students were out of campus on winter vacation. Yet the occasion was valuable because it was a rare opportunity for the French students and senior scholars to meet each other. Most young doctoral students from various social and environmental sciences were meeting for the first time in their lives and it was some experience for them to present their methodologies and findings before a group of senior scholars from France as well as NEHU, and learn from their expertise. We therefore feel gratified that we could organise this workshop for young French doctoral students, who subsequently worked very hard for more than one year under the guidance of their respective supervisors as well as the experts we had identified to finally give us something that we are proud to include in this volume. For most of them this publication is the very first in their lives. Hence, it is very special for them, if not for their career. It is also special for us editors because it brings together, perhaps for the first time in the history of India, such a large number of French scholars working in different parts of India, not knowing each other and yet working under a common area of research called nature. The geographical coverage of India in this volume is

also perhaps unprecedented. It is only perhaps coincidental that there is no chapter on the southern parts of India because French scholars are working on south India as well. Otherwise it has chapters on western India, central India, north-eastern India, the eastern Himalayas, central Himalayas, western Himalayas and northern Himalayas. We have not seen many books on India having such a wide geographical coverage, not even in French. We are very happy to have got the cooperation of some of the best known scholars in France to write the introductions to the three parts this book contains—introductions that cover conservation, governance and transformation. They have not only introduced the chapters but also worked on the theoretical and conceptual contexts within which those chapters could be best presented. We would like to acknowledge their intellectual services to the young doctoral scholars as well as to the editors of this volume. We sincerely thank Joëlle Smadja, Frédéric Landy and Loraine Kennedy for this. We would also like to express our sincere thanks to Jacques Pouchepadass for having accepted our request to write the Foreword to the volume. Without these four senior scholars throwing their intellectual might behind this book our introduction would have been longer but with a lot less substance. The publication of this book has been made possible through the support and cooperation of many persons and institutions. Our sincere thanks goes to the following senior researchers who contributed to the scientific value of the volume by agreeing to be part of the advisory committee that examined the chapters included in this volume and gave valuable suggestions for improvement: Joëlle Smadja, Marlène Buchy, Véronique Dupond, Sylvie Guillerme, Loraine Kennedy, Ajit Kumar, Frédéric Landy, Philippe Ramirez, Blandine Ripert and M. C. Behera. We thank the host institution for providing human and logistic needs of the participants during the workshop. For this event, financial assistance has been received from the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi, French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH), Paris, and the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. Financial support for this publication is gratefully accepted from the Book Office, French Embassy in India, New Delhi, and the Center for Indian and South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS), Paris. Finally, we would like to thank all AJEI members who have contributed to the volume and given their advice and encouragement for this publication.

References Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà Nature et Culture. Paris: Gallimard. Descola, Philippe, and Gilsi Palsson (eds). 1996. Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge. Dwyer, Peter D. 1996. ‘The Invention of Nature’. In Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication, ed. Roy Ellen and K. Fukui. Oxford/Washington: Berg, 157-86. Ellen, Roy, and K. Fukui (eds). 1996. Redefining Nature: Ecology, Culture and Domestication. Oxford/Washington: Berg. Gadgil, M., and R. Guha. 1992. This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Roué, Marie. 2003. ‘Introduction: ONG, peuples autochtones et savoirs locaux: enjeux de pouvoir dans le champ de la biodiversité’. Revue Internationale des Sciences Sociales 178: 597-601. Roy Burman, B. K. 2008. ‘Ambiguities, Incongruities, Inadequacies in Scheduled Tribes and Other Technical Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006: A Case for Constructive Engagement’. Mainstream 46 (15). Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2005. Jungles, Reserves, Wildlife: A History of Forests in Assam. Guwahati: Wildlife Areas Development and Welfare Trust. Skaria, Ajay. 2001 [1999]. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India. New Delhi:

Oxford University Press.

Abbreviations

ADC

Autonomous District Councils

AHKS

Adivasi Harijan Kalyan Samiti

AIA

Ankleshwar Industries Association

BEIL

Bharuch Enviro Infrastructure Limited

BFPC

Bajawand Forest Produce Co-operative

CDF

Cumulative Distribution Functions

CPR

Common Pool Resources

CPT

Cattle Proof Trenches

DFC

Dedicated Freight Corridor

DFO

District Forest Officer

DMIC

Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor

EIA

Environment Impact Assessment

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization

FCA

Forest Conservation Act

FD

Forest Department

GICC

Gujarat Industrial Corridor Corporation

GIDB

Gujarat Industrial Development Board

GPCB

Gujarat Pollution Control Board

HPC

High Power Committee

JFMC

Joint Forest Management Committee

JFM

Joint Forest Management

KFGC

Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee

KNP

Kaziranga National Park

LSGI

Local self-government institutions

LSGO

Local self-government organisations

MAC

Mising Autonomous Council

MIDC

Meghalaya Industrial Development Corporation

MPCR

Marginal per capita return

NDBR

Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve

NEFA

North-East Frontier Agency

NPD

N-player Prisoner's Dilemma

NTFP

Non-timber Forest Product

PA

Protected Areas

PDS

Public Distribution System

PESA

Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas

PIL

Public Interest Litigation

PRI

Panchayati Raj Institutions

PSS

Gujarati Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti

RAP

Restricted Area Permit

SC

Scheduled Caste

SHG

Self Help Groups

SNDP

State Net Domestic Product

ST

Scheduled Tribe

STOTFD

Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act

VCM

Voluntary Contributions Mechanism

VEDC

Village Ecodevelopment Committee

VIDC

Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation

WWA

Women's Welfare Associations

PART I CONSERVATION OF NATURE

Introduction JOËLLE SMADJA

The Himalayan region is home to a wealth of endemic flora and fauna and a variety of tribal peoples whose economy depends largely on the use of the natural resources in their environment. To preserve its biodiversity and unique landscapes, a nature conservation policy introducing a differentiation and specialisation of space has been at work there for decades and especially since the 1970s, when more than one hundred protected areas—national parks, biosphere reserves, conservation areas, etc.—were set up. They now cover more than 13 per cent of the region’s total surface area.1 By causing major changes in the geography of the region, in the division of space, in the definition of milieus and territories, this nature conservation policy has impacted patterns of land use and resource management. The lifestyles of the societies dependent on these environments have been profoundly changed, and conflicting situations, sometimes violent, have emerged. In order to understand the reasons behind this, one must remember the interrelation in time and space between agriculture and the so-called ‘natural’ milieu —such as forests, pastures, ephemeral islands in the case of rivers, etc. This interrelation is an essential component of the dynamics of farming systems in India. Indeed, for rural communities, far from being differentiated and specialised, space is a territory where farming, grazing, gathering, hunting, fishing, religious activities, etc. are closely interlinked. The agricultural and religious calendars, for example, echo each other, and in India (see Robbins 2001), as in Nepal (see Meyer and Koppert 1983), studies have shown that over 40 per cent of fruit and vegetable consumption of populations relying on a subsistence economy come from forests or other so-called ‘natural’ spaces. Thus, one of the inherent problems of setting up protected areas is the wide gulf between official nature conservation policies that bestow a purely ecological dimension on these milieus, and the point of view of populations not belonging to an ecosystem, but to a territory in which certain milieus, such as the forest or pastures, are both a special biotope and a material or immaterial resource (see Smadja 2009, 2010). Nature conservation measures therefore raise the issue concerning the definition of the resource. As we know, a resource is conjectural: it only exists when it is perceived as such, endowed with a usage value and socialised. Spaces such as forests, pastures or riverbeds, which for some only have an ecological or industrial value and where the presence of unsupervised human activities will be denied, may be vital to others. It is therefore advisable to know who can legitimately define a resource and what the purpose of its protection is, for whom it is protected, from whom and what for: for the survival of populations, or the economy of a region, or world heritage, or the tourist industry? Nevertheless, the nature conservation policies that have been at work for decades have led to milieus once used in a versatile way by populations, which used to be social spaces with multiple usages, being reclassified as ‘natural areas’ from which local populations have been partially or totally excluded. This process has been achieved by establishing barriers, ‘new environmental boundaries’ as Guyot and Mniki (2008) call them. The protected areas are thus like a closed world removed from any common usage. They are like islands of nature, and like a world of innovation when opened to tourism or when exploited industrially, within rural areas faced with socio-economic difficulties. Marking this divide between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ has led to the displacement of thousands of people. Only those holding property titles have been given new land, though often in milieus where they cannot pursue their activities. The others, who amount to a large number, remain in some sectors illegally. Consequently, villagers are at best considered ‘gardeners of the environment’, ‘land planners’, and, at worst, outlaws, encroachers2 or poachers who can, if necessary, be shot on sight for committing an offence.3 In many cases, local committees that existed before any protected areas were set up no longer wield any power over

developing and managing resources. They have been replaced by administrative bodies (generally government bodies) often considered by villagers to be illegitimate and whose authority is regularly boycotted (see Colchester 1993; Kollmair et al. 2003; Smadja 2010).

History of Forest Management and Marginalisation of the Poorest Populations The growing divide between so-called ‘natural’ milieu and society stems from a process that began with the British colonial rule. As of the mid-nineteenth century, the exploitation of timber and the abundance of large game were the main concerns of the British administration. With this in mind, the latter turned ‘the jungle’ into forests and established Game Reserves (bonuses were handed out for the killing of any wild animal and hunting was freely encouraged); most of them became Game Sanctuaries in the early twentieth century. Then, after India’s independence, ‘guns were exchanged for cameras’ (see Saikia 2005) and many of these Game Sanctuaries were turned into Wildlife Sanctuaries, then national parks from the 1970s onwards—hunting was also banned throughout India around that time—and some parks were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in the 1980s. This quest seems endless. Today, the size of protected areas is forever on the increase, as can be seen from the example of Kaziranga National Park, which is now being extended for the sixth time. This obviously raises the question of the limits to this policy. The well preserved wildlife, with nothing to regulate its numbers, is multiplying, the surface area of parks is no longer big enough for it, and national park authorities have found no other alternative but to extend them. What surface area will yet be needed for the wildlife population constantly on the increase? A retrospective profile of the Indian forest administration provides some insight into attempts to interpret this situation. In the course of the last two centuries and in a more marked fashion over the last decades, forest management in the Himalayan region, and in India on the whole, has roughly corresponded to what prevailed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As in Europe during the industrial revolution, we have witnessed a specialisation and a ‘scientific’ management of areas for improved productivity. Just as for the Administration des Eaux et Forêts4 in France, the forest had to produce wood, and domestic animals and men had to be excluded from it. Foresters also endeavoured to abolish commons they believed to be marginal but which in fact proved to be the cornerstone of an economy based on complementary milieu, since all land, even the poorest and most degraded, was used and besides, this was a symbol of village unity. Thus, in India, just like in nineteenth-century France, we have been witnessing an opposition between state foresters and foresters working in the field. The state foresters have a mission to conserve nature and to afforest the country. They think in terms of an overall balance between plains versus mountains and agricultural areas versus wooded areas. They turn the countryside into a juxtaposition of separate specialised areas. They are supported by advocates of an aesthetic (now environmental) protection of nature. Added to this is the fact that, in India, forest management has been largely influenced by European schools that were established in Germany in 1787 and in France in 1824. The first Indian foresters were trained there. Thinking that the forest industry would help their country make up for lost time, they then introduced into India ‘scientific forestry’ drawn from the European experience. And they pursued this specialisation of space by developing intensive agriculture as of the 1960s (Green Revolution) as well as commercial forestry. More recently, protected areas, parks and reserves are a result of these conceptions. The Indian Forest Act dated 1878 and 1927 sealed this policy at its inception by introducing the three major distinctions that exist today, viz. Reserved Forests, Protected Forests and Unclassified Forests: they left forests to State control where legislation was taking precedence over usage and traditional rights (see Bon 2005, Saikia 2005). These measures have consequently reduced the territories exploited by villagers. This has resulted in a shortage of resources, a degradation of the ecosystems exploited, and since then many by-pass strategies have been devised. It is worthwhile to note that Arunachal Pradesh has stood apart from this process, but today it is also at work in this State, as evident from Nicolas Lainé’s chapter. On the other hand, the foresters in the field, for which Le Play in France has been the representative figure, consider that a real conservation of the forest is achieved by improving the situation of mountain farmers (see Kalaora 1998). It focuses on the nature-society interaction at the centre of their work and refuses

any disciplinary cleavages. Today the debate is the same in India (see Saxena 1997; Das 2001; Husain 2003; Bon 2005, etc.). The forest department’s behaviour in the region is therefore rooted in a history that spans over three centuries. Having never had the means to fully implement its policy, having always been regarded as hostile by populations and acting as government representatives, its authority has always been boycotted. Besides, in Nepal, where the forest department was created in the image of the Indian Forest Service, the Maoists’ first move during the insurgency that started in 1996 was to blow up all the forest offices because, more than any other institution, they symbolised and represented the government. Thus, as in South Africa (see Rodary 2008: 215), the takeover of protected areas by hunters and foresters, then later with the spread of parks, the development of international tourism, aimed to a very large extent, at a wealthy clientele, have systematically marginalised the poorest populations. If the real poverty index in rural areas goes by the ability of farmers to access resources and manage their territory, as recalled by Sarah Benabou by combining the notions of ‘ecological poverty’ and ‘capabilities’ conceptualised by Anil Agarwal (2000) and Amartya Sen (1999, 2003) respectively, then a marginalisation and an impoverishment of the population are indeed the issues here.

Downsides of the Nature/Society Divide Nonetheless, and this has been verified everywhere in the world, ‘environmental barriers’ cannot be clear-cut borders between man and nature. Confining nature by trying to fix land, landscapes, populations and even animals within milieus that are highly mobile (as seen in Assam) is in any case problematic, since wild animals themselves do not respect park boundaries. Indeed, near parks throughout the Himalayan region, hordes of elephants and rhinoceroses now regularly destroy crops, homes and sometimes kill people. Furthermore, proper control of protected areas calls for drastic measures, often beyond their resources, and this policy presents many obvious inconsistencies. As described by Bruno Latour (1993) or as also shown by Paul Robbins (2001) in a text on invasive plants in Rajasthan, by accentuating the divide between nature and society, one actually generates a proliferation of hybrids against which proponents of a ‘pure’ and ‘protected’ nature then have to spend a great deal of energy and resources. Thus, park authorities are engaged in a vain struggle, wasting a lot of time and money, against all kinds of hybridisation; hybridisation between wild buffalo and domestic buffalo, for example, or elsewhere in Assam, against the invasion of plants such as Mimosa (Mimosa rubicaulis and invisa) from nearby tea plantations (see Smadja 2009, 2010). These barriers may have devastating effects and lead to quite the opposite result of what is expected. Indeed, natural resources within Industrial Areas’, as pointed out by Nicolas Lainé, or at parks’ peripheries, as shown by Sarah Benabou, maybe overexploited, while this was not the case prior to setting these limits. As underlined by Émilie Crémin, cash crops introduced in some cases to compensate for the ban on accessing resources constitute a loss of agro-biodiversity, which is characteristic of agro-systems of communities that rely on natural resources for their survival. The rate at which forest pickings are taken changes and this therefore no longer respects the vegetation’s pattern of growth, as shown by Sarah Benabou. Furthermore, it is not only the subsistence economy of those suffering environmental protection policies that is destroyed, but the economy of entire regions, as highlighted by Nicolas Lainé regarding logging in Arunachal Pradesh. It is also the case for the ban regarding livestock farming on the islands in the Brahmaputra, since it is the milk supply for the whole of Assam that is in jeopardy. Researchers like Serge Bahuchet et al (2001) have demonstrated how the disappearance of economies based primarily on food-producing agriculture and how depriving people of their know-how and turning them away from their practices could be the cause of genuine irreversible poverty. Then, a de-structuring of societies leading to a loss of social links takes place, which is one of the prime factors in environmental degradation. Thus, while trying to protect the environment, the opposite effect to what was expected is produced, which is also discussed in the book on environmental crisis by Beck et al (2006). Finally, this divide creates a sharp contrast between the resources made available for nature protection and indeed for tourism, and the utter destitution of populations. A large part of parks’ budgets is earmarked for putting an end to poaching, for recovering lost wildlife roaming about outside parks, for tourist facilities,

while hundreds of lodges, hotels and restaurants are built around them. By contrast, villagers are not only deprived of natural resources, but suffer from the destruction caused by wildlife to their crops, livestock, homes and sometimes to their own lives without even being able to react, since hunting has been banned. They hardly receive any (or little) compensation for this damage, derive little or no profit from tourism, and they find themselves stuck in a precarious situation. Often, the only form of development proposed is setting up eco-villages in which they are ‘museified’, their folklore being put to the fore, while, if need be, reinventing their traditions as has been written by Hobsbawm and Ranger (1992). Ultimately, this nature conservation policy has perverse effects since protected areas become territories opposing the State, or lands of ‘resistance’. Indeed, cases of encroachment and poaching persist, and are even on the increase, as seen in the three examples discussed here. Moreover, the promotion of ancestral cultures and of ethnicity for the benefit of tourists, which goes hand in hand with the process of environmental protection—as seen in eco-villages—as well as conflicts over access to land and management of natural resources around protected areas may lead to fuelling identity claims, to communalism and to demands for autonomous territories (Smadja 2009, 2010). This is the case for the Misings near Kaziranga, the group most affected by the park’s policy, as discussed by Émilie Crémin. Elsewhere in Assam, this was the case of the Bodos who gained autonomous councils in 2003 following a violent conflict over the management of resources in Manas National Park on the border with Bhutan. These autonomous territories will in turn become synonymous with exclusion. Finally, let us not forget that nature conservation can also be instrumentalised by activists to fight against the settlement of foreign populations. Thus, in Kaziranga, student nationalist movements play on the emotional charge the park carries to organise nature defence demonstrations (see Smadja 2009). Their clearly displayed goal is to protect the rhinoceros and at the same time promote the Assamese culture, yet their main purpose is to exclude Bangladeshi Muslims, accused of poaching, squatting, and hence a threat to Assam. This political union between conservationism and conservatism echoes what has been seen, for example, in South Africa with the Zulu nationalists and their conception of Zululand (see Guyot 2006: 232).

The Need for Real Participatory Management The studies presented here confirm that natural resources can be effectively preserved if real participatory management involving the populations and their knowledge is introduced. Participatory management has not been implemented at all in Kaziranga, except for a training course in environmental protection and incentives to fight poaching. At Nanda Devi, it is more a question of seeking the populations’ approval of decisions without actually consulting them; this form of management is not workable since it is perceived as a transfer of management at a lower cost. Yet throughout the world it has been demonstrated that any conservation action only lasts if it is viable for society and accepted by it; no protection can be achieved without the support of local populations.5 Genuine participatory management would therefore be achieved by managing milieus rather than by specialising them, which only generates prohibitions, by taking into account the definition of resources by the various stakeholders, by comparing the representations of each and everyone, by assessing each other’s needs, in short, by a real interdisciplinary approach proper to any environmental issue. Is this not a point of view reinforced today by the nomination of Elinor Ostrom as winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics? Indeed, she has concluded from her studies6 in different regions of the world that local communities with sound knowledge of their milieus are capable of exploiting a region’s resources by ensuring their renewal. She has also stressed that institutions fashioned over time are often best suited to safeguarding common interests. Statements toned down, however, since local institutions are not immune to committing major injustices and also require some form of regulation (see also Colchester 2003). Nevertheless, it is worthwhile pointing out that in Nepal, for example, agro-forestry and agro-arboriculture, introduced by populations to meet their needs in tree resources despite forest exclosures, then encouraged by the government, work extremely well (see Ripert et al. 2003). In India, the Scheduled Tribes and Traditional Forest Dwellers Act 2006 should help local people to access once again resources in protected areas. Yet proponents of strict nature protection have raised objections to it and so far it has very rarely been applied. In conclusion, it appears that in Himalayan regions where people live mainly off agriculture, livestock farming, fishing and, in all cases, off domestic or commercial exploitation of natural resources, confiscation of

resources to the benefit of protected areas, damage caused by wildlife in villages and absence of any real participatory management undermines social peace just as much as it does nature conservation. The relentless desire to cut off protected areas from society leads to numerous aberrations and fuel conflicts. What is being played out regarding these areas is far from being a ‘human versus animal’ conflict, as some conveniently qualify it to be good, but a conflict between different conceptions of natural resource management, a conflict between men about what nature management should be, as acknowledged by Weber (1995) or later by Emmanuel Bon (2005) in studies about India. It seems clear that the many conflicts throughout the Himalayan range are partly fuelled by these nature conservation policies.7 To return to the four chapters in this section, the first deals with the way British perceived the ‘megalithic cultures’ and the tribes of Northeast India during 1854–1945. Through a history of the scholarly discourses on the monuments, we understand how the British perception was informed by evolutionary and racial perspectives and how they indulged in heroic-romantic interpretations of the prehistoric cultures that are still alive in this region. The examples presented show ‘how far our perception of “natural” landscape as well as the related archaeological environment is informed by our “imagined national identity’”. This article underlines the influence of British perceptions on our knowledge of peoples and of their practices in Northeast India and on the ensuing specific policies. This occidental influence is today still at work in the policy related to protected areas, as we will see it with the three following chapters. Towards the end of his article, Raphaël Rousseleau makes an interesting typology of the ‘megalithic cultures’, describes the functions of megaliths in local cultures, and identifies some major megalithic sites in the region. Impoverished societies de-structured by nature protection measures are a common observation underlined by the three texts that follow, all concentrating on the north of the Indian subcontinent, in the Himalayan region including the range itself and its bordering plains. In all the three cases, populations that are made up of Scheduled Tribes depend for their survival on renewable natural resources used for domestic or commercial purposes, and in the three cases, protective measures have established a differentiation and specialisation of space. This process is at work throughout the Himalayan region, and consequently these cases are very representative. The three cases, however, differ from one another. On the one hand, nature conservation consists of creating pockets of nature where any exploitation of natural resources is prohibited and from where the resident populations are evicted. This applies to the national parks—Nanda Devi in the mountains of Uttarakhand and Kaziranga in the Assamese plains—studied by Sarah Benabou and Émilie Crémin respectively. Incidentally, these two examples show that the issues are the same both in the mountains and the plains, and in the western and eastern parts of the Himalayan region. On the other hand, nature conservation can consist of creating islands intensively exploited within the otherwise protected areas where any exploitation of resources is prohibited, as illustrated by Nicolas Lainé with the example of ‘industrial zones’ where timber is exploited in the Lohit District in Arunachal Pradesh. The examples in the first part of this book therefore emphasise the fact that exceptional spaces for some may well be spaces of oppression for others. That being so, they do not deny the need to protect natural resources, but show instead that we must not only look admiringly at protected areas, but weigh up all the consequences of creating them. They prompt us to raise a number of questions: can protection be part of a global viable (rather than ‘sustainable’) development policy? Shouldn’t one manage the situation rather than impose bans? Can ‘protection from men’ become ‘protection for men’?

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ONE

Megalithic Landscapes, Cultures and Identity in Northeast India RAPHAËL ROUSSELEAU

When the first British travellers crossed the Khasi Hills, they were astonished to find in the very heart of Asia, some peculiar atmospheres reminding them of their homeland. The neighbouring area of Shillong appeared to them as the ‘Scotland of the East’, not only for its ‘highlands’, but also for the number of megaliths or ‘huge stone monuments’1 standing in the fog like ‘oriental’ reflections of their own supposed ‘Celtic’ imaginary. Historian David Arnold (2005) demonstrated how the colonial observation of Indian nature evolved from a ‘traveling gaze’ full of romantic references (like Walter Scott) to a ‘tropicalist scientific’ approach. I will first trace here a similar process regarding the archaeological and ethnographical perception of megalithic landscape and cultures of Northeast India. I will also show that this ‘gaze’ can be correlated to a quest for ‘selfidentity’ among certain social groups of the colonisers. Today, though the landscape of Meghalaya keeps the charm of its ancient past and natural beauty, our knowledge of those monuments has considerably improved since then. In the second part of the chapter I will present an overview of the typology and socio-cultural ‘functions’ of the remaining monuments, also indicating the major sites.2

From the ‘Stonehenge of the East’ to the ‘Megalithic Cultures’: A History of the Scholarly Discourses on Stone Monuments First British Descriptions The first comparisons between Indian and European archaeological remains were actually made in other parts of India: mainly Rajasthan and the south. Archaeological landscape itself was seen in close relation with the people living there. The Todas of the Nilgiris (between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) and the Bhils of Rajasthan were, for instance, perceived as direct 'descendants’ of ancient heroic peoples: the Celto-Scythian, conceived as the common ancestors of both oriental and western civilisations. The stone circles and commemorative ‘hero stones’, erected respectively by those two tribes, were simply interpreted as another evidence of this heroic past. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, British scholars were assimilating European stone monuments, like the famous Stonehenge in Southern England, with the Celtic people (identification of which later proved wrong). From this supposition, they attributed the same origin to all stone architectures throughout the world.3 The first mention of Khasis and other Northeast peoples goes back to the nineteenth century, but it was after Assam fell under British rule (Treaty of Yandaboo 1826) that Europeans—the missionaries first—began to know more about the peculiarity of the Khasi customs, mentioned for example by Walters in the Asiatic Researches. But it was the ‘Note on Kasia Hills & Peoples’ by Colonel Yule (1844) which really attracted the attention of scholars on Khasi megaliths. Yule was the first to describe clearly the Khasi monuments and to compare them to the Central Asian, Syrian and even European ones. He suggested, for instance, a supposed similarity between the Britannic word men for ‘stone’ and the Khasi word maw for the same. Following Yule, as J. N. Chowdhury (1996: 179) outlined, the naturalist J. D. Hooker too, in his Himalayan Journals (1855: 311–13), describes the large ensemble of tables and standing stones in Nartiang in the Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya as another ‘Stonehenge’, particularly ‘picturesque’: Nurtiung contains a most remarkable collection of those sepulchral and other monuments, which form so curious a feature in the scenery of these mountains, and in the habits of their native populations. They are

all placed in a fine grove of trees, occupying a hollow; where several acres are covered with gigantic, generally circular, slabs of stone, from ten to twenty-five feet abroad, supported five feet above the ground upon other blocks…. Splendid trees of Bombax, fig and banyan, over-shadowed them: the largest banyan had a trunk five feet in diameter, clear of the buttresses, and numerous small trees of Celtis grew out of it, and an immense flowering tuft of Vanda coerulea (the rarest and most beautiful of Indian orchids) flourished on one of its limbs…. The Nurtiung Stonehenge is no doubt in part religious, as the grove suggests, and also designed for cremation, the bodies being burnt on the altars.4 In the Khasia [Hills] these upright stones are generally raised simply as memorials of great events, or of men whose ashes are not necessarily, though frequently, buried or deposited in hollow stone sarcophagi near them, and sometimes in a clay urn placed inside a sarcophagus, or under horizontal slabs.

Figure 1.1 Stones at Nartiang Source: Hooker 1855: 313.

Diffusionist and Evolutionist Comparisons Beyond the reports by natural historians and army officers, the Khasi megaliths began to be more systematically investigated from 1872 onwards. In his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal (as Assam was part of the Bengal Presidency up to 1874), Dalton devoted special attention to such monuments, adding new interpretative developments to those of his predecessors: To the peculiar aspect of the Khasi hills from physical conformation and natural features must be added the various monumental stones that give a marked character to the scenery. These are of several kinds but most of them, says Colonel Yule, recall strongly those mysterious solitary or clustered monuments of unknown origin, so long the puzzle and delight of antiquaries, which abound in our native country, and are seen here and there in all parts of Europe and Western Asia. It is probable that

the stones, compared to Stonehenge found in the Nilghiries, were set up by a people who honoured their dead as do the Kasias, and that the similitude of custom in this respect points to some connection between the Kasias and the Hos of Singhbhum, and the Munda race, generally, of the Chhota Nagpur Province. (Dalton 1872: 62) In the same year, Major Godwin-Austen was the first to give a detailed description of the monuments. In two articles published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1872, 1876), he stresses the importance of those stones, and compares them, once again, to the ‘Druidical remains’ of Europe. But, far to stop at this general statement, he reported the reasons given by the Khasi themselves to set up such stones. Thus, he proved the link between the monuments and the funerary ceremonies. Through some lectures delivered in scholarly societies, his reports were diffused among the anthropologists of that time. Thanks to Godwin-Austen’s information, the first ‘art historian’ of India, James Fergusson (1808–1886), wrote a chapter on Khasi monuments in his book Rude Stones and Monuments in all Countries (1872). This work is a sort of ‘encyclopaedia’ of the megalithic monuments known at that time, which ought to be the first volume of a planned general history of architecture in various tomes, which was not completed. Though Fergusson considered the ‘rude stone monuments’ as a mere example of elementary architecture, he still proposed them as the ‘prototypes’ of later Indian temples. According to him this kind of architecture was associated with an archaic religion, a sort of ‘stone worship’ once diffused by a nomadic ‘rude race’ of people. He borrowed this theory from the French archaeologist Alexandre Bertrand, specialist in Celtic Antiquities. But, in Fergusson’s perspective this thesis takes a stronger racial aspect, as he sees ‘art history’ as a ‘history of the racial influences on arts’ (Guha-Thakurta 2004). His approach might be labelled as a ‘racial diffusionism’, which legitimated the colonial conquest by claiming the superiority of British achievements in all matters (religion, architecture, etc.). In any case, the success of the book contributed a great deal to the temporary fame of the Khasi monuments outside India.

Figure 1.2 Various Khasi and Jaintia monuments. Source: Drawings by Major H. H. Godwin-Austen, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. 1, 1872, Plate 3. In the meantime, the descriptive term of ‘megalithic monuments’ was officially preferred to the one of ‘Celtic monuments’, during the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology held in

Paris in 1867. The West-European megaliths were no more attributed to ‘Celtic’ people, but rather to anterior Neolithic and Copper Age cultures, a hypothesis still held today. Furthermore, similar stone monuments outside Europe were considered as an evidence, not merely of the diffusion of a single people, but of the universality of a ‘barbaric phase of civilisation’ (Westropp 1869), within the frame of the evolutionist theory of history. This theory presumed that all human societies were passing through the same stages of development, and in this case through a ‘rude stone stage’ of architecture and cult. During the same period, the conquest of Northeast India shifted from the Khasi to the Naga highlands, and with it the heroico-romantic self-presentation of the colonial officers as against ‘savage’. One of the main examples is the constant comparison established between certain ‘Hill tribes’ and the Scottish ‘Highlands’ clans, in relation to their proud spirit of independency and their martial qualities (see Arnold 2005: 96). I will quote here only one example amongst many of such comparisons. In 1882, a former subordinate of GodwinAusten, Colonel Woodthorpe divided the Naga groups between ‘kilted’ and ‘unkilted Nagas’. Moreover, a famous drawing from the Woodthorpe collection in Pitt-Rivers Museum shows Captain Butler of the Assam Rifles wearing a kilt, while surrounded by his men and Naga villagers. This reference to the kilt, the Scottish male skirt, is not an individual exception as it could appear at first sight. This simple cloth was of immense importance as an identity-marker for Her majesty’s Scottish subjects. H. Trevor-Roper (1983) showed that this same kilt—invented only in the eighteenth century—played a key role in the 'invention of the tradition’ of the Scottish Highlands, particularly through the costume of the infantry regiments. So, we can infer from this example that the Scottish officers recognised in Northeast Indians what they considered to be their own ‘identity traits’: a simple cloth, an untamed spirit of independence and martial qualities, as well as the rude stone shrines, all linked to an imaginary glorious epic past. In his book on the ideology of the nineteenthcentury British discourses about India, T. Metcalf (1998: 182–85) outlined the fact that the ‘Hill tribes’ were presented as more courageous than the Indians of the plains, on the one hand, and as more ‘savage’ on the other hand. In the colonial strategy, it was not only a way to ‘divide and rule’, but also to Christianise those groups perceived as ‘non-Hindu’, and in the present case ‘megalithic’ peoples considered as closer to their own European past identity.

Towards a more Socio-cultural Approach In 1874, in an article that appeared in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, another author C. B. Clarke gave a typology of monuments and an account of the funerary ceremonies linked with the commemorative standing stones and the ossuaries. He mentions the quarries and the techniques of stone extraction, well known to the Khasis who, in his own words, were ‘good geologists’. He rightly remarked that the rude aspect of the monoliths was taken too quickly as a proof of their supposed antiquity, while the majority of them were erected recently, if not just few years before his observation (Clarke 1874: 493). In 1914, Major Gurdon devoted a long chapter of his monograph, The Khasis, to their stone monuments and the funerary ceremonies associated with the same. Inspired by evolutionary theory, he considered the Khasi traditions as a living proof of a matriarchal stage of civilisation, supposed to be common to both ancient European and modern Indian peoples: Ka Iawbei is the primeval ancestress of the clan. She is to the Khasis what the ‘tribal mother’ was to old Celtic and Teutonic genealogists, and we have an interesting parallel to the reverence of the Khasis for Ka Iawbei in the Celtic goddess Brigit, the tribal mother of the Brigantes. Later on, like Ka Iawbei, she was canonized, and became St. Bridget. (Gurdon 1914: 112) For Gurdon, who followed the famous thesis of both J. J. Bachofen and L. H. Morgan (according to which the ‘primitive’ society was, economically and symbolically, organised around the mother), the Khasi matrilineal right of inheritance was a survival of an ancient ‘maternal law’, considered to be once universal. In this perspective, the use of megaliths was seen as one of the manifestations of evolutionist stage of humanity. According to Gurdon, who relied on Fergusson, the morphology of the monuments was the same because it reflected a similar sociological and religious institution: We know, for a fact, that the Khasi memorial stones were dedicated to the same objects as those of the Belgaum stones, i.e. to the worship of ancestors; so that we have not only similarity in appearance, in

conformation, and invariable unevenness of number, but identity of purpose, if Fergusson’s conclusion is correct. (Ibid.: 147) Even if he believed in the universality of the custom, Gurdon tried to trace a more direct origin to the Khasi monuments. On the basis of the linguistic links between Khasi and other Austro-Asiatic languages, he compared briefly the Khasi funerary rituals with some Indonesian examples. About ten years later, J. H. Hutton devoted an article to the alignments of standing stones and megalithic bridges from the Jaintia Hills up to Jaintiapur (present Bangladesh). Hutton, who is known mostly as a specialist of the Nagas, was a colonial administrator of Assam before he became Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. If we look at his first publications, we can see that his interest in the Nagas came from an earlier interest for the ritual use of stones in the entire Northeast India. In his view, the Naga groups were among the last living ‘megalithic cultures’, thanks to which the anthropologists could observe and understand the religious conceptions at the basis of the standing stones institution. According to his enquiries, the stones were conceived as a sort of ‘material medium’ through which the magic power of the ancestors could be re-employed by the living community. Therefore, Hutton concluded that the megaliths illustrated an archaic fertility cult, still practised in Northeast Indian hills. The ‘megalithic cultures’ of India attracted another anthropologist, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, a native of Austria. In 1945, he published an article on the ‘problem of megalithic cultures’, synthesising the archaeological and ethnographical data of his time. He distinguished two types of independent megalithic cultures in India: the first one, which was still a living tradition in the eastern and central India, and the second one, which was documented with the help of archaeological remains in South India (in the Nilgiri hills for instance). The two streams had clearly no connection. Since then, archaeological excavations and ethnographical studies have proved that it is even more difficult than Fürer-Haimendorf and Hutton expected, to generalise about what we call ‘megalithic cultures’. Megalithic tombs’ defined a ‘kind of funerary custom’ using large stones, shared by various independent societies, and not linked with any specific historical ‘stage’. Moreover, megaliths in general are far from being only tombs: for example the famous Stonehenge (in Southern England) is a circle of standing stones where various rituals took place during several centuries, probably in connection with seasonal feasts. Thus, different practices of erecting stone monuments occurred at various times and spaces, in Europe, in India or elsewhere in the world. Consequently, the interest in megaliths has shifted from an ‘evolutionist’ perspective to a more comprehensive approach. There are numerous morphological variations and a diversity of beliefs related to contemporary megalithic cultures in India. To take other examples, few subdivisions of the tribal groups of the Gonds in Bastar (Chhattisgarh), the Gadabas and Saoras in Orissa, and some Mundas in Jharkhand, still erect stones to commemorate their dead, and the ethnographical knowledge about them has considerably improved since the 1950s. Yet, it is impossible to correlate the customary use of stones with the diffusion of a particular linguistic family (Khasis speak in Mon-Khmer, while Nagas in Tibeto-Burman; the Gonds and Gadabas are speakers of Dravidian while the Saoras and Mundas speak Mundari), or a supposed universal religious ‘stage’ (either a so-called ‘fertility cult’ or a ‘stone worship’). The only shared feature between all those cultures lies in their socio-political organisation: the lineage-based or (sociologically speaking) ‘tribal’ division of the society articulated with a respect, if not a cult, for the ancestors. Within those Asiatic societies, the ancestors occupy a respected position, and it is not by chance that stones are erected to commemorate, not those who died recently, but precisely the ancestors who were united with the lineage during the secondary funerary ceremonies. In all those societies, the stones literally ‘stand’ for the ancestors’ presence, and at the same time for the status of the living members of their family (Rousseleau 2008b). Such ethnological observation may be of some utility to interpret the megaliths of the past.

Typology, Functions and Major Megalithic Sites Even if there existed numerous local variations within the Khasi customs, it is possible to reconstruct quite accurately on which occasions Khasis erected large stone monuments. Following the steps of Clarke and Gurdon, David Roy (1963) gave a minute description of the Khasi funerary customs, about which he

investigated in the 1930s. He made his enquiries among those elders who once had been not only eyewitnesses, but also participants in the rituals. Published in the German anthropological journal Anthropos, this article remains one of the few written testimonies of the Khasi funerary ceremonies. According to the above quoted authors, there are two major occasions to raise stone monuments among the Khasis: in funerary contexts in order to commemorate their dead, and during rituals for the holding of larger periodical markets. Different types of monuments can be correlated to those main circumstances and socio-cultural functions.

Funerary and Commemorative Monuments It is important to distinguish between the stone coffers or ossuaries and the simple shrines (often called altars by nineteenth-century observers) or stone tables, which is constituted by a horizontal flat stone lying on some short stone pillars. Both types were formerly called dolmens, ‘stone table’ from a nineteenth-century Breton neologism, without specific distinction. The former have actually a true funerary function, having been ossuaries in the past; the latter are small shrines conceived to receive offerings, and are often located in front of groups of ‘standing stones’, or menhirs according to the neo-Breton derivation, a term avoided by specialists today. The Khasi funerary rituals spread over several years and counted up to six different feasts. After the cremation of the body, three ceremonies were associated with the deposition of the deceased’s calcinated bones in a coffer, each time of a superior size compared to the previous one and corresponding to a larger kinship group: (a) household (iing), (b) local matrilineal lineage segment (kpoh), and (c) matrilineal clan (jaid, kur). There existed three different types of ossuaries or mawshyieng (literally ‘bone-stone’, Roy 1963): i. mawkynroh (also called mawphew, according to Roy [1963], while Gurdon [1914] calls it simply mawshyieng), a simple individual coffer near the house, receiving only the deceased’s bones; ii. the second mawkynroh (mawphew, according to Gurdon [1914]), a larger repository collecting the bones of the dead members of the matrilineal lineage sometime after the first ceremony; iii. mawbah (‘great stone’) or mawniam (‘ceremony’s stone’), standing last is the most important megalith, receiving finally the remaining bones of all the matri-clan members. The shrines are referred as maw-kynthei (female stones) as well as ka Iawbei Tynrai or ‘grand-mother of the root’ because they stand for the matrilineal clan ancestress, and are sometimes associated with another type of monument—the standing stones, called by contrast, maw-shynrang (male stones). The latter includes three, five or even nine slabs (if not eleven in a case mentioned by Gurdon [1914: 150], symmetrically organised by decreasing order of size on both sides of a central higher stone. This central stone is called mawkni (‘the stone of the maternal uncle’), while the smaller ones are called mawbud or ‘accompanying stones’, or standing for the maternal brothers and nephews (ki mawpyrsa ki para). The alignment of standing stones takes place at least one year after the deposition of the remains of the celebrated individual within the clan ossuary. In this sense, those groups of standing stones rightly deserve the name of cenotaphs, or funerary monuments which do not receive the dead body. Following the same authors, I will distinguish two main types of alignments: i. Mawlynti (‘the path stone’) or mawkjat (‘stone of the leg’) is an alignment constituted by three standing stones: one mawkni stone and two accompanying ones, as well as one shrine. According to Gurdon, this type of short alignment was set up for each nocturnal stoppage of the procession in the direction of the clan sepulchre, and was intended to allow both the living and the dead ‘to rest’. Due to such function, the alignments are concentrated all along the roads leading to clan ossuaries. ii. Mawbynna (‘the stone for commemoration’) refers to an alignment built following the same principles as in the case of mawlynti, but including at least five standing stones and often two shrines in front of it. Those two shrines refer to the matrilineal lineage ancestress (on the left) and ka Iawbei longkpoh or ‘grand-mother of the segment of lineage’ or ka Iawbei khynraw, the ‘young grand-mother’ of the dead’s family (on the right).

All the authors agree on the above terms, but Roy and Gurdon radically differ about the following ones. According to Gurdon, mawnam is morphologically similar to mawlynti, but differs in function: it is intended to commemorate a deceased person. However, this honoured person is not a member of the matrilineal clan, like in the case of mawbynna, but the father of the person who builds the monument (or a member of the father’s line). Therefore, the central standing stone evocates the father (u maw thawlang), and the shrine represents the father’s mother. Still according to Gurdon’s description, mawksing (‘the drum stone’) and mawkhait (‘the plantain stone’) are accompanying stones on both sides of the main one, but Roy describes these as smaller stone structures nearly similar in morphology and functions to tmawbynna. Relying on Kynpham Singh, Chowdhury (1996: 196) interprets the drum stone as erected for the drummers who accompany the procession. Even if such ceremonies are things of the past now, enquiries with Khasi elders could still clarify the different assumptions.

Monuments for Marketplaces Due to the interest of the observers of ancestor worship, the funerary ceremonies and monuments received much more attention than the stone monuments erected in marketplaces. This type of structures appears morphologically similar to the commemorative alignments, except that they compose very impressive ensembles, including sometimes several hundred standing stones and equally large stone tables (mawshongthait). The most famous example is the Nartiang one. According to my own researches, the original aim of such architectures seems to have served as large selling platforms or stalls during the fairs. Such sites appear quite intricate today, like true stone labyrinths, but originally they were divided into various organised areas. This practical and economic function, however, should not hide more complex roles, since the markets were (and still are) at the very centre of the socio-political life of the hills, and the best place for exchanging goods and news. My own attempt at mapping such ‘fair places’ brings me to the subject of precolonial kingdoms of the hills. Every site of the markets, marked with numerous stone structures, was the former seat of a local political power, presided by a particular clan, or Syiem, which is an institution abolished by the British in 1835. Each week, on the market day, tax was collected over the goods. The Syiem and the council of elders (each bearing a status title) shared the tax before eating together on the large stone table in front of the highest slab. The founding stone of the place received some offerings before the opening of the market. It seems that this stone was considered as the seat of the presiding ‘market goddess’.

Major Megalithic Sites Even if stone coffers can be found in the neighbouring Garo Hills as well as standing stones in the West Khasi Hills, such monuments are mostly present in the East Khasi Hills and the Jaintia Hills districts. I will mention here only the main sites of these districts, considering that there are hundreds of smaller alignments there, mainly near important paths like on both sides of the Shillong-Dawki and the Laitlyngkot-Cherrapunjee roads. Few alignments can still be seen near the lowland roads, in Ribhoi district (Marngar area) as well as in Assam (Beltola, Jagi Road, Nowgong district, Neli area, etc.). The regional geology, from the gneiss in the north and centre of Meghalaya to the silicified limestone in the south (Cherrapunjee area), gives a diversity to the monuments’ appearance. To begin with memorial monuments from Shillong, the neighbouring sites of Saw Mer and San Mer show respectively a beautifully curved alignment of nine slabs, and a group of six alignments (including four to about twelve stones each, some of which are fallen on the ground). Other interesting monuments can be seen in Nongkrem and Laitkor in the vicinity of Shillong city. At the outskirts of the village Maw Kindur, one can observe a true dolmen, whose table is decorated in relief with a circle. Maw Kindur was the seat of the former Madur-Maskut kingdom, run by the members of the Malngiang clan. This was the first known ‘State’ before the rise of the more famous Khyrim and Jaintia states (Chowdhury 1998: 229). The posterity ascribed magic powers to the Syiem of Madur-Maskut, believed to possess invulnerable and removable intestines and heart. In the south of the State, the monuments of Cherrapunjee and Mawsmai show, particularly, regular slabs due to the nature of the local stone. According to a Khasi lore, the impressive alignment at the entrance of Mawsmai is said to stand in commemoration of a pact, or peace-oath, between the Syiems of Cherra and

Mawsmai (see among others Hooker 1855: 313–14). The central stone is ‘crowned’ with a decorated cap called shata, from the Bengali chhata or umbrella, which implies a prestigious, royal status. In lower Cherrapunjee (Pomsohmen hamlet), close to the river, one can see various memorial alignments and two now rare monuments: the crematory platforms or pyres (kpep) of the Syiems of the former Sohra kingdom (Chowdhury 1996: 71, quoting Kynpham Singh). The monument erected in the marketplaces also show alignments of standing stones with large stone’s tables, but constitutes extended groups, certainly more impressive than the commemorative ones. The main groups can be seen in Nongkseh, Laitlyngkot and Nartiang. Located at about five kilometres from Shillong, Nongkseh (or Bisi) was the capital of Khyrim, one of the two kingdoms (with Mylliem) which formerly occupied the present Shillong area. Nongkseh preserves the remains of its erstwhile marketplace. Gurdon (1914) considers that the tallest stela of the site was called u mawkni Syiem, the ‘stone of the Syiem’s maternal uncle’, and formed the centre of an alignment belonging to the local basans' (official) clan, who provided the principal sacrifier of the Khyrim Syiem. In the present Shillong town, during winter, the representative of the Mylliem district (Raid) still offers a puja on the stones located in the centre of the Bara Bazar market (Iewduh). Within the present marketplace of Laitlyngkot village, an imposing group of short alignments with large stone tables can be observed, which are today fenced by the Department of Art and Culture, government of Meghalaya. People continue to use it, showing that the flat slabs are the former stand tables, used to display the proposed goods for barter or trade. The most impressive monument among all is the Nartiang marketplace, in the Jaintia Hills district of Meghalaya. Nartiang was the former summer capital of the Sutnga kingdom (later called Jaintia realm), whose winter capital was Jaintiapur (in present Bangladesh). The former power of this kingdom is still visible through the few remains of a palace and the ki maw jong Syiem (‘the stones of the Syiem’): a vast group of about hundred gigantic tables and standing stones. Those monuments, still now, neighbour the marketplace above the village, accessible after crossing a monolithic bridge.5 Those alignments were organised by clans bordering two main paths. Apparently, only the Syiems were formerly allowed to seat on the main table in front of the tallest standing monolith. According to Swer (1992: 65, 75), the latter stone (and another one, fallen during the 1887 earthquake) has been brought ceremoniously by royal order from the Sanirang village, to confer prestige to Nartiang. A goat sacrifice was previously offered as a ‘puja to the presiding market goddess’ (Ka Pam Blang Iew) on the foundation slab (ibid.: 60).6 According to the local tale, this flat monolith was stolen from the previous bazaar at Raliang by a legendary giant, U Mar Phalynki. He used the stone as an umbrella and left it at the entrance of Nartiang. But this stone was also the ‘abode of market goddess’, who shifted to her new village and established a new fair on every Mawlong day (ibid.: 21). After discussions, the Raliang representatives entered into agreement with the representatives of Nartiang by performing a Raliang sacrifice every year at Nartiang. Another legendary character, U Lah Laskor, is also believed by some to have brought and erected the tallest stone.

Figure 1.3 Contemporary Nartiang site Photo: Courtesy of Raphaël Rousseleau.

Figure 1.4 Lineage Ossuary near Shillong Photo: Courtesy of Raphaël Rousseleau.

Conclusion: Megalithic Landscape and Identity Imagination Following my historical survey, I would now like to draw some general conclusions. The earlier examples show that the evolutionist and racial perspectives on tribes and megalithic cultures were cast by a ‘romantic’ history and ethnography. The peoples and their landscape were considered, as a whole, integrated in ‘picturesque scenery’ illustrating the ancient battlegrounds of ‘heroic tribes’. We find here what David Arnold (2005: 34) called the ‘traveling gaze’ and his romantic references, which progressively disappeared from the naturalist writings, leaving ground to more scientific descriptions around 1870. Our examples, nonetheless, have shown something new: such ‘heroic-romantic’ interpretations remained popular among the colonial army, and more particularly the Scottish battalions, upto the end of the nineteenth century. The lyrical evocations progressively vanished with the specialisation of both archaeology and ethnology, and with the

establishment of a colonial administration more interested in profit than in Walter Scott’s romantic novels. Those examples show how far our perception of ‘natural’ landscape as well as the related archaeological environment is informed by our ‘imagined national identity’. Finally, it is noteworthy to underline here that the contemporary studies of stone monuments shifted from supposed prehistoric origins towards the historically and ethnographically documented uses of them. Scholars today focus less on the ever-hypothetical diffusion of ‘megalithic cultures’ than on the recent sociopolitical value and employment of the monuments. The Meghalaya State itself, through the Department of Art and Culture, protects the megalithic heritage. Some sites (Nartiang, Laitlyngkot, Nongkrem) have been fenced some years ago, and some others have been cleared from the forest vegetation. Even families maintain the old monuments commemorating their own clan members. This chapter is just an attempt to show the complexity and the richness of the megalithic monuments, a topic which truly deserves and awaits further research and a pluridisciplinary approach. Now that the Khasi Hills environment is being more and more exploited (through open air sand excavation, etc.), it maybe useful to rekindle the former links between memories and places. Below the conservation of the main sites (not all of them, of course) as ‘picturesque landscapes’, it is important to give a voice to the stones, by collecting the surviving local ‘histories’ among the people related to them. Only through this process can the megaliths be rightly re-appropriated by the Khasis themselves as an essential part of their cultural and artistic heritage; this way it could also become a true argument for a ‘green’ tourism.

References Arnold, David. 2005. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science 1800–1856. Delhi: Permanent Black. Chowdhury, J. N. 1996. ‘Stonehenge to Meghalaya’. In Ki Khun Khasi-Khara (The Khasi People), 179–202. Shillong: Shrimati Jaya Chowdhury. ———. 1998. The Khasi Canvas (with a short note on Khasi language and literature by I. M. Simon). Shillong: Shrimati Jaya Chowdhury. Clarke, C. B. 1874. ‘Stone Monuments of the Khasi Hills’. Journal of the Anthropological Institute 3(3): 481– 93. Dalton, Edward Tuite. 1872. Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal. Calcutta: Government Press. Fergusson, James. 1872. Rude Stones and Monuments in all Countries, their Ages and Uses. London: J. Murray. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1945. ‘The Problem of Megalithic Cultures in Middle India’. Man in India 25(2): 73–86. Godwin-Austen, Major H. H. 1872. ‘The Stone Monuments of the Khasi Hill Tribes’. Journal of the Anthropological Institute 1(2): 122–43. ———. 1876. ‘Further Notes on the Rude Stone Monuments of the Khasi Hill Tribes’. Journal of the Anthropological Institute 5(1): 37–41. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. 2004. Monuments, Objects, Histories. Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. New York: Columbia University Press. Gurdon, Major P. R T. 1914. The Khasis. Calcutta: Government of Eastern Bengal and Assam. Hooker, J. D. 1855. Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist, Vol. 2. London: J. Murray. Hutton, John Henry. 1926. ‘Some Megalithic Work in the Jaintia Hills’. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 22: 333–46. ———. 1929. ‘Assam Megaliths’. Antiquity 3(2): 324–38. Metcalf, Thomas R. 1998. Ideologies of the Raj. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Rousseleau, Raphaël. 2008a. ‘Stonehenge d’Orient. Les tribus “mégalithiques” dans les discours britanniques

sur l’Inde (1740–1945)’. Gradhiva 8 (nouvelle série): 96–111. ———. 2008b. Les Créatures de Yama: Ethnohistoire d'une ‘tribu' de l’Inde. Bologna: Bologna University Press. Roy, David. 1963. ‘The Megalithic Culture of the Khasis’. Anthropos 58(34): 520–56. Swer, U Nobait. 1992. The Story of the Sanirang Stones in the Form of Dialogue. Shillong: Ri Khasi Press. Trevor-Roper, Hugh. 1983. ‘The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland’. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 15–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westropp, Hodder M. 1869. ‘Cromlechs and Megalithic Monuments’. The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 1 (1): 53–59. Woodthorpe, Lieutenant-Colonel R. G. 1882. ‘Notes on the Wild Tribes Inhabiting the so-called Naga Hills, on our Northeast Frontier of India’. Journal of the Anthropological Institute 11: 56–73,196–214. Yule, Colonel. 1844. ‘Note on the Kasia Hills & People’. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal XIV (152): 612–31.

TWO

Transforming Rural Livelihoods through Ecodevelopment in the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve SARAH BENABOU

Today, many biologists warn that we are facing a major ‘Sixth Extinction’ crisis, as severe as the one which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Amongst various measures taken to significantly slow down the rate of loss of biodiversity, the establishment of protected areas (PA) has been promoted most strongly. Nevertheless, the biodiversity-rich areas in which these parks are developed are very often lands inhabited by the poor, who are dependent on natural resources to meet their basic needs and to lead the kind of lives they value. Thus, biodiversity governance is intimately related to the question of poverty, and the challenge today is precisely to find possible ways in which biodiversity conservation could give equal priority to the well-being of local communities. Ecological poverty is still a key issue in India today.1 A large majority of the Indian population lives in rural areas and depends on natural resources for daily subsistence; the loss of this capital leads to poverty. In the context of PA, the territorial restrictions imposed by conservation policies have major implications for the growing number of people living in the vicinity of the national parks. Deprived of their access to many of the natural resources that they enjoyed earlier, local communities tend to show widespread hostility towards state-initiated conservation efforts. Deprivation of natural resources is the most obvious and well-known face of poverty around PA. However, poverty is a multidimensional phenomenon not restricted to the lack of economic or material resources. It is also generated by a sustained denial of local people’s capabilities (in the sense defined by Amartya Sen)2 to choose the kind of lives they have reason to value because the livelihood of people living in the vicinity of PA has to match conservation imperatives, which are largely dictated by the Forest Department (FD). Till today, the FD has full powers over the management of PA. Local people are very often given no choice but to give up their former livelihoods, considered as ecologically destructive, and to adapt themselves to new ways of life that they have not chosen and for which they are not prepared. However, to achieve the goals of biodiversity conservation in protected areas, the support of the local population is needed. This fact has led, over the past decade, to demands for the integration of PA management with rural development schemes. Ecodevelopment is the latest initiative in this domain. In the Indian context, ecodevelopment is defined as a strategy for protecting ecologically valuable areas (PA) from unsustainable pressures resulting from the needs and activities of people living in and around such areas (IIPA 1994). It attempts to do this (i) by providing alternative livelihood options to villagers, thereby weaning them away from dependence on natural ecosystems, (ii) by increasingly involving the people in the management of the PA, and (iii) by raising the levels of awareness amongst the local community of the value of the PA The current interest in this new governmental initiative, which is largely supported by international donors, calls for critical examination. An anthropological approach allows us to go beyond the discourses and examine on the ground how ecodevelopment might differ from the previous exclusionary approach. The case of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve (NDBR) is presented here to illustrate the concrete effects of top-down conservation policies and ecodevelopment on local livelihoods. By following the unfolding of these series of conservation policies in the NDBR, this chapter indicates that, even if the discourses on conservation have changed, ecodevelopment is marked by striking similarities with the previous conservationist approach,

leaving the local population often further disempowered than before. To do so, we shall first sketch the socio-economic context of the area and argue (1) that the exclusionary policy of the NDBR was rooted in a rhetoric that ignores the dependence of local people on natural resources, (2) that this misunderstanding has led to a tragic pauperisation of the local population, (3) that the ecodevelopment programmes initiated in the NDBR, in theory more people-oriented than conventional conservation programmes, appear to be a short-lived form of gaining people’s participation, and (4) that ecodevelopment follows a lingering model of ‘exclusion’ resulting in a significant loss of decision-making spaces for villagers.

Study Area and Description of Rural Set-up in NDBR The NDBR is located in the state of Uttarakhand, in the north-west of the Himalayan chain, close to the Tibetan border. It consists of a core zone (624.62 sq. km) and a buffer zone (1,612.12 sq. km).3 The core area has been a Wildlife Sanctuary since 1939 and it was declared as a National Park in 1982. With the inclusion of the buffer zone, the region was designated as a Biosphere Reserve in 1988 and recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1992. There are no permanent habitations within the core zone of the NDBR A majority of the inhabitants of the buffer zone are known as Bhotiya, an ethno-linguistic group of people living in the trans-Himalayan region that divides India from Tibet. They were registered as a ‘Scheduled Tribe’ by the Indian government in 1967. The present study is based on research carried out during 2004–6 in two prominent villages of the Niti Valley, Lata and Reni, located in the western part of the buffer zone and near the only entry point to the core zone. The villages lie in Chamoli district from where the famous Chipko movement against commercial felling began in the early 1970s. The villagers actively participated in the movement and successfully stopped commercial felling of their forests by forest department contractors. The livelihoods and identity of the Bhotiya people were indeed intimately linked with their natural surroundings through their transhumance activities and the ancient trans-Himalayan trade with Tibet (FürerHaimendorf 1981).4 The Niti Valley inhabitants devoted most of their time to sheep and goat rearing and agriculture. To sustain their agro-pastoral economy, they relied on the natural resources that surrounded them: their village forest played an important role in providing them fuel wood, fodder, leaf litter for animal bedding, other non-timber forest products and grazing lands in winter. Their fields produced a part of their food (buckwheat, barley, millet, local pulses) and their high altitude alpine meadows (attached to each village through a customary use rights system called haq)—source of medicinal and edible plants—were used as summer pastures. Their cash needs, very low as in any subsistence economy, were supplied first by the sale of cash crops (potatoes and kidney beans), of various woollen handloom products, and of medicinal and aromatic plants. During the 1970s, mountaineering expeditions also provided another significant source of income, as the Bhotiyas worked as guides and porters in the Nanda Devi basin. There was no governmental market for these activities of trade and services, which rested on informal exchange networks. The remoteness of the Nanda Devi area, away from the major economic centres and devoid of infrastructure, had limited the Bhotiya people to a small social unit living on a territory from which they met their basic needs. Their economy was mainly based on agro-pastoralism with small surpluses available for exchange in regional markets. Wealth was not measured so much in any form of currency as in the form of natural resources.

‘Too many Adams in Eden’? The Shaky Premises of the Exclusionary Approach This social configuration, claimed today by the Bhotiyas as ‘our traditions’, dramatically changed after the establishment of the Nanda Devi National Park in 1983. A few years before, an Indian ecologist Lavkumar Khacher (1978) published a paper that sounded the alarm. According to him there were ‘too many Adams in Eden’ (1983: 44) and it was imperative that measures be taken to protect the Nanda Devi area for posterity. Khacher made his case by first giving a geographical description of what was known as the Nanda Devi

‘Sanctuary’ to mountaineers. Using this image at great length, he showed how the spectacular ring of more than a dozen peaks over 6,400 metres high that surrounds the Nanda Devi glacial basin had kept it ‘inviolable’ (1978: 868) till 1934, when the first access route inside the ‘sanctuary’ was discovered by the British explorers Shipton and Tilman. Undisturbed by the ‘outer world’ (ibid.: 868), the basin, covered by alpine meadows and thick pine and deodar forests, provided a home to numerous species of large mammals and song birds. This geographical situation ‘kept local villagers out’ (ibid.: 876) and left the area free from human settlement. This rhetoric was used to demonstrate that the basin constituted an ‘unspoiled’ natural entity disconnected from the human context that surrounded it, in accordance with the then prevailing wilderness myth. Little attention was given to the pastures considered locally as the commons of Lata and Reni, where the shepherds use to bring their flocks from April (after the winter snow melts) to October. Furthermore, if there were indeed no concrete (pakka) houses in the basin, the high altitude pastures were dotted with chanees, i.e., wooden or stone huts used as shelters for the shepherds during the summer season. The basin was thus an integral part of the livelihood of the Bhotiyas, as well as a link between the people and their divinities, as we shall see later. Consequently, to portray the basin as a terra nullius created the illusion that since the basin belonged to no one, it actually belonged to everyone. The State was thus in a position to exercise its right of ‘eminent domain’,5 by asserting its dominion over the basin for the public good. The second argument in favour of the park was, of course, ecological. According to this, the basin would undergo rapid degradation if the alpine expeditions, pastoral activities and poaching were to continue. Indeed, Khacher denounced the damage caused by mountaineering expeditions, which involved, with an average of four expeditions per season, more than 200 men and more than a thousand of pack goats (ibid.: 881). Their footprints have left scars on the basin (trails, depletion of the vegetation and landslides due to the passage of animals, firewood and juniper collection as sources of fuel, felling of trees to build bridges, camping sites turned into refuse dumps). If this sombre picture painted by Khacher was unfortunately accurate, he also pointed out that there were no governmental checks whatsoever on individual trekkers and Indian expeditions, with only the foreign expeditions being registered with the Indian Mountaineering Foundation. The pastoral activities of the Bhotiyas were also brought into question. After the closure of the Tibetan border in 1962, the Bhotiyas living in the upper Niti valley lost access to their grazing lands and started using the pastures in the lower valley. According to Khacher, this situation had led to overgrazing in the pastures, with the risk that ‘enterprising’ shepherds would lead their flocks further up into the sanctuary (ibid.: 877). He also questioned an ancestral practice of the shepherds, who use fires in the dry season to clear the long grass and to permit their animals to get at green sprouting grass (ibid.: 881). Both these arguments are largely open to debate even today. There is a scientific uncertainty concerning the ecological consequences of grazing and fires. If, in some cases, they represent a real threat for the ecosystems, many authors underline that these activities also play a significant role in shaping the vegetation structure and composition of a landscape, as has been reported for grazing in the adjacent Valley of Flowers (Naithani et al. 1992). Following the closure of the core zone and the abandonment of alpine pastures, the growth of thorny bushes, shrubs and unwanted weeds have been threatening the biodiversity of the area, especially many valuable alpine herbs (Nautiyal and Kaechele 2007). The poaching activity in the Nanda Devi basin was closely linked to the humanisation of the area, through the opening of trails for mountaineering (Khacher 1978: 881). The poachers were particularly interested in musk deer, whose glands were sold at a steep price (today around Rs 4000 for a tola; a tola equals 12 grams), as well as in furs. The poachers apparently came from the adjacent region of Pithoragarh and from Nepal, but Bhotiya shepherds, who hold firearm licenses and spend a summer within the area, were also accused of indulging in poaching. The last argument developed by Khacher was the ‘positive human factor' (ibid.: 882). The conservation authorities would have everything to gain by working with local people, if they acknowledged ‘the innate intelligence of the peasants to understand the value of conservation for their own survival’ (ibid.: 882). The Chipko movement, which was quite obviously a movement of peasant resistance, is used as the irrefutable proof of the ecological concern of the Bhotiyas: ‘The heartening aspect of the satyagraha was not based on economical needs but on the highest of conservation principles—saving the forests to combat floods and

landslides!’ (ibid.: 882). Khacher fell here into the universal cliché of the ‘ecologically noble savage’ (Redford 1991), which portrays indigenous people as natural conservationists, living in ‘harmony’ with their environment. The Bhotiyas were also depicted as devout Hindus, who venerate the Nanda Devi peak as the physical form of the Goddess, which was another reason for them to protect the sanctuary. The plea of Khacher for the Nanda Devi national park is a good example of how the Bhotiyas’ relationship to their natural environment was perceived in the late 1970s. In his text, the fact that the livelihood of the Bhotiyas depended on the access and use of the natural resources of the basin was largely underestimated. Moreover, by presenting the relation of the Bhotiyas with nature as swinging back and forth between two extremes—going beyond material concerns (Chipko, veneration of Nanda Devi), or, on the contrary, falling into predatory forms (overgrazing, poaching)—the first rhetorical foundations of the alienation of the Bhotiyas from their environment were laid, and the first step towards exclusion was taken.

The Poverty Trap of Wildlife Conservation Under the aegis of the Wildlife Protection Act (1972), the main purpose of protected areas is to protect the ecological integrity of ecosystems, by restricting human activities within them or in their vicinity. Conservation policies rest indeed on the questionable claim that these areas, still relatively ‘intact’, must be protected from human exploitation in order to maintain their ‘balance’ and achieve a state of ‘naturalness’. The key objective is to let nature take its course with a minimal level of human disturbance. Thus, the core of the conservation work does not amount to very much: in the NDBR, it primarily comprised periodic scientific monitoring and patrols of forest guards to prevent poaching or any resource extraction activity within the inner sanctuary. The establishment of a PA (especially a national park) can thus be understood as a separation process of the local population from their means of subsistence. For the park authorities, this process is perceived as a liberation, in so far as it allows rural population, whose children ‘don’t want to work in the fields anymore’, to enter ‘modernity’, i.e., to leave the exhausting way of life of the countryside in order eventually to come to work in large cities. But, on the other side of this process, the loss of access to its means of subsistence means that the rural population also loses all the guarantees that their former livelihood offered, turning them into poor workers dependent upon state charity. For the villagers of the Niti Valley, the closure of the park has led to serious setbacks in their local economy. Their main subsistence activities, keystones of their social organisation, were dependent upon access to the basin, and their collapse has generated chain reactions in every domain of their lives. The most immediate shock was the end of mountaineering expeditions, which were up until 1974 their major source of income. Men used to work as porters and guides, while women were in charge of preparing meals for the mountaineers. Mountaineering was, however, a pretty recent activity for the Bhotiyas; until the advent of this activity, the sanctuary was seen as the abode of the goddess, and climbing the Nanda Devi peak was thus regarded a taboo. The ban on access to the sanctuary’s pastures has precipitated the end of pastoral activity. Livestock breeding was the keystone of various activities on which the Bhotiyas’ identity was built. They used to spend four months in the high pastures, four months in the village, and four months in the plains. Before the closure of the Tibetan border in 1962, their flocks were used for the trade with Tibet. They used to spin the wool to make handloom products that they sold in regional markets, as well as raw wool and young goats. The animal excrement was used as manure for their fields. Today, in Lata village, more than 97 per cent of the households have sold their flocks because of lack of pasture land. Only few villagers can afford to buy wool in the market to make their handloom products, and their knowledge of weaving is slowly dying out. The lack of manure has compelled the villagers to give up their less accessible fields. If the villagers want to maintain the fertility of their lands, they have to buy manure from the market. The collection of medicinal plants (jari booti) and minor forest products has also been hit by the ban of access to the sanctuary. These plants have medicinal properties that the Bhotiyas know how to make use of, especially by their vaids (local healers). Following a customary rule, they used to go to high altitude pastures in September, after the Nanda Ashtami festival, when the plants can be picked without disturbing their

growth process. They also used to pick aromatic plants and wild vegetables for their food. There are few villagers who, in spite of the ban, still occasionally go into the sanctuary to pick such plants. But, as a villager said, they are now compelled to go ‘like a thief in the night’, without bothering anymore about ensuring the renewal of the plants. In addition to these immediate constraints, villagers are also forced to bear the costs of successful conservation programmes. While restrictions on hunting have denied them a means of self-defence, the wild animal populations have increased to the point that they now penetrate beyond the confines of the basin. Crop raiding by Himalayan black bears and wild boars are widely reported, as much as cattle lifting by leopards, amounting to losses that are at best poorly compensated by the Forest Department. Thus, the collapse of traditional activities of the Bhotiya people has left a vacuum which has accelerated their dependence upon the market economy. They are now forced to turn massively to products available in the towns, and to develop new economic activities. Money is needed to get food, clothes, medicines, and send their children to school. With agriculture as the only source of revenue, their economic situation has become extremely precarious. Their subsistence agriculture has been replaced by cash crops, resulting in a loss of agro-biodiversity, and again, a dependence upon the market economy. Given that the region is remote, the villagers have to rely on middlemen who buy their crops at discount prices. With a very low level of adult literacy, a large portion of the villagers work as wage labourers (mazdoors) in road construction (stonebreaking) or as porters for trekking agencies. Despite the lack of security that these odd jobs offer, the villagers take them up since within the village there is hardly any opportunity to work. Hence they need to leave the village. Villagers are becoming dependent upon rural development programmes such as the Jawahar Rojgar Yojna.6 Chasing work, the men no longer have the time to gather for the festivals in the villages, and the community bond seems to have disintegrated. Women, who have to take care of various domestic tasks, no longer have the time to take the cows grazing in the village forest every day; their children do this now, at the cost of their attendance in school. Those who have been lucky enough to go to school and to save up some money may eventually find a government job, thanks to the Scheduled Tribes quota. The rapid pauperisation of the Bhotiyas is thus characterised by a high unemployment rate among the youth and the mobility of a large part of the male population into the plains.7

The Practice of Ecodevelopment in the NDBR The precarious situation of the Bhotiya people has been widely reported in research publications as well as in newspaper articles (Maikhuri and Rao 1998). This sudden interest in them arose particularly after the Jhapto Chhino (‘swoop and grab’) movement of 1998, where a number of villagers from the Niti Valley entered the core zone of the NDBR to protest against the draconian ban on local access. At that time, reports on the inadequacy of coercive conservation practices were flourishing, and discourses on conservation were changing in India as well as internationally. A shift from exclusion to ‘participation’ of local people in conservation was advocated. After a long series of policy interventions, an ecodevelopment strategy was developed by the Government of India in the early 1990s to better link PA management with livelihood needs. The strategy embraced a ‘community-based’ approach encouraging durable partnerships between FD staff and local communities. Ecodevelopment in the Indian context aims to provide alternative livelihood options to villagers so as to reduce their pressure on protected natural resources. Each village is first motivated by the FD to form a new community-based organisation called Gram Sansadhan Vikas Samiti (village ecodevelopment committee, VEDC). Other village institutions already in activity, such as Van Sanrakshan Samiti (forest protection committees) or Mahila Mangal Dal (women’s welfare associations, WWA), are also involved in the ecodevelopment project. The VEDC is in charge of designing and implementing a five-year micro-plan, through participatory rural appraisal and the medium of the FD staff, playing the role of facilitator for VEDC. The micro-plan defines a package of activities that could be useful in reducing the negative impact of local people on biodiversity and of the PA on the local people. Funds are released to the VEDC directly on the basis of the micro-plan. In the NDBR, the World Bank-funded forestry project of Uttaranchal has provided funds to implement

ecodevelopment programmes in 14 villages out of 47 villages of the buffer area of the enlarged NDBR (including the Valley of Flowers). The villages selected at the outset are situated quite close to the core areas. The basic objective of the programme is to associate local people with the conservation activities taken up by the park authorities, and to develop employment opportunities in the villages. In Lata village, the VEDC was set up in 2003. There are 14 village members and one village leader, all elected by the village assembly (Gram Sabha). With the help of the FD, the VEDC takes responsibility for carrying out activities such as: Ecorestoration works (security walls to prevent rains from washing away dirt tracks, check dams to retain excess water during monsoon rains, security nets to fix the riverbed during monsoon, plantations); Conservation work, particularly controlling the infiltration of herb collectors and poachers inside the PA; Activities to support livelihood needs such as construction of pipelines, water tanks, water troughs for livestock in each house, and distribution of solar lanterns, gas connections and pressure cookers; Distribution of loans to individual beneficiaries for buying milk cows, LPG gas, production of fruits and vegetables (interest rate of 9 per cent); Incentives to grow medicinal plants around the village in order to sell them. While micro-plans are programmed for five years, the budget to support ecodevelopment activities is allocated to VEDC annually; if the work is well-done, the VEDC gets more money to carry out its activities. The budget depends upon the type of work done. Usually, the VEDC is in charge of all the implementation operations (purchase of raw material, handling, etc.). However, the VEDC can only obey orders: it is the FD which receives the budget and distributes it (the villagers do not know the real amount of the budget allocated to them; they suspect corruption), takes decisions (micro-planning is done during meetings between FD officials and the villagers, but partnership between villagers and the FD is a very one-sided affair, since the FD holds the real power), and finally gives orders to the VEDC. As a result, all the ecodevelopment activities lasted two and a half years, and then stopped. Due to women’s involvement in Chipko, the Lata village has a strong and active WWA. This association is headed by a woman, who is assisted by nine members. Money comes from the government and the FD, but the bank account is in the name of the head of the WWA. During the first two years of the VEDC, the WWA budget was Rs 1 lakh. In 2006 (the year I visited), no money was deposited, the bank account stood at Rs 3000. Financing is not steady; it depends on the FD, and on two external incomes that are supposed to feed into the WWA account regularly: 1) permits paid by tourists to the FD, which transfers a proportion of the money to the WWA, and 2) the wool carding machine8 set up by the FD to silence the Jhapto-Cheeno Andolan. In the beginning, there were lots of work and money, but now, due to the lack of wool, the machine runs at half its speed and can no longer ensure the functioning of the women’s association. As in the case of the VEDC, the WWA carries out the following activities: Loans (interest rate of 7 per cent); Awareness programmes (at the request of the FD), such as environmental education programmes in schools, cleaning garbage, plastic bags and plastic bottles, plantations in the village; Reception of tourists. On the ground, the ecodevelopment project constitutes a meagre compensation and is not yet a sustainable livelihood option. This short overview of the context and practice of ecodevelopment in the NDBR allows us to draw some lessons as regards the nature of ecodevelopment and particularly why, whilst aiming to promote participation of the resident people, it ends up leaving them even more disempowered than before.

‘Participatory’ Biodiversity Conservation: A Further Form of Disempowerment?

A significant insight into the attitude of the authorities towards the question of integration of local people is provided by the report carried out by the team in charge of the scientific monitoring of the NDBR (UAFD 2004). The closure of the park has over the years allowed a significant improvement of the ecological situation, as has been acknowledged by the scientific team. Interestingly, despite these remarkable positive changes and the adverse effects of the complete ban on access to natural resources for the impoverished population living in the vicinity of the park, the scientists recommend that ‘The Nanda Devi National Park should continue to remain inviolate’ (ibid.: viii). Why lose an opportunity to adjust conservation policies to a given context? As the leader of the biodiversity monitoring expeditions in Nanda Devi explained during an interview, the aim of conservation today is not only to ensure the renewal of natural resources, but also to maintain biodiversity, i.e., the variety of all forms of life, from genes to species, through to the broad scale of ecosystems. Yet decisions about biodiversity involve considerable scientific uncertainty: our general knowledge of the structure and function of ecosystems is incomplete. As a result the only way found to conserve biodiversity is, as it were, to wrap the natural environment up in cotton wool. In other words, the scientists take refuge behind scientific uncertainty as an argument to close off the debate about the legitimacy of excluding resident people from within the PA. It should thus be clear that with this very widespread interpretation of biodiversity governance, the exclusionary approach to wildlife conservation still has a bright future. Ecodevelopment is not a break from this approach, for it permits a quiet form of exclusion carried out in the name of ‘participation’. Significantly, understanding how ecodevelopment was concretely implemented in Lata village was not an easy affair, as the large majority of villagers are simply not aware of the content of ecodevelopment activities in their village—a good indication of the degree of ‘participation’ in the micro-planning process. If it is acknowledged that the major problems faced by the ecodevelopment approach are mostly due to the gap between the stated objectives and actual policy outcomes, they are also largely induced by a number of weaknesses in the very idea of ecodevelopment (Saberwal, Ranagarajan and Kothari 2001), that we will try to understand now with the case of Lata village. The basis of ecodevelopment is to provide alternative livelihood options to villagers so as to reduce their pressure on protected natural resources. What does this mean concretely? First of all, according to this strategy of diverting human ‘pressure’ from PA, human activities are perceived as detrimental to wildlife conservation, as in conventional conservation thinking. Thus, we are still trapped in a dualistic approach where humans and nature must be separated from each other. The exclusion of local people from PA is still considered as the best option (even if a number of studies have shown the opposite, see ibid.), rather than trying to integrate their traditional practices into the conservation effort. Therefore ecodevelopment is limited to the periphery of PA, which means that the local people do not participate in the management of the core protected zone. Second, by encouraging ‘alternative’ livelihoods, i.e., livelihoods that are not dependent on the use of natural resources, ecodevelopment accelerates the entry of local people into the market economy, initiated by the former preservationist policy. The only difference is that ecodevelopment offers local people some tools (loans, employment opportunities), which are more governmental handouts than sustainable job opportunities. Few efforts are made to utilise the financial support of ecodevelopment as seed money for the revolving fund of the community, for example in the case of the WWA. The point here is not to preach for keeping local people in a so-called ‘backward’ state, since it is very clear that today new needs have arisen and aspirations have also changed, but rather to realise that if ecodevelopment is meant to fulfill these aspirations, it should be adjusted to each particular context. A lack of communication with the local people and sitespecific knowledge has led to ridiculous situations. For example, when the NDBR staff ask the villagers to grow medicinal plants in their village the latter, who recognise that it could be a great income generating activity, justifiably point out that all the expensive medicinal plants grow in alpine areas and cannot, for ecological reasons, be grown in the low altitudes where the villages are located, and villagers are not allowed to pick them in alpine meadows. Moreover, there is no government market to sell these plants. Rather, the cash needs of the community, induced by conservation policies, leads to market-driven, illegal, natural resource exploitation associated with environmental pressures: in spite of the ban, people go into the core zone in order to bring back valuable medicinal plants, and sometimes musk glands and furs to sell to middlemen. Even in the case of agriculture, there is no governmental system where their products can be

bought at a fixed rate. Farmers produce fewer potatoes, fearing a loss of production. The same could be said for woollen handloom. If the point of ecodevelopment is to generate alternative livelihoods, money could be fruitfully used to build these lacking infrastructures. Ecodevelopment rests on the creation and functioning of VEDC. The VEDC is a new entity which has no links with the existing management system in the village. Why not build ecodevelopment on available community institutions such as the Gram Sabha or the Van Panchayat, one might justifiably ask? To create a new institution not grounded in the village management system leads to a high degree of dependence on the funds provided for its functioning and to a lack of legitimacy. The committees are furthermore rather inefficient and sometimes with overlapping functions. A new committee is created with each new governmental initiative, and dropped as soon as the funds run out. The only reason for the creation of VEDC is the need for the FD to be part of it, and ultimately control it. The same thing happened under Joint Forest Management, and it is no surprise that ecodevelopment was to be built upon the ‘gains’ of this other governmental initiative, which has since been severely called into question (Sarin 2001). Another weakness of ecodevelopment, largely due to its poor implementation, is the lack of true ‘participation’ in the micro-planning process. As we have seen, the power struggle is highly unbalanced, largely in favour of the FD. Ecodevelopment thus causes a significant loss of decision-making power for villagers, since micro-plans are developed by the FD. The villagers complain that they can no longer do anything on their own initiative concerning natural resource use without prior approval of the forestry staff. From being responsible for forest management (through their customary land use system, but also through their local institutions such as the Van Panchayat and the Mahila Mangal Dal), the villagers’ role has been reduced to providing information for the preparation of micro-plans and working as wage labourers for short-term activities. Their opinions are never sought when it comes to delicate questions. For example, through the awareness programme, the villagers were encouraged to clean up their areas, but were never told about the potentially adverse effects of underground tunnels dug for the hydroelectric project in the Niti Valley, a very serious matter in this earthquake prone zone. Finally, by involving people—at least in theory—in planning the development of their area, but without giving them a real stake, ecodevelopment reflects the inability of the authorities to seriously contemplate community ownership. As Ashish Kothari and Vasant Saberwal demonstrate (2001: 86): ‘[…] ecodevelopment does not attempt to reverse the historical process of state take-over of community lands, and the common (though not universal) denial of rights and tenurial security over resources for local people.’

Conclusion For people dependent upon natural resources for their livelihood, the hasty and violent entry into the market economy induced by conservation policies and by ecodevelopment involves very severe pitfalls and limitations. This transition process, occurring all across indigenous peoples’ territories, is—despite the seductive claims of participation—carried out in a manner which ignores the aspirations of local communities and their dependence on the resources of the areas that are to be conserved. In the long run, the increased prohibition of access to productive resources will lead to an impasse. As Sunita Narain (2005) puts it: We have not made environment into a development challenge. Because we have still not learnt how to use it sustainably. Therefore, environmental protection becomes an invariable conflict with development. [… ] So far, we know only two ways of working the environment. We either use it for extractive purposes, in which we rape the forests, destroy our resources. Or we throw a protective ring around it, to stop the environment from degrading. But we have never really learnt how to use the environment for productive purposes in a sustainable manner. Thus, for the rural population, poverty is not only constituted by a lack of cash, but above all by a lack of access to natural resources and decision-making powers. From this perspective, we must underline that the problem goes beyond the issue of protected areas. The massive transformation of many Indian regions induced by the increase in the number of development projects (dams, roads, hydroelectric power plants) poses a real threat. All these projects encroach on the common good of villagers—and Uttarakhand is in the front line. ‘They are talking about poverty alleviation. But the only method they have found so far is to let the

poor die,' an old Bhotiya woman had told me during my research. A little hope and may be a historic opportunity lies in the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Right) Act (2006), which gives the ST rights over their lands and natural resources. However, the implementation of the Forest Act has scarcely begun and already voices are protesting against it, saying that it seals the death warrant of the forests.

References Agarwal, Anil. 2000. ‘Beyond the Billion’. Down To Earth 9(3): 30–36. Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph von. 1981. ‘Introduction’. In Asian Highland Societies, ed. C. von FürerHaimendorf. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA). 1994. Biodiversity Conservation through Ecodevelopment: An Indicative Plan. New Delhi: IIPA. Khacher, Lavkumar. 1978. ‘The Nanda Devi Sanctuary–1977’. Journal of Bombay Natural History Society 75(3): 868–86. ———. 1983. ‘Nanda Devi: A Goddess Desecrated’. Sanctuary Asia 3(1): 38–49. Maikhuri, R. K., and K. S. Rao. 1998. ‘A Ban on Common Sense’. Down to Earth 6(17): 36. Naithani, H. B., J. D. S. Negi, R. C. Thapliyal, and T. C. Pokhriyal. 1992. ‘Valley of Flowers: Need for Conservation or Preservation’. Indian Forester 118(5): 371–78. Narain, Sunita. 2005. ‘Need to Change Directions’. Seminar 545. www.india-seminar.com. Accessed on 17 October 2011. Nautiyal, A, and H. Kaechele. 2007. ‘Adverse Impacts of Pasture Abandonment in Himalayan Protected Areas: Testing the Efficiency of a Natural Resource Management Plan (NRMP)’. Environmental Impact Assessment Review 27: 109–25. Redford, Kent. 1991. ‘The Ecologically Noble Savage’. Orion 9: 24–29. Saberwal, Vasant, Mahesh Rangarajan, and Ashish Kothari. 2001. People, Parks and Wildlife. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Sarin, Madhu. 2001. ‘Disempowerment in the Name of ‘Participatory’ Forestry? Village Forests Joint Management in Uttarakhand’. Forest, Trees and People, Newsletter No. 44. Sen, Amartya K. 1999. Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf Press. Silori, C. S. 2001. ‘Biosphere Reserve Management in Theory and Practice: Case of Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve, Western Himalaya, India’. Journal of International Wildlife Law and Policy 4: 205–19. Uttaranchal Forest Department (UAFD). 2004. Biodiversity Monitoring Expedition Nanda Devi 2003: A Report to the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. Dehra Dun: Uttaranchal State Forest Department.

THREE

Wildlife Conservation and Tribal Livelihood in the Brahmaputra Floodplains ÉMILIE CRÉMIN

Every year, during the monsoon season, millions of people are affected by floods in India. In Northeast India, the Brahmaputra River regularly submerges the lowest lands of the state of Assam, where different communities depend on the natural resources of the floodplains for their livelihood. The riverside dwellers have developed different adjustment mechanisms to natural hazards over centuries. Originally, living in the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh, the Mising tribe1 has been migrating out to the Brahmaputra floodplains of Assam since the thirteenth century, most probably in search of fertile land (Lego 2005:10; Mipun 1993: 36). They have defined their territory during a long process of migration and adaptation to new environmental constraints.2 Consequently, they have integrated with the diversity of socioethnical groups such as the Ahoms, Nepalis, Bangladeshis, ex-tea tribes and others, who are gathered in the plains. Currently, Mising villages are mainly settled in upper Assam along a narrow strip of wetland situated between the Himalayan foothills and the river, on the north bank of the Brahmaputra, as well as on the opposite south bank. During their migration, some of their clan members crossed the large braided river to reach the territory of the Bokakhat Subdivision of the Golaghat district where the Kaziranga National Park (KNP), classified as a UNESCO World Heritage reserve,3 is situated today. Because they have been living for so long in the river floodplains, the members of the Mising tribe have accumulated extensive knowledge of the abundant biodiversity and the various ecosystems present within the Brahmaputra wetlands. In order to overcome the ecological constraints of the river hydrosystem (i.e., floods and erosion), the Misings have developed adaptive strategies such as seasonal or permanent migration, the development of diversified agricultural system provided by land-cover mosaics and seasonal potential of climate, as well as the use of construction techniques adjusted to periodic flooding. Since the 1950 earthquake the Brahmaputra river bed has become larger causing flooding and erosion and riverside agricultural land to decrease4 (Sarma 2005). A strip of five kilometres of riverside land has been eroded in the Bokakhat area since the earthquake.5 These eroded lands were inhabited and cultivated by the Mising community. The families have accordingly shifted their villages further inland (Map 3.1). Meanwhile, in 1974, the Mising villages within the KNP were evicted by the forest department and have settled on the fringe of the protected area. The villagers became more vulnerable with the growth of population density on a reduced territory. Since then, they have had to constantly adjust to new social pressures and biophysical constraints that raise unprecedented environmental concerns for their territory. In this chapter we will emphasise on the importance of ecological knowledge in the appropriation of the natural resources and the impact of the National Park management on the disruption of a social and ecological system within the Mising tribe’s territory and its consequences.

A Socio-ecological System Rooted in Local Ecological Knowledge: Mising Agricultural Land Use in Bokakhat As Philippe Descola has demonstrated, the dualism between nature and culture is a social construction of modern western philosophy (Descola 2005; Latour 1997). The approach proposed by Friket Berkes et al. (2000) concerning socio-ecological systems makes it possible to explore environmental problems as a direct

interaction or interplay between nature and society. This approach emphasises that humans must be seen as a part of, not apart from, nature. Knowledge of natural resources, ecosystem dynamics and associated management practices exist among communities which, on a daily basis and over long periods of time, interact for their benefit and livelihood with ecosystems.

Map 3.1 Map of the Kaziranga National Park and Mising fringe village in the Bokakhat subdivision. Source: Google Earth 2009, realised by Émilie Crémin 2009.

Development of a Socio-ecological System based on the Ecological Knowledge of the Brahmaputra Floodplains Over time, the territory of the Mising tribe has been repeatedly redefined by the instability of the floodplains leading to the sporadic resettlement of its different groups. These groups choose to migrate to the Brahmaputra wetland plains, whose ecosystems provide abundant and diversified natural resources. In the area of the KNP, the Mising tribe has inherited local knowledge concerning the ecological functions of the plains and its biodiversity. This functional knowledge of the local environment encompasses a glossary of terms designed to describe, classify and interpret natural objects. It explains how each component of the ecosystem operates (Levi-Strauss 1962: 11–49; Métailié and Roussel 1998). The Brahmaputra is a braided river in a constant state of change, roaming across unrestricted floodplains, creating and destroying side channels, sand bars, backwaters, oxbow lakes, swamps and a variety of other ecosystems. As they are connected to natural drainage systems, the wetland depressions called beel in Assamese, contain a variety of fish species. The Mising fishermen fish in those beels, using various tools or instruments depending on the water level and characteristics of the ecosystem. Before the massive deforestation that took place during the nineteenth century, the practice of slash-andburn cultivation (jhum) was used in the plains in the way the Adi tribe practises it today in the hills (see Mipun 1993: 22; Smadja 2009). They cultivated rain-fed rice called ahu (in Assamese) from February to June. The lowest lands were used for widespread cultivation, mainly for the floating bao rice from June to November. The more elevated lands covered by forests made it possible for them to collect fruits, leaves, medicinal plants and wood for different domestic uses. The villagers would abandon a given plot when the river changed its course or when the soil fertility declined and moved on to more fertile lands. Until the 1950s, migratory habits associated with an itinerant form of agriculture represented an adaptive strategy to the hazards of a complex and inherently unstable floodplain’s ecosystem. The Misings consider, even now, that the performance of rituals supports the good management of the territory and brings about good harvests. Thus, rituals are performed before the sowing of ahu rice, during the ali aye ligang6 festival, and after harvesting.

The usual Mising village settles temporarily on and along natural alluvial embankments above wetland depressions, surrounded by forests covering the levees. Drawing from their past as hill-dwellers, they have retained the knowledge of how to build houses. This knowledge of house architecture allows them to build platform houses on piles called Chang ghar (in Assamese)—houses that stand in the centre of the communitarian territory and of the family homestead. (Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1 A Mising Chang ghar (traditional house) in the new relocated village called Borbeel Mising gaon, situated near the Kaziranga National Park. Photo: Courtesy of Émilie Crémin, February 2007. Riverside ecosystems are quite different from mountain environments. However, bamboo houses are functional in the wetland, as the high platform above the ground protects the people from wild animals and annual floods. Building materials, collected directly from the natural resources surrounding the villages, are partly different from those of the hills but bamboo remains a major resource. Ecological knowledge and local ways of life are dynamic and have been transformed over time. Ever since they have settled in the Brahmaputra floodplains, the Misings have adopted new natural resource exploitation techniques from interactions with Ahoms and other Assamese communities. These interactions have generated an innovative blend of techniques that gives them the capacity to manage and appropriate wetland ecosystems efficiently (Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Transect of the agro-ecological zones in the Brahmaputra floodplains. The traditional ecological knowledge permits the villagers to take the benefits from the mosaic of ecosystems using the low land to cultivate paddy, grassland for cattle and forests to collect products for daily needs. Source: Crémin 2007. Throughout history, humanity has shaped nature and nature has shaped the development of human society (Burel and Baudry 2000). With the use of the natural resources, the Misings are reshaping their territorial landscape by transforming the riverside ecosystem. Evidence of such transformation can be seen through the agricultural activities (Deffontaines 1998). Thus, landscape is the spatial manifestation of the relations between humans and their environment.

Current Seasonal Organisation of Land Use Land use is the management of natural resources by humans, which can lead to modification of ecosystems into agro-ecosystems such as fields, pastures, and settlements or the conservation of the so-called ‘wilderness’ into protected areas. In Assam, the diverse ecosystems of the floodplains have been altered mainly by the massive deforestation of the colonial period and by the construction of artificial levees (or embankments) built to protect the land from flood. The agricultural practices had to be adjusted to this new land use planning inducing environmental changes. Since this period, in the low-lying wetlands, monsoon paddy cultivation alternates with wheat and mustard cultivation during the dry season. The hali rice7 is cultivated in the low land from June to December but this crop is risky as it is vulnerable to the hazards of floods. Since the 1980s, new varieties of high-yielding rice associated with irrigation and cultivated between September and June are added. The uncultivated common lands, including alluvial forests and grasslands, mostly covering sand bars in the river bed called char or sapori in Assamese, are spaces used as grazing land where villagers can also collect small wood, grasses for roof thatching and fodder. Whilst improving the ecosystem of the plains, the Misings have developed a polyculture8 that permits selfsufficiency (Kutum 2005). The practice of subsistence farming on reduced areas of land with limited inputs produces enough food to meet the basic needs of a family. As the forest areas are no longer available for collection of resources specific to these ecosystems, homestead gardens have now become important substitutes for the in situ conservation of a wide range of unique genetic resources of food and agriculture (Subedi et al. 2004; Ramakrishnan 2008: 40). In their home gardens, the villagers have domesticated a wide variety of wild plants found in the wetland and forest ecosystems (Shrivastava and Heinen 2005; Boissya and Kalita 1997). Conservation of these plants permits the survival of many species that would otherwise disappear because of deforestation (see Haudricourt 1987). A high level of man-made agrobiodiversity9 is thus concentrated around the houses in the form of medicinal plants, vegetables, ornamental flowers, construction materials, etc. Kitchen gardens are typically cultivated with a mixture of annual and perennial plants that can be harvested on a daily or seasonal basis. They provide a safety net for households when other types of food are scarce.

Thus, their ecological knowledge permits optimal land management of a small territory in a relative balance with the characteristics of the riverside ecosystems. Although farm activities have been shaping the community’s territory and the landscape of Bokakhat for many centuries, the organisation of the territory is currently disrupted by increased biophysical constraints and administrative regulations.

Defining the Territory of KNP’s Fringe Villages Administrative and Land Tenure Constraints Dominated by the Chutia and the Kachari kingdoms from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries and annexed by the Ahom Kingdom between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, upper-Assam was administered by the British Empire from 1838 until India’s independence in 1947. Over the years the territorial regulations and land tenure systems in the area have been successively modified (Gait 2006; Karna 2004; Jacquesson 1999). These regulations have defined the status and the shape of the territory across Assam (Shrivastava and Heinen 2005). Currently, there are 27 registered villages (revenue villages) inhabited by a majority of Misings in the Bokakhat subdivision land use plan of 1958 (Crémin 2007). This process of administrative integration has restricted the communities’ migratory habit, leading them to adopt permanent settlement in the territorial limits defined by the land tenure system within the Bokakhat subdivision. In their own spatial representations, the territorial boundaries have been traditionally mobile, their spatial organisation changing from one season to the next, adjusting to the natural hazards. This mobility of the territorial boundaries is, however, not recognised in the government’s land use plan. The last few generations of this community are being sedentary but the river regularly erodes the river banks on which the plots of land allocated to the Mising villagers are situated. These villages are washed away every year and the people are thereby compelled to find new lands to build new houses and to satisfy their daily needs. Some of the families are resettled inland, other families choose to stay on the river bank but they have no land rights and thus they settle illegally in the fringe area of the KNP on the Forest Department land.

Kaziranga National Park Fringe Villages and the Wildlife Conservation Policy The Kaziranga Reserved Forest was created under the British rule in 1908. Until the foundation of the Kaziranga National Park in 1974, the conservation policy allowed villagers to collect forest products. However, since then, conservation policy has increased the separation between the wildlife protected area and the local people. Earlier, the KNP was a temporarily inhabited space and a part of the territory of the Bokakhat Mising community. With the KNP coming into force, the villagers have been excluded from the protected area. Physical constraints and pressures on natural resources caused by demographic pressure have compelled the Forest Department to implement a number of measures to improve the protection against the encroachment of local villagers (Gokhale 2005). One of these territorial planning measures concerns the extension of the protected area by integrating the sand bars created after land erosion in a sixth addition10 (Mishra 2005; Smadja 2009; Dieulot and Vassor 2008). Having been evicted from the successive additions of the protected area, the Misings are directly affected by these conservation policies. The extension of the KNP area reduces land potentially exploitable by them while regulations regarding access into the park area interfere directly with the collection of non-cultivated (wild) products such as fish used for daily meal, plants used as vegetables or as medicine, wood used as fire-wood or as house pillars, and grass for fodder or used in house partitions and roof. The number of protected species (rhinoceroses, elephants, buffalos, and deers) is constantly rising. With the increasing density of wild animals, some of them escape from the protected area and graze on the cultivated land but the villagers do not receive compensation for the damage caused to their crops by wild animals. The park has recently implemented the construction of an electric fence to delimit the border between the wild and the domesticated animals. The extension measures have been decided upon by the

authorities without any consultation with the communities and the arrangements to prevent the depredation by wild animals are still insufficient to protect cultivated lands. This situation creates tensions between the villagers and the Forest Department. The governmental measures applied in the Bokakhat Subdivision are contradictory. The Forest Department tries to protect the area by excluding the local people. At the same time, the territorial authorities of the Bokakhat Subdivision try to help the villagers intensify their agricultural productions (mainly paddy and mustard), which may damage the Brahmaputra floodplains by an overexploitation of its natural resources. An action plan involving co-management or participatory management is non-existent in the KNP conservation strategy.

Pressure on Populations and Natural Resources The demographic pressure adds itself to geophysical and administrative constraints on a territory. The demographic growth in Assam has increased the population density in the Brahmaputra floodplains from an average of 286 inhabitants per square kilometres in 1991 to 34011 inhabitants per square kilometres in 2001. This growth limits access to sufficient agricultural land and increases the pressure on the natural resources. The lands are continually being exploited and the production of crops intensified, which leads to overexploitation and to degradation of biodiversity, soil fertility and reduction of harvest. In Assam, population density is also increasing due to the migration of people from Bangladesh12 and Bihar. Facing an annual environmental devastation in the Gangetic plains, thousands of families are annually searching for lands where they can settle. These families subsist essentially on paddy cultivation, fishing and cattle grazing. They encroach the Forest Department land and compete for access to the limited natural resources with other dwellers of the floodplains and they also get involved in conflicts with territorial authorities. As a matter of fact, the combination of geophysical, administrative and demographic constraints adversely affects the territory and obliges the Misings to modify their way of life. The anterior socio-ecological systems of the floodplain dwellers are disrupted and become more vulnerable to changes, whereas they used to have an adaptive strategy to cope with natural hazards. The socio-ecological system is hardly able to adjust to higher pressure on natural resources because of scarcity of land and administrative restrictions. This environmental concern is ultimately increasing the impoverishment of the riverine communities.

Mitigating the Consequences of Environmental Change The Misings are excluded from the conservation area and their existing land is affected by bank erosion. So their territory is reduced and remain under pressure of wildlife depredation as well as increasing demand of land for a growing population still depending on agriculture for their livelihood. In such circumstances, the Misings of the fringe villages of the KNP try to find some new adaptive strategies to cope with natural hazards and administrative constraints. The villagers ask for resettlement on land that could lawfully be given to them. However, this process is time consuming and many remain without land for several years. They shift to areas that are not flood-prone such as embankments and alluvial terraces. Even if away from floods, the lands they now settle on are affected by erosion, leading to further relocation—this time to sites outside the limits defined by the land use plan. Whereas there is no legal right of the displaced villagers, the villagers settled on the public land are called ‘encroachers’. They are mainly settled on the embankments to protect themselves from floods even if they are liable to administrative eviction. From those embankments they have access to the sand bars on which the cattle can graze and from which they can extract natural resources, as they did previously. But, since 1999 this area has been included in the KNP and access to it is controlled by the forest guards.

Government-led Flood, Erosion and Poverty Alleviation Initiatives Since the 1980s, public authorities have been implementing different projects in order to spur the development of the floodplains territories. Embankments are built to fight the devastating effects of floods and erosion. However, they are changing the hydro-geomorphologic structure of the alluvial floodplains by

separating the swamps from the hydrographical network and actually impeding the process of draining the wetlands. The embankments have not been successful in protecting the land from the floods as breaches frequently occur and large areas of land are consequently damaged by sudden flooding. Technological improvements are not sufficient to control the vagaries of the powerful river. Nevertheless, one observes an unexpected process in the cultivated area close to the KNP: the streams connected with the watershed of the park permit the regulation of the floods within the fringe villages (Dieulot and Vassor 2008). To solve the problem of ‘encroachment’, authorities have relocated and resettled four villages affected by erosion further inland. These new villages are integrated into already existing land use plans. They are often rebuilt near tea gardens, on parcels of land which are not suitable for the agricultural techniques used by the community and where the access to natural resources is limited. So, those Misings who have been resettled inland by the local authorities commute several kilometres every day to reach the lands and the swamps from where they can extract the resources which are necessary to follow their traditional practices. While adapting to a new natural environment and the Assamese society, some Misings have changed their practice. As thousands of villagers have lost their lands and are consequently unemployed, they are starting new economic activities. Villagers living below the poverty line receive some help from the Public Distribution System (PDS) (see Landy 2006) and from rural development programmes. The Indian government is promoting the modernisation of agricultural practices to increase productivity by introducing new varieties of high-yielding rice, of inputs (pesticides and fertilisers) and irrigation systems using motor pumps (see ibid.). Application of green revolution through intensification of agriculture involving the use of water pumps, use of high yielding varieties, input of fertilisers and pesticides are leading to an overexploitation of ecosystems in Bokakhat. The pesticides dissolved in the water might have already altered the composition of the flora and fauna in the marshy lands. Modernisation has transformed agricultural technologies. It has also made them dependent on the state and the market economy. The creation of Self Help Groups (SHG) respects the social organisation of the villages. However, the villagers frequently return to their traditional practices after they have used the subsidies. Only a few projects are economically sustainable.

Coming Out of Territorial Claims in the Mising Territory The territory is a space used, appropriated and bearing the identity of a society. It is an arrangement of material and symbolic resources that can structure the daily lifestyle of a group (Debarbieux 2002). Territorial boundary limitations are created by the implementation of the cadastral plan and revenue village rules (see Brunet 2005). These two aspects of the territory—identity and administration—often contradict each other in the provision of land for the various parties involved. Mising people’s occupation and use of land are traditionally governed by customary laws which are different from those determined by the central government. To Mising villagers, territory is inevitably linked to natural resources. It extends to all the spaces occupied by them in upper Assam. Solutions proposed by public authorities have failed to take into account the cultural and socio-ecological particularities of the Mising tribe. Therefore the group continues to find its own solutions to the environmental constraints. The Misings have started to assert their constitutional rights from the 1980s (Racine 1996). In a regional context, already restructured by tribal autonomous territories the main organisations of the Mising tribe13 are asking for the application of constitutional rights through the Mising Autonomous Council (MAC) created in 1995 (Pegu 1998). The territorial claims of the MAC are based on the request for the application of the rights indicated in the Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution ( 1950) that already has a provision for the administration of Tribal Areas in the states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. These claims are influenced by regional and international dynamics which recognise the rights of indigenous peoples.14 This way, the Mising villagers may acquire control over the restructuring process of their territory in Assam. The Mising autonomous council has been dissolved by the government on 30 June, 2009. The Mising organisations from that time asked for an interim council to run the administration till election would be held. But the government appointed the North Assam commissioner as the administrator and constituted an advisory committee from the state administration to look after the council. No election has been announced

yet and the history of the MAC is still to be continued. The 27 villages of the Bokakhat subdivision,15 the ‘Dhansiri-Diboi constituency’, are included as a satellite area of the territory under the Mising Autonomous Council. The community hopes to get involved in the management of the additional areas under KNP instead of being again excluded. The judgment on the ‘6th additional area’ case is still pending in the Gauhati High Court (Smadja 2009) in October 2011.

Conclusion The Misings are dependent on the natural resources of the floodplains for their livelihood. The local ecological knowledge has permitted them to manage an ecosystem which is rich in biodiversity. This interaction between the Misings and the Brahmaputra floodplains environment has formed a socio-ecological system that is different from such systems elsewhere. However, the evolution of geophysical and administrative constraints, as well as additional pressures due to demographic growth and intensification of farming on reduced land, are leading to the ecosystem’s transformation in the fringe villages of the KNP. Since the creation of KNP, access to the park is prohibited and the sixth addition area includes the eroded land of Mising villages, transformed in sand bars, on which the conflict is based. Co-management is still not considered in the territorial management projects. Therefore the villagers are excluded from the protected areas and have become vulnerable to the recent dynamics. The National Forest Policy of 1988 recognises that the ‘lives of tribes living with and near the forests revolve around forests’ and enjoined that ‘the rights and concessions enjoyed by them should be fully protected. The domestic requirements of fuel wood, fodder, minor forest produce and construction timber should be the first charge of forest produce’. The policy further recognises the symbiotic relationship between tribal peoples and forests. The international community has recognised the close and traditional interdependence of many indigenous and local communities with their environment, notably in the preamble to the Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992. There is also a broad recognition that traditional knowledge can serve conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, two fundamental objectives of the Convention (Métailié and Roussel 1998). In December 2006, the Indian Parliament passed the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act. This historic legislation marks for the first time in India’s history that a law has been passed recognising the rights of forest communities.16 It aims at giving them ‘responsibility and authority for sustainable use, conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecological balance […] strengthening the conservation regime […] while ensuring food security’ (Forest Right Act notified on 1 January, 2008). The recent recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples could influence the authorities of the Bokakhat subdivision and the KNP officers to take into account the objectives set by the Convention on Biological Diversity: ‘Conservation of biodiversity, sustainable use of resources and equitable share of its advantages’, in order to allow the association between biodiversity conservation and sustainable social development. Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, and their governance requires flexibility and capacity to respond to environmental feedback (Levin 1998; Berkes et al. 2000; Dietz et al. 2003). Accordingly, societies depending on natural resources need to be flexible and constantly develop knowledge and understanding in order to cope with changes and uncertainty in complex adaptive systems. The Misings try and find new strategies in order to recover a territory which is under the combined pressures of administrative restrictions and biophysical hazards. Territorial claims are rising as a reaction to this situation. As the Assam government and the local administration do not propose specific answers to their concerns, they claim the application of a territorial autonomy. With territorial autonomy, the tribe also expects to get more facility to rebuild the traditional land use. The tribe’s territory is currently under construction. The creation of a Mising autonomous council will probably restructure the upper-Assam territory during the coming decades. With autonomy, they wish to get a better control of their territory. If decisions guide the management of natural resources to a new management mode, then a new socioecological system can to be put in place (Smadja 2009).

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Culture, ed. J. J. Kuli. Guwahati: Ayir Publications. Racine, Jean-Luc. 1996. ‘L’Assam et ses marges: Une histoire agitée’. In L’Inde contemporaine de 1995 à nos jours, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot, 249–66. Paris: Fayard. Ramakrishanan, P. S. 2008. Ecology and Sustainable Development: Working with Knowledge Systems. Delhi: National Book Trust. Sarma, J. N. 2005. ‘Fluvial Process and Morphology of the Brahmaputra River in Assam’. In Geomorphology 70(3–4): 226–56. Shrivastava, Rahul J., and J. T. Heinen. 2005. ‘Migration and Home Gardens in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam, India’. Journal of Ecological Anthropology 9(1): 20–34. Smadja, Joëlle. 2009. ‘Belonging, Protected Areas, and Participatory Management: The Case of Kaziranga National Park (Assam) and of the Misings’ Shifting Territory’. In The Politics of Belonging in the Himalayas. Local attachments and Boundary Dynamics, ed. J. Pfaff-Czarnecka and G. Toffin, 246–72. Delhi: Sage Publications. Subedi, A. P. et al. 2003. ‘Who Maintains Crop Genetic Diversity and How? Implications for On-farm Conservation and Utilization’. Culture and Agriculture 25(2): 41–50.

FOUR

Effects of the 1996 Timber Ban in Northeast India The Case of the Khamtis of Lohit District, Arunachal Pradesh* NICOLAS LAINÉ

In 1995, T. N. Godavarman Thirumulpad filed a petition, which led the Supreme Court of India to ban felling trees in any state without prior permission from the Union government. The verdict took place on 12 December, 1996. With Northeast India being one of the world biodiversity hotspots, this unprecedented measure was seen as a victory for conservationists and ecological activists from the subcontinent and abroad. The verdict has however had a critical impact on the economy and development of local communities in many parts of the country including the Northeast. The states of the region comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim, and representing one-fourth of the total area of India’s forests and half of the country’s domestic timber trade were the worst affected. This chapter focuses on the consequences of the ban on (Tai) Khamtis,1 a Scheduled Tribe (ST) living in Lohit district of Arunachal Pradesh. I will first describe the specific context in which timber operations emerged in Lohit district in order to understand the rapid growth of industry and opportunities generated for the Khamtis and other inhabitants of the district. I will then focus on the implementation of the 1996 ban and its direct consequences for the locals. While doing so, I will also show its implications for the state economy. The implementation of the ban was not an easy task and many adjustments were needed. I will discuss further the measures taken by the apex court and the efforts made by Arunachal Pradesh to encourage new economic sectors like tourism, tea plantation or the use of non-timber products (like bamboo or citronella grass, for example), as alternate sources of income. Finally, I will describe the present situation and the difficulties faced by the Khamtis of Arunachal Pradesh to sustain their development.

Context, Emergence and Growth of the Timber Industry in Lohit District Geographical and Historical Contexts Contrary to what happened to most of Northeast India during the colonial period, large-scale exploitation of natural resources, particularly timber, did not occur in the present Lohit district dominated by the Khamtis. The political and historical background of the region may explain this fact. During the British rule, Khamtis and populations like the Singphos or the Muttocks, created a lot of resistance (through violent acts and attacks) to avoid the advent of the imperialists in the region.2 As a consequence of these tensions, the latter were more focused on securing their position vis-à-vis the other local populations they dealt with. The British feared the threat of Burmese invasions, as they wanted to keep the region free from all kinds of problem. Despite several explorations, the present state of Arunachal Pradesh was an ‘Excluded Area’ in the Indian Constitution Act of 1935 and was administered by the Governor of Assam. Since the adjacent Upper Assam was devoted to the tea industry, timber was used mainly for making tea chests (Saikia 2005). Due to the specific situation mentioned above and the nature of relations shared between the British and the local populations, it is not surprising that till the time of India’s Independence, the North-east Frontier

Tract3 remained an unexplored area rich in biodiversity and forest resources. Moreover the region shares common international borders with Bhutan, Myanmar and China. Soon after the emergence of India as a nation the situation with China revealed the strategic location of the region. Indeed when India had granted asylum to the Dalai Lama (following the 1959 Tibetan uprising), violent incidents took place in many parts of the border (known as Mac Mohan Line). In this climate China invaded NEFA in 1962,4 the region being the gateway to India in the Northeast. At first, the newly formed democracy simply followed the policy of the British and did not encourage large-scale industry and exploitation of the region.

Map 4.1 Location of Lohit district in Arunachal Pradesh, Northeast India (Crémin 2010)

Emergence and Development of Saw Mills: Role of Khamti Elites (1950–1970) Only a small-scale timber industry existed in Lohit district before the independence of India. The first sawmill in the district, Lohit Saw Mill, was started in 1948 in Sunpura. Somehow this scenario started changing in 1952 when the present Arunachal Plywood Industry (an enterprise initially based near Pasighat having the

name of Bird Company Private Ltd.) shifted to Namsai as a consequence of the great earthquake in 1950 and the devastating flood that occurred the following year (Dutta Choudhury 1978). In the early years of India’s independence a few Khamti elites5 got the opportunity to occupy key posts in the region. Elected Khamti politicians had a lot of influence on Arunachal politics. Thus a saw mill was started in 1960 in Tezu, the headquarters of Lohit district, and was run by one of those elites. Prior to that, although valuable timber was readily available to Khamtis, they were not exploiting the resources for commercial purposes. Two reasons explain this point. First, because there was no demand for wood products, and second, machines for processing timber were not available (Misra 1994). The absence of communication at that time did not encourage the promotion of timber industry in the region. The saw mill that started in 1960 opened new development opportunities. Part of the processed timber was used for the construction of Tezu township, or was sent to Assam via Sadiya (ibid.). The same people then started a second saw mill and veneer industry in Chowkham. A study reveals that all the young Khamti entrepreneurs have taken help from an ex-member of Parliament in securing loans and establishing saw mills (ibid.). This was the beginning of timber operations in Lohit district. Khamtis live in the plains, occupying the lowlands of the Lohit district comprising a network of rivers and dense evergreen forests, namely the Namsai Forest Reserve. The forest is dense with trees like hollock (Terminalia myriocarpia) and hollong (Dipterocarpus gracilis), the latter being of soft wood suitable for making plywood. At the outset, when the timber industry first took off in the district, rivers were used as means of transport (Behera 1994). The development of the timber industry at that time also owes to the support provided by elephants. Elephants are thus found in considerable number in the foothills and they are very useful for pulling and loading heavy timber on the trolleys and trucks (Dutta Choudhury 1978). As pointed out by Behera, the locational advantage of the area occupied by Khamtis has provided them with some advantages over other tribes of the district (Behera 1994). Initially when the timber industry came into being those who belonged to the elite class disliked holding salaried jobs in the industry. Khamtis are basically rice eaters and agriculture is their most important occupation. Besides running saw mills, they desired to be timber contractors and supply elephants on hire basis to the flourishing saw mills of the region (ibid.). But they were conscious of the potential and revenue that dealing in timber could bring to the whole community. In the mid-1960s, a group of them met the then Adviser to the Governor of Assam in connection with the demand for taking the flourishing Assam Saw Mill at Namsai on a co-operative basis. But one member of the elite raised an objection to a long-term lease of the entire forest to that saw mill (ibid.). As a result, a quota of allotted trees to the above mill was given to the local people so that they got some benefit out of the flourishing timber industry. In the 1970s saw mills and plywood industries flourished in the Namsai-Chowkham area.6 Khamtis naturally got easy access to lucrative business. More than half (57.14 per cent) of the small and medium scale industries of the district were located in Khamti area in 1975 (ibid.). Cutting and selling of timber, and trading in timber products like plywood have rapidly extended new opportunities for the Khamtis.

Climax of the Industry and First Sign of Restrictions (1980–1996) During the 1980s, most of the timber industries of the state were concentrated in the Tirap and Lohit districts of Arunachal Pradesh. Timber business was so lucrative then that it was sometimes compared with the gold rush that occurred in the USA centuries ago (Roychowdhury 1992). It was an easy avenue of accumulating wealth for Khamti elites and the industry emerged as one of the major contributors to the State Net Domestic Product (SNDP). Local saw mills had national contracts with the Indian Railways for the construction of seats which generated a lot of revenue for the state. Between 1982 and 1984,40 per cent of the sleepers were made of Nahar wood (Mesua ferrea), which is found in abundance in Lohit district (ibid.). Timber operation thus became a real means of development for Arunachal Pradesh the economy of which largely depended on assistance from Central government.7 The Five Year Plans8 controlled by the Department of Planning of the

state government were oriented for making the growth easier for this industrial sector. The plan investment made during 1951–1978 shows that the transport and communication sectors received the highest priority with the investment of 39.2 per cent of the total plan outlays. Social services and agriculture, including forests, were down on the list of priority9 (Government of Arunachal Pradesh 2007). These facilities were encouraged by the richest section of the Khamti society. It has been shown that between 1980 and 1996, the number of timber-based industries has grown up by 400 per cent in Arunachal Pradesh (Roychowdhury 1992). The timber industry has certainly generated secondary trade in articles related to the timber industry, including garages for repairing the trucks or shops serving basic needs for the timber workers for example. Consequently, Namsai has emerged as an important urban centre in the Lohit district. Incidentally illegal and corrupt activities have also proliferated causing serious threat to the rich biodiversity of the district. Prior to 1980, property hammer marks (a permit) were issued under the divisional forest officer to approve the number of permits according to targets and capacity. But a quota system was introduced in order to control the alarming rise in felling. Corruption and political pressure allowed the timber lobby to flout the rules made by the forest department.10 In Arunachal Pradesh the law states that only the local people were allowed to hold tree permits and felling licences and permits to set up saw and plywood mills. In practice, however, clandestinely outsiders either bought those licences or worked in partnership with licence-holders. As a result, most of the timber economy was often run and managed by entrepreneurs from outside. In Namsai and Chowkham areas, almost all the units are registered in the name of Khamti enterprisers but are run by outsiders (Behera 1994). Surprisingly this situation does not seem to alert officials. Their dependence on outside entrepreneurs was even seen as a ‘transitory phase’ by the Chief Minister himself who was confident that ‘a time will come when we will be able to manage our industry on our own’ (Roychowdhury 1992). But such a time is yet to come. Regarding illegal traffic in timber, the Forest (Removal of Timber) Act of 1983 prohibits transportation of timber outside the state, without an order of the competent authority (i.e., Forest Department). This was enacted to prevent the timber merchants and traders (who employed local villagers to clear forests) from illegal felling and removal of timber from the state’s forests. In 1988, a proposal to ban timber operations in Arunachal Pradesh was made at a national conference of the state ministers of forest, conducted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India. The estimated loss of 80 crores would be met by the Centre. This proposal was quickly turned down by the state due to the strong timber lobby already in control of the region (ibid.). Despite the official restriction, timber business kept growing till the mid-1990s. At that time Chowkham (a village in the Lohit district) had the reputation of being one of the richest villages in Asia. Khamtis follow Theravada Buddhism and at the same time follow some animistic practices like spirit worshipping. In order to appease phi noy (the spirit of the mountains), they performed a ritual called tang ton mei, which consists of planting a tree on the very same place where another has been cut. Such a ritual can be considered as a strategy against deforestation. In their cosmology, some specific tree species are also protected (like those belonging to the genus Ficus) and also those having seven or more branches are believed to be the abode of spirits (Behera and Mantaw 1997). This indigenous method of forest conservation has been reduced today to symbolic placing of a branch on the spot where a tree is felled.

The Breakdown: The Supreme Court Order and its Effects (1996–2000) The 1996 Verdict The gold rush came to an end on 12 December, 1996, when the Supreme Court of India, following the judgment in the case of T. N. Godavarman vs. Union of India (W. P 202 of 1995), imposed a ban on any felling of trees in all states and Union Territories.11 Actually the order has extended the power of the Forest Conservation Act (FCA) of 1980. The Act was concerned with reserve forests only; with the 1996 verdict it extended to all forests regardless of their legal status of ownership. The 1996 verdict interprets the word

‘forest’ strictly in terms of its dictionary meaning.12 For a rural area like Arunachal Pradesh it is used to ‘imply that if you take few steps outside the house you are in a forest’ as remarked by Mukut Mithi, former Chief Minister of Arunachal Pradesh in an interview given to Down to Earth.13 The 1996 ban stipulates that the ban is only an interim one. It is mentioned that it will allow the continuation of timber operations, but only after developing appropriate plans. Nevertheless in its initial statement, it took specific measures for the Northeast Indian states. Arguing the danger of biodiversity loss that occurred in the Changlang and Tirap districts of Arunachal (adjacent to Lohit), the Court directed the immediate closure of all saw mills, plywood mills and veneer mills within a distance of hundred kilometres from the border of Assam. In addition, in order to stop the trade in timber the court directed that there shall be a ban on the movement of timber from any of the seven states of the region to any other state (Dutta 2005). This led to the collapse of the entire timber market in the region since the demand for timber was mainly from outside the region. Following this a huge number of logs costing millions of rupees remained in the district forests and could not be sold anywhere.

Further Development of the Verdict Following the judgment dated 12 December, 1996, other important notices have been issued by the Supreme Court of India. On 4 March, 1997, the Court appointed a High Power Committee (HPC) for Northeastern States to oversee the preparation of the inventory of timber and timber products lying in the forests, transit depots and saw or plywood mills.14 The court also gave power to the states to help sustain liveli-hood of the local people. In the same order the Court abolished the permit system which was prevalent in Arunachal Pradesh. In the following year, taking into account people’s dependence on forest produce in the region an order of the court dated 15 January, 1998, stipulated that ‘even though the proliferation of wood based industries has been the main cause of degradation of forest in the North Eastern States, considering the extent of forest (64% of the geographical area) and the dependence of local people on the forest in the region it is neither feasible, nor desirable, to ban completely either the timber trade or running timber based industries. However, their number and capacities were to be regulated qua the sustainable availability of forest produce and they are also required to be relocated in specific industrial zones.’ The census of all mills and the proposed relocation areas were tasks given to the HPC. In the same year, on 17 September, 1998, the Arunachal Pradesh Forest Authority was created under Section 3(3) of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. This authority was given the duty to monitor and implement the directions of the Supreme Court in the state. It was empowered to issue guidelines on the approval of the industrial areas of Arunachal Pradesh, such as the location of such areas, the prices of timber, etc. From this date all new applications from the state of Arunachal Pradesh were to be filed before this authority. In 2000, the Court reconstituted the High Power Committee.

Direct and Indirect Consequences of the Ban Before 1996, the timber industry represented the largest employment sector in the district as well as the state. However, the ban brought about some dramatic consequences for the inhabitants of the Lohit district. The market that emerged on the basis of the timber business vanished totally after the ban. Since there was no work for the people, most of the elephants that belonged to Khamtis were sold outside the state.15 Trucks were also sold because they were falling into disuse. During my fieldwork many villagers confessed that before the ban almost every Khamti family in the Chowkham area owned an elephant or a truck. The ban has also led to opium (kani) consumption by a large number of people. Historically, opium was only a privilege of the Khamti aristocrats, as was owning of elephants. Only the rich Khamtis could reinvest their capital in new industrial sectors like tea estates or brick manufacturing sectors. The impact of the ban can also be seen in terms of loss of revenue of the state government. As mentioned earlier, since the 1970s forestry and logging were the most important sectors of Arunachalese economy. For the state, the Court order resulted in about a 84 per cent drop in its revenue, from 49 crores in 1995–1996 to 7.9 crores in 2000–2001 (Lian 2002). The contribution of forestry to the state’s economy, or Net State Domestic Product (NSDP), which represented 20.7 per cent during 1970–1971 was down to 3.9 per cent for the year 2003–2004 (Bhattacharjee

2006). A quotation from the first ever UNPD report on the state can summarise the industrial scenario of the state: ‘ ... if the 1980s was the decade of industrialisation for Arunachal, then, the 1990s was the decade of deindustrialisation’ (Government of Arunachal Pradesh and UNPD 2006).

State Measures (2001–2008) In order to compensate for its loss and to generate profit, the state government through the Department of Industry has launched the New Industrial Policy of Arunachal Pradesh 2001. The state government has also tried to generate revenue through other sectors such as tourism. Travelling to Arunachal Pradesh has been made easier. A number of entry formalities have been relaxed for foreign tourists16 and attractive tourist circuits have been created. Facilities such as hotels and lodges have also been constructed in the state. Since the turn of the century the state is trying to showcase the culture of 26 major tribes living there and developing eco-tourism. Officials like G. N. Sinha, Director of the State Forest Research Institute, Itanagar, argued: ‘The age of timber harvesting based economy is now coming to an end in Lohit district. It is therefore high time that a new paradigm of development is ushered in for its economic development. It is in this context that development of ecotourism gains importance for its people’ (2006). Those efforts have been made to increase the revenue but locally it has not made much of an impact. Till today, the Lohit district lacks facilities for hosting domestic and foreign tourists. Nevertheless, the Khamtis took this opportunity to celebrate Poi Pee Mau (New Year Festival). Since 2008 the festival is annually held in different places of the district under the aegis of a newly formed organisation called Tai-Khamptis Development Society (TKDS). While visiting the Khamti area in 2006 Siraporn Nathalang, a Thai scholar, noticed that Buddhist festivals were used for promoting Arunachal tourism (2009). By the end of 2010 a first ever guest house (apart from the few run by the forest department or in Tezu) opened in the district. The guesthouse is situated within the compounds of the impressive Kongmu Kham (Golden Pagoda) inaugurated in February 2010, on the Namsai-Chowkham road. It is clearly seen as a ray of hope for developing tourism activities and attracting visitors to the district.

Revival of the Timber Industry and the Present Condition Following the recommendations of the reconstituted HPC the new industrial policy has proposed a new territory called ‘industrial zone’ or ‘industrial estate’ where logging operations can be started again. Instead of working on the basis of timber permits, the new regulation is exclusively working on the basis of quota. Even though timber logging could officially restart in the district some problems appeared for those who wanted to take part in it. Firstly, Khamtis did not have their elephants and trucks for conducting timber operations. So they had to depend on a few owners of elephants from outside. Secondly, the procedure for getting licence and permit for cutting trees was extremely time-consuming. This situation encouraged illegal felling as revealed by some respondents during my fieldwork. Moreover, in the present scenario, timber business is no longer as lucrative as it used to be. Due to various reasons, the price of timber is much lower now than it was before the ban. For example, in Gunanagar, an industrial estate adjacent to Chowkham where there are a number of mills, the average buying price per cubic feet is between Rs 65 to Rs 70. For the same amount it was Rs 300 to Rs 400 before the ban. During fieldwork in the village of Chowkham a young Khamti involved in this business confessed that for him selling logs ‘is like selling vegetable in the local market’. The latter sold his tusker in 2000 for a sum of Rs 7 lakhs to someone from Kerala. Several other Khamtis voice the same opinion. Indeed they are aware that outside the state, prices for one cubic feet can be up to Rs 1000. This situation is also encouraging illegal trading.

Figure 4.1 Timber operations in Lohit district Photo: Courtesy of Nicolas Lainé (2009).

Conclusion Since their migration to Northeast India, Khamtis have always been dependent on forest products for their livelihood. The 1996 Supreme Court order has had severe consequences both at the local and national levels, severely affecting the source of their livelihood.17 At the state level, there were 242 wood-based industries before the ban. At first, the High Power Committee for the Northeastern Region cleared 169 wood- based industries, renewing their licenses so that they could continue to function. In 2007, however, out of 169 industries the state government renewed the licenses of 74, consisting of 3 plywood units, 13 veneer units and 58 saw mills (Sinha 2008). Though the timber industry has not totally disappeared, today in Arunachal Pradesh, the timber business is clearly no longer as important as it used to be before the ban. As a significant example, in 2005, the Arunachal Plywood Industry (the oldest and most important mill in the region) decided to concentrate its production towards bamboo only. Today the company is manufacturing bungalows made of bamboo and selling them outside the Northeast or even abroad. In an informal discussion with the current manager during my fieldwork, I was informed that without such radical measures, the future of the company could not have been assured. He also firmly expressed his intention not to invest in timber products anymore even if it is possible to do so today. Going through the same direction, the revised 2008 Arunachal Pradesh State Industrial Policy clearly focuses on non-timber products like bamboo.18 It has been shown that despite the brutality of the verdict, very few who were in a position to invest in other ventures (such as tea garden, bricks manufacturing, bamboo products, etc.) took these opportunities to sustain and to maintain themselves and their families. But among the whole Khamti population the biggest majority was not in a position to do so. While doing fieldwork in 2009 and 2010, more than 10 years after the initial verdict, it was still present in the minds of many Khamtis. Despite the many efforts and measures taken at different levels described, it is noteworthy that no other activity guarantees their economic welfare nowadays. Timber logging was indeed the cornerstone on which the whole economy was based. Taking back the example of the Arunachal Plywood Industry in Namsai, the company has hardly 150 salaried professionals today. Before the ban no less than a thousand people were needed for the running of the machines that were working 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. This company itself is at the origin of the emergence of one of the main towns of the District: Namsai. Back in 1952 and the implementation of the mills there, the main and (unique) road was created to reach the company. Yet logging operations, legally or otherwise, are still carried on and constitute one of the major sources of income for many Khamtis of the Lohit and Changlang districts of Arunachal. For some of them timber

operations never stopped. But many of them seem to have realised that timber supply cannot go on forever, as most of the people engaged in timber business say that timber will not be available for a long period in the district. Devoid of any other means to earn their livelihood, they continue to cut trees. Nobody knows how long this will continue. The timber operations in the Lohit district shows how the industrial lobby invokes ‘the equation of conventional development thinking of industrialization with “progress” and prosperity’ for pressurising authorities (Gagdil and Guha 2008). But the impact on the forest—both in terms of it being a part of the nature that’s being sapped of its richness and variety and also in terms of it being a source of natural resources aiding the survival of many—is often substantial and irreversible. The ban introduced by the Apex Court in 1996 was considered an urgent solution by many. However, such a radical measure impoverished an entire community disallowing them access to even firewood for household consumption.

References Bhattacharjee, R P. 2006. ‘Forest Economics in Arunachal Pradesh and Its Impact on State Economy. Arunachal Review 8(18): 13–16. Behera, Maguni Cheran. 1994. Planning and Socio-economic Development of the Tribals. New Delhi: Commonwealth Publishers. Behera, Maguni Cheran, and Helina Mantaw. 1997. ‘Development, Deforestation and the Status of Customary Law: A Study of the Khampti Tribe in Arunachal Pradesh’. Himalayan Paryavaran: The Journal of the Environment Society 5: 37–41. Barpujari, H. K. 1998 [First edition 1970]. Problem of the Hill Tribes North East Frontier, Vol. 1. Shillong: North-Eastern Hill University Publications. Dutta Choudhury, S. B. 1978. Arunachal Pradesh District Gazetteers, Lohit. Itanagar: Government of Arunachal Pradesh. Dutta, Ritwick. 2005. ‘Northeast: Apex Court Rules for Forest. Forest Case Update, Issue 10, March, http://www.elaw.org/system/files/ FCUpdateIssue10.doc. Accesed on 18 October 2011. Dutta, Ritwick, and Bhupinder Yadav (eds). 2007. Supreme Court on Forest Conservation. Second Edition. New Delhi: Universal Law Publishing and Co. Gagdil, M., and R Guha. 2008 [1995]. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Government of Arunachal Pradesh. 2001. New Industrial Policy of Arunachal Pradesh 2001. Itanagar: Department of Industries, http://indarun.gov.in/htm/policies/ap-industrialpolicy2001.pdf. Accessed on 18 October 2011. ———. 2007. Draft Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007–2012) and Annual Plan (2007–2008). Itanagar: Department of Planning. http://www.arunachalplan.nic.in/html/docs/2_Eleventh_Plan_Statement_and_Annual_Plan_2007_08.pdf. Accessed on 18 October 2011. ———. 2008. Arunachal Pradesh State Industrial Policy 2008. Itanagar: Department of Industries, http://www.arunachalpradesh.nic.in/deptt/industry/IndPolicy.pdf.. Accessed on 18 October 2011. Government of Arunachal Pradesh and UNDP. 2006. Arunachal Pradesh Human Development Report 2005. Itanagar: Department of Planning, Government of Arunachal Pradesh. Government of India. 2001. Arunachal Pradesh: Data Highlights: The Scheduled Tribes, Census of India 2001. http://www.censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/.../dh_st_arunachal.pdf. Karlsson, B. G. 2000. Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People's Struggle for Forest and Identity in SubHimalayan Bengal. London: Curzon. Lian, Chawii. 2002. Logjam. Down to Earth 10(20). http://www.environmentportal.in/node/441. Accessed on

18 October 2011. Misra, Kamal Kant. 1994. Tribal Elites and Social Transformation. Delhi: Inter- India Publications, Tribal Studies of India Series T 164. Nathalang, Siraporn. 2009. ‘Khamti Shan Buddhism and Culture in Arunachal Pradesh, India’. Contemporary Buddhism 10(l): 111–23. Polycarp, Clifford. 2003. ‘India Must Rethink Timber Strategy’. Down http://www.environmentportal.in/node/37797. Accessed on 18 October 2011.

to

Roychowdhury, Anumita. 1992. ‘Chopping Down the Future’. Down to http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/node/9348. Accessed on 18 October 2011.

Earth

12(15).

Earth

l(l).

Saikia, Arupjyoti. 2005.Jungles, Reserves, Wildlife: A History of Forests in Assam. Guwahati: Wildlife Areas Development and Welfare Trust. Sinha, G. N. 2006. ‘Take Nothing but Pictures, Leave Nothing but Footprints and Use Nothing but Time: The Pros and Cons of Ecotourism in Lohit’. Souvenir of Lohit Eco-Cultural Festival, Namsai, Arunachal Pradesh. ——— (ed.). 2008. Forest and Forestry in Arunachal Pradesh. Itanagar: State Forest Research Institute.

PART II NATURE’S GOVERNANCE

Introduction FRÉDÉRIC LANDY

The title of this section reflects present times. The term 'governance’, unlike ‘rule’ or ‘government’, implies a multiplicity of actors and decisionmakers, far from the closure of natural areas implemented by top-down approaches. Governance is nothing less than ‘the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, plan and manage the common affairs’ of an area (UN definition quoted by Lawa-Rewal and Ruet 2009). The number of actors involved in the governance of nature and their respective actions and interrelationships vary according to space and time. The history of protected areas in the world is marked by three periods (Aubertin and Rodary 2008). The first was the time of confinement of protected areas more or less closed to outsiders and neighbouring people, even though the latter had to rely on natural resources for their livelihood. Profitable use of resources and above all ‘conservation’ were dominant reasons behind the state doing so. The second period was the time of opening up, with participation and consensus becoming priority issues given the harsh criticism regarding the social and even environmental failures of the integral protection model. The French Natural Regional Parks, which were established in 1967, were pioneering experiments since they were created at the initiative of local representatives and bodies on a voluntary basis and with the prominent agenda of developing the local area. In India, the National Forest Policy, 1988, followed by the guidelines implementing Joint Forest Management (JFM), launched a trend favouring participation—though only degraded forests were originally eligible for JFM and the actual role of local stakeholders in forest management often proved to be very limited. The recent period is marked by criticisms from two differing sides against local participation. On the one hand, elite capture by local notables as well as in many cases the upkeep of stronghold by the state lead to disappointing outcomes for both democracy and conservation. Local notables can often grasp most of powers devolved through decentralisation and participative policies to the expense of the weaker members of the communities, even though the latter get a good part of their livelihood from natural resources. Or the state agencies—be they the local Forest Department staff, the Block Development Office, etc.—succeed in keeping a lot of strength by bypassing the new rules or implementing them to their advantage. On the other hand, global NGOs (connected to the World Bank or national cooperation agencies) such as the WWF advocate a return to stronger forms of conservation, excluding social stakes to the advantage of a greater priority granted to the protection of a ‘nature’ ideally defined without any interference with humans. Global stakes such as the recent carbon market and biodiversity seen as global public goods deprive local stakeholders even more of rights in nature management (see Sanjeeva Kumar’s chapter in this book). That one forest can be considered both as a common property good and a global public good is not without creating potential conflicts, since the interests of the local population (firewood, grazing, prevention of soil erosion, etc.) may not fit with the global ecosystem services currently advocated in the international arenas (global biodiversity, climatic change). This return to the ‘conservation fortress’, however, is not so clear in India for two reasons: first, the country has been most of the time relying on its own forces to manage issues related to environment and this ‘self-reliance’ has prevented global NGOs to play a dominant role unlike in Madagascar or even Indonesia today. Second, the participation trends had not been so strong in India, with the Forest Department remaining ‘a state within the state’ in most cases and the country keeping itself partly aloof of the global changes in the environmental policies. For long the climate change was not on the agenda of the Government of India: this issue was considered as a topic raised by the developed countries; it was allegedly irrelevant for India, a country that had not yet reached the same level of development and had the right to benefit from the ‘ecological debt’ incurred by the rich countries during decades. Incidentally, it remains to be seen whether in

most countries, the ‘withdrawal of the state’ had not been partly eyewash. In many cases, ‘participation’ had turned to a simple management tool instead of being a mode of empowerment. Another way of considering this periodisation is to address the changes in the representation of natural resources as collective goods. Grossly speaking, most of the natural resources (forest, water, pasture lands, as well as some agricultural lands) were originally considered common goods before colonisation in the Southern countries (developing countries) and before enclosure times (seventeenth century onwards) in the Northern countries (developed countries). When the states took these resources under control, strongly restraining the access rights of local stakeholders, they became public goods, and this situation remained valid in most Southern countries even after the end of colonisation since many independent governments followed the same approach as the colonial ones. This was the case in India beside notable exceptions: van panchayats in Uttarakhand (the chapter by Carine Sébi) and tribal regions under the Fifth and Sixth Constitutional Schedules could keep a good part of their forest under community rule (Sanjeeva Kumar’s chapter). The later trend in favour of participation acted in a parallel way to two processes taking shape at that time and being less differing than complementary: on the one hand, decentralisation policies in many countries brought local interests to the foreground; on the other, liberalisation policies, sometimes enacted under structural adjustment programmes, forced the state to withdraw to a certain extent. As a result, natural resources tended to become common goods again, even though ‘community’ was no longer defined by customary ‘traditional’ traits but by democratic characteristics based on universal franchise. These common goods are anyway of a strange type, since today the threats on global biodiversity and the fears of climatic change make treating natural resources as global common goods, essential to the survival of the whole of mankind. This is all the more so since multinationals have entered the game jointly with global conservation NGOs. This complex evolution makes clear a major interest of the notion of ‘governance’: it allows to understand this multiplication of actors, stakeholders and scales (from local to global) of stakes and actions. One has also to engage with the polysemy of some notions that hide very different, often conflicting processes. For instance ‘decentralisation’. As is clear in the chapter by Iqbal and Berthet, there are two differing types of decentralisation. First, sectoral (functional) decentralisation: in some specific domains, such as irrigation, watershed management or garbage collection, the users are devolved a more or less important role in the management. This is the case of JFM. Secondly, political (territorial)1 decentralisation: in 1992, two Constitutional amendments revived the Panchayati Raj Institutions, with elected village councils (gram panchayats) plus district councils in rural areas, and elected corporators, ward committees and municipal councils in big cities. The Constitution now gives some powers to these levels to the expenses of the state level in particular. Now, the federal states can give panchayats the responsibility of minor forest products, social forestry, and watershed development, i.e., sectors that may come under the purview of JFM village committees. How can these two types of institution cohabit? This question is a key challenge for the future of democratic management of natural resources in India.

Three Approaches, One Type of Management Depraz (2008) recalls that the principles of nature conservation can be based on three different philosophical and moral approaches: The first one is anthropocentric: nature is considered only as a potential means of development for mankind. Nature is a resource seen through an instrumental perspective. In India, as Iqbal and Berthet recall in this volume, under the British rule, forest was considered as a space of production for timber, ship poles and sleepers. The second ethic is biocentric and considers nature per se, for its own intrinsic value, something that deserves protection and conservation policies. The ‘conservation fortress’ is more than reluctant to accept former extractive uses. In both approaches, however, natural resources are considered as spaces to be closed because their wealth is too precious and fragile. Only the third ethic could bring another mode of management: the holistic approach considers man within nature, based on a postulate accepting anthropic actions if they are integrated into reproduction processes of natural resources and biodiversity. In India, this forms the very basis of Joint Forest Management.

It remains to be proved, however, that actually this change in paradigm always leads to new modes of management when some foresters are too reluctant to adopt new ethics and some forest users keep exploiting the resources in an unsustainable way. This problem is not specific to India, nor to Southern countries. In France, the National Park of Guyane recognised the presence of local American-Indian communities but did not provide to them formal guaranteed rights on the forest that remains a part of the private domain of the State (Aubertin and Rodary 2008). That the French Constitution recognises one people only and is hostile to granting rights to specific communities given its theoretical ideal of universalisation and homogenisation is added to the not surprising reluctance of forest managers to lose part of their power. In India however, constitutionally affirmative action and differing rights to various local communities are formalised. The Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution grant rights to tribal communities in tribaldominated regions. This allows more autonomy for natural resource management in favour of the local population. Despite the autonomy however, results are few. While in many areas elites succeeded in confiscating most of the resources to the benefit of a few tribal notables, who were often connected to outside smugglers, timber sellers, politicians, etc., on the other hand this autonomy may be pure eyewash and create ‘entry points for State formation in community space’ (as shown by Kumar in this volume with the case of Autonomous District Councils in Meghalaya). In Meghalaya these elected councils were Trojan horses allowing control by the government of customary chiefs and ‘traditional’ institutions. Till recently Indian tribes played the national card of the ‘Scheduled Tribes’ identity, demanding reservations and specific rights within the national polity. Unlike Australian aborigines and American Indians, they were not relying on the global game to have their rights defined and secured. Only a few years ago they started to play the ‘autochthonous’ card in international arenas. Having a population of more than 80 million in India, they could efficiently use global levers for obtaining more rights in the national arena. There remains an ambiguity, however: ‘indigenous lands’ in the Brazilian Amazonia were not created for conservation goals but for guaranteeing historical rights to American Indians. Similarly, it remains to be seen whether granting rights to ‘tribes’ in India always generate outcomes leading to more protection. It is not only a matter of ‘bottom-up’ institutional arrangements that allegedly are both more efficient and fair than the good old top-down patterns. Verticality of linkages does not always come out prominently. More ‘horizontal’ management tools may appear, which are not always inserted in environmental agendas and group together actors (local agriculturists, herders, as well as environmentalists and administration) for other approaches that may push nature conservation to the background. For, in India, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 grants up to 4 ha of land to people who can prove that they had been cultivating before 2005 (Ramdas 2009). This Act has been severely criticised by environmentalists since it is applicable to all types of protected areas in India. This is probably the price, however, for meeting the basic tenets of‘environmental justice’ (Blanchon et al. 2009) while obtaining sustainable and long-term management of natural resources. One cannot conclude without insisting on the need for more contextualisation of natural and protected areas. There cannot exist one blueprint valid for any forest and for any reserve in India. The new tenets of nature management take into account more differing stakeholders. Protected areas are seen as spaces integrated in specific environments (low or high population densities, pressure from farmers or from herders, rural or urban settings, etc.). Such a complex approach prevents to dream of ready-made solutions. However, this Copernican revolution is yet to happen in many forest departments in the world, particularly in India. The Sanjay Gandhi National Park, which is located right within the 20 million-agglomeration of Mumbai, is still managed as any other national park in India. According to its director, there should not be any difference whether a park is located in a remote Himalayan region or in the economic capital of India (Landy, Bon and Zerah: forthcoming). One wonders whether this obstinate will of adopting the same tools whatever be the context can lead to appropriate outcomes.

References Aubertin, C., and E. Rodary (eds). 2008. Aires protégées, espaces durables? Paris: IRD Editions. Blanchon, D., S. Moreau, and Y. Veyret. 2009. Comprendre et construire la justice environnementale. Annales

de géographie 665–666: 35–61. Depraz, S. 2008. Géographie des espaces naturels protégés: Genèse, principes et enjeux territoriaux. Paris: Armand Colin. Lama-Rewal, Stephanie Tawa, and Joël Ruet. 2009. Engaging with the Concept of Governance in the Study of Indian Metropolises. In Governing India’s Metropolises, ed. S. Tawa Lama-Rewal and Joël Ruet, 3–21. New Delhi: Routledge. Landy, F., E. Bon, and M. H. Zerah. Forthcoming. Urban National Parks in Emerging Countries: Between City and Forest, the Conflicts around the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai. Ramdas, S. R 2009. ‘Women, Forest Spaces and the Law: Transgressing the Boundaries’. Economic and Political Weekly 44 (44): 65–73.

FIVE

Women, Self-Governance and Local Political Representation in Bastar, Chhattisgarh* M. A. IQBAL AND SAMUEL BERTHET

The idea of villages as units for economic development can be traced back to the early years of British administration in South India. The social condition of its rural population was one of the main issues for the future of Independent India. During the two last decades of his political action, M. K. Gandhi drew attention to this socio-economic issue (Bhuimali 2004; Govindu and Malghan 2005). He was followed by E. F. Schumacher (1993). According to the two thinkers no development policy would be relevant without an active role of rural people in the decision-making process. Their ideas influenced experiments in the 1950s and 1960s (Kumar 2006) but with the industrialisation and centralisation policies engaged by Nehru, the imbalanced relationship between rural and urban India remained by and large the same. The economic set-up of the country laid by the British and the new Indian elite during almost two centuries of administration was urban and business-oriented. The economic activities under the Raj led to uneven development and to the creation of backward regions. Most such regions were incidentally tribal.

Tribal Regions in Contemporary India The Ministry of Tribal Affairs defines the ‘scheduled areas’ as following: The criteria followed for declaring an area as Scheduled Area are preponderance of tribal population; compactness and reasonable size of the area; under-developed nature of the area; and marked disparity in economic standard of the people. These criteria are not spelt out in the Constitution of India but have become well established. They embody principles followed in declaring ‘Excluded’ and ‘PartiallyExcluded Areas’ under the Government of India Act 1935, Schedule ‘B’ of recommendations of the Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas Sub Committee of Constituent Assembly and the Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission 1961. Special administrative regimes due to indirect rule (indirect rule in the princes’ territory as opposed to the direct rule in the provinces directly under the Company and then the Crown) in princely states largely prevented political representation of such areas. By the end of the eighteenth century Indian timber had become a crucial raw material for the British empire first for shipbuilding and later for the construction of railway sleepers. Indian forests contained timber of high value such as teak and sandalwood. A special policy was framed for hilly and forest regions associated with tribal populations. It set up the context for defining scheduled tribes as an administrative category with the prominent feature assigned being their ‘backwardness’. This category is by and large the result of the need for a permanent manpower in parts of the country so that free labour remained available at all times. An ascribed identity of ‘backward tribes’in a fixed territory—hilly and jungly—became widely accepted in contemporary Indian ethos. Meanwhile, the administrative set-up with a local population having little influence on the use of local resources of high value and a bureaucracy not accountable to this population was prone to corruption. A nexus of bureaucrats, forest department employees, middlemen and timber brokers came into being in which the local population, who were mostly illiterate, soon got involved. Fixed borders were assigned to forest regions in contradiction to the existing conception of moving and flexible boundaries of the forest. The interdependence between forest and non-forest areas as well as shifting cultivation or nomadic ways of life

was challenged. This territorial organisation was administratively and politically translated into the creation of‘Backward Areas’, transformed into ‘Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas’ after the process of democratisation began in 1935 to finally become VI Schedule Areas after independence. They were inhabited mainly by Scheduled Tribes. The concept of ‘tribal’ as linked to the forest habitat has been discussed in Ethnicity and Environment (Guha 1999). Guha argues that some communities of peninsular India—called tribal—have been driven to the status of forest proletariat due to British-designed forest policies. The term ‘proletariat’ needs clarification, as in this case, the communities were dependent on forest officers for their very livelihood: nistar (free work and hospitality) were expected from them in exchange of pattas (temporary lease on land). The political, economic and administrative set-up acted as a layer between the tribal regions and the rest of the territory, and prevented a self-sufficient economy and autonomous polity to emerge. Being excluded from the colonial politics and living in precarious conditions the process of marginalisation and exclusion of the Scheduled Tribes was inevitable. An ideological debate arose from this situation revolving around the identity of tribal people. Described as ‘primitive’ or pre-‘civilised’ humanity, the economic and political factors which led to the situation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were almost ignored in favour of moral considerations. After Independence, the legacy of the British rule persisted in the Partially Excluded Areas transformed into Schedule Areas where the discretionary powers of the administration, particularly under the Forest Department, was well known. Hence, there were conflicting political relations with the state in the aftermath of Independence. No real movement emerged from Bastar since Independence, either under the influence of a national or regional political party; the movement for the adivasis’ rights led by the former ruler of Bastar was short-lived due to the brutal death of the Maharaja during a demonstration. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an increasing focus on local self- government institutions (LSGI), through the implementation of the Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRI1992) and their extension to Scheduled Areas (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas or PESA 1996), and on local self government organisations (LSGO) through co-operatives and self-help groups (SHG) and micro-credit projects. This trend was concomitant with the idea of civil society and an increasing role of NGOs. The participation of women appeared as a precondition for an efficient implementation of LSGOs. Therefore provisions for reservation of one-third of the seats within the PRI were made for them. Bastar provides an insightful example of the relation between PRIs, LSGOs and women, on the one hand, and actual decentralisation on the other. With the creation of three ‘small’ states in 2000—Jharkhand, Uttaranchal and Chhattisgarh—the concepts of local self government and the liberal ideology of decentralisation seem to be amalgamated. The liberal reforms coincided with a new ideology of governance at the beginning of the 1990s, promoting decentralisation. Less state machinery and more participation of local communities became the motto for a better implementation of public schemes where it was considered that the state had by and large failed. In the 1990s a new development paradigm seemed to emerge. With new technologies, the end of the Cold War and the possibility to foresee a subsequent decrease in military expenditures, increasing literacy rate and political awareness in the villages along with the creation of smaller states and the PESA, Gandhi and Schumacher’s defense of a village-centered policy seemed to gain momentum raising concerns and awareness about environmental issues, through organisations like the Centre for Science and Environment ( 1980) or movements such as the Narmada Bachao, Ekta Parishad or Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha.1 A growing role of the civil society became imperative for new development programmes, which empowered the people to some extent. Nevertheless, the new importance given to local people was also by and large dictated by global funding agencies. The micro-credit opened new perspectives for penetrating a little tapped rural market, and banks quickly jumped into the bangwagon of local banking.2 K. V. Kamath, the Chairman of ICICI bank had said, ‘The real way there is to partner with micro-credit institutions, corporate providing inputs or buying products from the farmer and self-help groups.’3 Sitarama Murty, former managing director of the State Bank of Mysore also commented: ‘At the turn of the millennium, the Government turned its attention to micro-credit as a means for credit delivery to the poor through self- help groups. Though four-crore families have been brought under the micro-credit umbrella with the help of 26 lakh SHGs, the qualitative aspects leave much to be desired. Just enough to meet consumption needs, the

average credit hardly enables a sustainable income-generating investment. Drinking water, healthcare, education, storage, roads, transport and marketing do not find a place in the plan.’ Growing influence of global agencies translated into a growing grasp of local resources, notably through the Joint Forest Managment programmes. Political and social movements, such as the ones led by Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha, articulated demands for decentralisation but decentralisation meant something different to the policy-makers. To the leaders of the movement decentralisation meant local management of local resources whereas to the policy-makers it meant less investment in the administrative infrastructure and a bigger role for the private sector in the local economy. While the first conception could translate into a reinforcement of states’s basic amenities (school, water, health centre) a focus on local culture—especially language—to prevent the rise in the number of school dropouts and ensure political empowerment at the local level, the second perception meant to decrease the state’s investments and promote global culture and economy (English medium education, world standard manufactured products, etc.). The 1990s saw some political movements in Bastar demanding a shift of status to the VI Schedule Areas such as in Northeast India. In 1996, the extension of the Panchayat to Schedule Areas was passed and in 2000 Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh. High hopes followed the coming into being of PESA. But a growing pressure was soon built against that. First, the new state elite was not keen to share the power just gained, and second, the area of Bastar became more and more a stronghold of Naxalites coming from neighbouring Andhra Pradesh. Further, the growth of developing countries, mainly India and China, took the competition for resources to a new height, particularly regarding mineral resources. Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh being the richest in terms of mineral resources, the control over land took a particular turn in those states. In 2004, a report on PRI in Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra listed the difficulties faced by the LSGO. They were as follows: States have tried to postpone panchayat elections at some time or the other. Violence mars panchayat elections. The panchayats have weak revenue sources and no programme for revenue mobilisation. Funds for centrally-sponsored schemes are still being routed through the District Rural Development Agencies and line departments. Although the states are expected to go by the recommendations of the State Finance Commissions, no state has abided by this directive. Panchayats are thwarted in their effective functioning by politicians, bureaucrats and other traditional power wielders. In all the states we continue to have a ‘Gram Sevak (village official) Raj’ rather than Panchayati Raj.4 Awareness remains one of the main issues for better implementation of LSGOs. On the one hand, the Right to Information was one step in this direction. On the other hand, low implementation of the PESA, the bureaucratic grasp over the co-operatives’ functioning and the policy of two children only are evident signs of resistance by the states. Empowerment, economic or sociological, through gender equity, faces the same obstacles from the states. The ‘two-child’ norm clearly affects those whom the PRI and the PESA aimed at including more actively in the democratic fold—women, STs and SCs. In the neighbouring Madhya Pradesh, gender wise, women account for 58 per cent of the representatives, the STs 50 per cent and the SCs represent 22 per cent.5 There is little doubt that the low percentage of vote during the 2005 panchayat elections in the V Schedule Areas in Chhattisgarh finds its source in this exclusion of a large chunk of rural population. The opposition of the then Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar to this norm adopted by some states emphasises the opposition between the state and the Central government.6

AHKS and the NFTP Co-operative Bajawand in Bastar After India’s independence, the district of Bastar was formed by merging the feudatory states of Bastar and

Kanker and was part of the then Madhya Pradesh. This 39,114 sq. km. district was further divided into three districts in 1999, namely North Bastar (Kanker), Central Bastar (Bastar) and South Bastar (Dantewada). In 1982, the Adivasi Harijan Kalyan Samiti (AHKS) was formed in Asna with the aim of protecting the fast vanishing tribal culture, to improve their economic, social and political status, to spread education, women’s empowerment, forest protection, etc. The various objects of the AHKS were to begin the process of reviving customary tribal rituals which had been forgotten and start taking up cases of atrocities on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes by dominant non-tribals, such as land appropriation or beating. The AHKS became an instrument to negotiate problems at the local level. The decision to adopt the secular terminology samiti and not ashram was a deliberate choice in a region where proselytisation often led to communalism and conflicts. The NGO had no funds until it started to benefit from government schemes. Till then expenses were covered by minor fees paid by the participants, anticipating the development of SHGs. In 1995, it received Rs 25000 as loan from the Rastriya Grameen Vikas Yojna (National Scheme for Rural Development), and began having an impact on local resources management soon after that.

Beginning of Women’s Empowerment in Asna In 1984, the Women and Child Development Department of the then Madhya Pradesh Government started forming Mahila Samoohs (women’s committees) in the state. Each committee was given Rs 15,000 as seed money so that its members could collectively take up some income-generating activities. In the village of Asna, the samooh was named Mahila Arthik Samooh, and Kalawati, belonging to the Battra community, and herself a NTFP (non-timber forest product) collector became its president. Although the concept of SHG had not entered Bastar, the Mahila Arthik Samooh was at par with it. The samooh under the guidance of a government supervisor took up the making of papad7 and knitting tat patris.8 But both the activities stopped after a while as the women found it interfering with their daily routine. In the year 1987, the forest department took up the project of protecting and planting trees in the forest land adjoining the village of Asna. The Forest Department started to fence off the area by putting barbed wire fencing and digging cattle-proof trenches (CPT) without consulting the villagers. With the barbed wire fence and CPT coming up all around, the villagers and especially the women found it very difficult to frequent the bushes for urination and defecation (the bushes were also being cleared up), to bring fuelwood, fodder, leaves (to make leaf plates and cups) and to graze their cattle. All the village routes to the forest were fenced off. The women went to the Sarpanch (head of the panchayat, the village council), Patel (revenue in-charge), kotwal (representative of revenue and police reporting on deaths and births) and elders of the village one by one to stop this, but they all said that this was the work of the government and hence they could not do anything. The tribal men, fearing police action and violence, did not come forward. The women were left alone but did not keep quiet and came to the AHKS in great numbers asking for advice and help. The women and the AHKS sat together and quickly decided to take some action. The next day the tribal women of Asna gathered in hundreds and went to those places where CPT were dug and barbed wire fences were set up under the supervision of forest guards. They requested the labourers to stop the work. Some listened to the women and stopped immediately, while others who resisted were chased away and their spades and diggers taken away by the women. After successfully stopping the work, the women held a meeting in the forest to discuss future plans. They formed a society called Jungle Bachao Samiti, and Mitki Bai, a senior woman who had shown striking leadership abilities, was elected President. The tribal men continued to keep a distance from the dharna fearing police action, but in private they supported the women’s cause. The non-tribals in the village initially tried to jump on the bandwagon in order to improve their political hold. But the women refused to let them assume the leadership of their movement. The administration’s initial threat turned to pleading, and finally, the work stopped and the women won their just battle. The victory inspired the women further and they took up the responsibility of protecting the forest by themselves, roaming the forest day and night and catching the offenders. After some attempts of negotiations with the FD the dialogue failed. The FD did not agree to the women’s demands and finally the women got their way with the support of the district collector. During the previous years, the state had undertaken ‘compensatory afforestation’ on the land of many

villages surrounding Asna apparently to compensate for the forest that would be lost to the Bodhghat Hydel Project coming up on the Indrawati River near Barsur. The compensatory afforestation was not preceded by any dialogue with the people and impinged on the people’s land and rights. Large number of women from several villages gathered at Asna asking for advice to the newly formed women’s group. The movement spread to distant villages, involving many more women and raising many new issues.

The Crucial Issue of Non-Timber Forest Products Though adivasi women traditionally gathered forest products, the trade in these products was in the hands of the FD and non-tribal communities. When the Mahila Arthik Samooh came into being, the AHKS served as a useful platform for the new administrative initiative, members of the Samiti being experienced in collective decision-making and awareness campaign. Kalawati, one of the directors of AHKS, and her Mahila Arthik Samooh decided to enter this field. Fighting many initial odds, in 1989, the women of Asna received permission from the FD to open a phad (collection centre) for the purchase of sal seeds (a nationalised product). The phad was run entirely by tribal women and was extremely successful due to their honesty with the weighing scales and payments. Tribal villagers from far away villages who were cheated at collection centres also came to Asna. Kalawati then negotiated with the FD to open a phad at Asna in another most important nationalised NTFP—tendu patta (used to make bidis). This started in 1990. This meant that the women had more employment than before. Once the tendu leaf collection finished the sal seed collection would begin. During the tendu patta collection Kalawati came to know that, as per government rules, nationalised NTFPs were managed through co-operatives by NTFPs’ collectors themselves. She and other women became members of this co-operative by paying Rs 11 as entrance fee. During the early years of working at the collection centre at Asna, Kalawati and her women followers learnt a lot about the problem facing the NTFPs’ collectors like false counting and weighing by phad munshis9 leading to underpayment and husbands coming to claim their wives’ weekly payment. Traditionally, only men used to collect the tendu leaves as it was believed to be a man’s job. The women had to learn this task and they mastered it so well that the FD brought men from other collection centres to learn from the women. Much of this learning was translated into further action when Kalawati became president of the Bajawand Forest Produce Co-operative (BFPC). She later filed her nomination for the cooperative election as one of its directors and won unopposed as the only woman director out of 13 directors. The directors were elected collectors. Often elections were not held because that was considered very expensive. So, local leaders along with FD representatives decided upon the directors. When it came to electing the President among the directors, there was a dispute between two men both of whom wanted to be President. Kalawati was then elected as the President, as a third choice. In 1994, she became the first woman president of a BFPC in the entire state of Madhya Pradesh.

Bajawand Forest Produce Co-operative (BFPC) When Kalawati took over the management of BFPC, the financial position of the co-operative was critical. Though 95 per cent were women among the collectors, their representation in the Co-operative was extremely marginal. The male members had political ambitions or linkages with those who were not actually collectors. In the appointment of the phad munshis there was interference from political leaders and the FD, bypassing the co-operative laws. The task before Kalawati was to free the co-operative from the clutches of the FD, to stop the interference from politicians and to remove the unwanted members who were not actually collectors. She also had to improve the financial position of the Co-operative and to increase women’s ratio in the overall membership. As president, Kalawati encouraged women to register as members of the society. Within five years, the membership of women increased from 19 to 72 per cent. The membership cards of the society were usually in the name of men. She changed this to the seniormost woman of the family, so that the women would get the money. Moreover, she also started appointing women or group of women as phad munshis. The appointment

of men using political patronage as phad munshis was stopped and non-politically sponsored people, especially women, were appointed. The BFPC rules were strictly applied and non-collectors were removed. She also took control of the financial activities of NTFP collection from FD and ensured that people got the life insurance they were entitled to under the tendu patta scheme as well as their bonuses in time. Later on, the government accepted the following measures: enrollment of actual collectors, appointment of phad munshis by the members of the BFPC, and enrolling senior women as heads of the tendu patta card’s house. Orders were issued everywhere to adopt the changes Kalawati had introduced, but they were never actually implemented in many villages. She went on foot and cycle to tell the villagers about restoration of their legal rights and the benefits shared by the collectors from this new situation. The women became aware that the FPCs were meant to be ruled by them. They started asking for correct payments and took advantage of life insurances. Kalawati and other directors of the FPC soon started to become a target of some politicians and middlemen. The politically connected men whom she had ousted from the Co-operative got together and filed false allegations against her and her board of directors. An enquiry was conducted and the allegations were proved baseless. She was reinstated, but for one year she went through severe mental torture and loss of valuable time for the improvement of the Co-operative. Kalawati fought to take control of the society from the FD and succeeded. In 2000, the FD handed over all the work to her, and she managed to execute it all successfully. It was a milestone in the history of tendu patta. Two FPCs headed by women presidents, Kalawati and Asmati, conducted the entire operation from collection to cash payment to the collectors on their own, without the interference of the FD. Kalawati shattered the common belief of the FD that the BFPC cannot handle the tendu patta operations on their own, and that too under the leadership of women. However much of the co-operative’s freedom depends on the District Forest Officer’s (DFO) personal liking. The DFO is also the Managing Director (MD) of the District Forest Produce Union Co-operatives, clubbing the directors of the different FPC in the district, and is empowered with decision-making power. Often, in the appointment of phad munshis, the MD bypasses the regulations due to political pressure. Kalawati once filed a case against one such MD. The Assistant Registrar of Co-operatives gave the decision in favour of Kalawati. The MD was furious at his decision being countered by an officer of a lesser rank, the Assistant Registrar, who was just a second-class officer. Thus the DFO changed the law to appropriate the powers of the registrar. New orders were issued where the registrar’s powers were also given to the DFO. Kalawati then toured her area extensively, publicised the work of the Co-operative and registered many new members. They gradually began to see the Co-operative as their own society, rather than simply a committee of the forest department. While the changes in the FPC benefited all the NTFP collectors, she was particularly interested in ensuring that women, who were the primary collectors, were empowered in the process. In the 2001 co-operative elections, she wanted an all-woman team of directors. She was able to get 13 women nominated out of which 6 won. She was herself the seventh and won with maximum votes. She was sure to be elected president for the second term but her opponents began a campaign against her and were eventually able to bribe one of the women directors on their side, and Kalawati lost the presidentship by one vote. She is now only a director and the president is again a man, but her fight to gain control over cooperatives in order to empower women continues. From 2000 to 2005, AHKS has been selected for implementing a credit project along with other NGOs in the district of Dantewada. It included organising and managing SHGs as well as implementing a basic health care scheme. The project was supported by the World Food Program, FD and the NGO Care. Though successful on many aspects such as leading the members of the micro-credit group to manage the ration distribution centre, the programme was problematic in regions where the communications were extremely difficult, the political mobilisation almost non-existent and the literacy rate one of the lowest in the world.

The AHKS prepared a questionnaire and served it on more than 60 women of various SHGs of the Bastar district as well as members of Bajawand NTFP co-operative with the help of two research assistants fluent in Halbi (lingua franca of Bastar) and experienced in assisting SHG meetings. The survey was conducted in the villages of Asna, Palligaon, Tekameta, Baghanpal (block Jagdalpur), Karangi and Deorgaon (block Tokapal) Potanaar and Chitrakot (block Lohandiguda), Metawala (block Bakawand) and Teertha (block Bastar)—all in the district of Bastar. The survey tried to understand if the women members of SHG were aware of the origin of the funds supporting the programme and the contact they had with the representatives of the programme. It also wanted to know the connection between women members of SHG and political mobilisation. In a region where political forum is extremely reduced, basic livelihood issues often brought the deprived villagers in conflict with the administrative apparatus and the SHG provided with a platform for mobilisation.

Women, Local Self-Governance and Local Self-Government Institutions First of all, there are material preconditions for women to be able to interact and work with either LSGO and/or PRI. The most important of these preconditions is the distance between the residence and the meeting place. In scarcely populated regions such as Bastar, inhabitants may have to cover one and a half to two hours on foot to reach the panchayat meeting place. It can prevent women already involved in many kinds of physical tasks throughout the day (wood gathering, collecting and transporting water, cooking, domestic animals’ care, etc.) to take part in the panchayat meetings on a regular basis. Hence we summed up the situation in the following manner: either the women go to the PRI centre or an LSGO comes to them. A particular advantage of the LSGO, such as SHG, is to hold meetings in smaller areas, or hamlets. It explained partly why women refer mainly to Mahila Bal Vikas Vibhag10 representatives as the people to whom they usually address their demands, the Aanganwadi workers being usually in charge of coordinating the SHG. It is also important to note that more than two-third of the women (42 against 19) declared that their domestic work was not affected by their activities as members of an LSGO. It is corroborated by the fact that the number of women declaring that their domestic activities are affected almost corresponds to that of women members of panchayat (19 against 21). It is noticed that women members of PRI who are not part of SHG have often been elected to panchayat on behalf of their husbands, who could not stand due to the reservations. The husbands then attend the panchayat meetings representing their wives. It is the case in the village of Chitrakot and Asna for instance. It has been noticed that no action is taken by the bureaucrats to prevent this bypassing the 73rd amendment of the Constitution of India. While, in spite of the reservation, men by and large retain the hold on the decisionmaking—by representing their wife panch or a sarpanch—SHGs remain exclusively for women, hence free of their husbands’ interferences. While women do not receive special training for competing in elections, administrative issues are addressed, contacts with the administration facilitated or encouraged and participative decision-making experimented. Women elected to the panchayat who do not hold any other positions often lack the experience a woman gets while participating in an SHG. The main issue remains awareness and information on the working of PRI, so that only few women interviewed raise demands with administrative and political representatives, and that among this group, almost an equal number still refers to the district collector as compared to LSGO and PRI representatives. The general picture is that PRI started to make inroads into the local political scene, but are yet to substitute the federal or central state machinery for local decision-making. The vast majority of women are still by and large unprepared for taking demands to the administration. Concerning the representatives to whom women address their demands there is a clear polarisation between local self government institutions and bureaucrats.

LSGO and Political Mobilisation The unity of all the members of SHG in conducting various activities like decision-making, awareness campaigns, and project development appears to be the main priority of the women interviewed. More than outside support, this mobilisation, along with better information and training seem crucial for the success of

their initiatives. This shows clearly that collective decision-making and action are looked for preparing the ground for mobilisation and representation. The experience of the AHKS in the context of the credit project of Dantewada district has proved how SHG can work as a platform for better implementation of development and welfare schemes such as management of ration shops (Public Distribution System run by the Central Government) in the villages of Rokel, Pakela, Chipurpal, Hameergarh, Puriras and Tongpal; management of Health Metanin Programme (run by the State government) in the development block of Chindgarh; and management of Van Suraksha Samiti and Gram Van Suraksha Samiti (forest protection programmes in collaboration with the FD) in Metawada, Asna, Irikpal, Chitrakot, Palli, Tekameta. Palligaon, Baghanpal, Karangi, Potanaar and Teertha. Women also believe in more devolution of power to them, and their answers indicate that they are ready to play a more active role. Most of them not only plan to remain active members of their SHG, but are keen to work further in the local resources management. The question that remains is: Are the central and state institutions ready to give room to this local political mobilisation and representation? As indicated in the introductory section of this chapter, many reports suggest that strong resistance from the states have taken various forms, such as postponing elections, limited devolution of power, dissolution of elected bodies and appointment, or legal restrictions such as the two-child norm, which prevents women and STs to appear in the PRI elections as candidates.11

LSGO: A First Step for Women’s Participation in PRI Most of the women who responded to the questionnaire administered for our research admit that there exists a relation between LSGO and panchayat. Nevertheless, in most cases (30 against 23) their position in LSGO does not reinforce their position concerning the decision-making in the panchayat. The relation between LSGO and panchayat therefore deserves particular attention. In regions where political mobilisation since Independence has been very low at the local level the LSGO represents a first and necessary step for mobilisation. With little means for information and almost no experience in political mobilisation, the PRI might be too distant and radical a step for most women as a first instance of political initiative. The non-interference of men and the experience gained from within the LSGO (whether SHG, Co-operatives or/and others) might prove decisive for providing self-confidence as well as the rudimentary knowledge regarding the process of decision-making. Therefore, though sometimes perceived as competing with PRI, the LSGO can actually complement the local self government’s functioning. For the LSGO to play this role, better training and information on the funding and decision-making process should be provided, as well as interferences from the state avoided. The period of an initial short term funding (usually five years)12 in order to initiate autonomous working of SHG is unrealistic particularly in regions where development programmes have never been implemented.

Conclusion In this case study of Bastar, we raised the question of the relations between LSGO and PRI, arguing that the first could be used as a middle step for an efficient working of the second. The LSGO and PRI face similar obstacles. In regions where political mobilisation has been extremely weak since independence, the PRI cannot provide a solution to all problems. Though local, the panchayat is sometimes not easily accessible to all due to geographic reasons (distance) and gender discrimination (little scope for women’s participation in decision-making processes). Here, the SHG can provide a platform through mobilisation on the crucial issue of resource management and decision-making. Nevertheless, the SHG’s weakness lies in their dependence on funding from outside agencies on a temporary basis. Thus, interlocutors need to be identified through regular contacts with representatives of the funding agencies. In our case study of Bastar, positive results about women’s awareness and participation in resource managment and decision-making are largely due to the work of local facilitators like M. A. Iqbal and Kalawati, who are able to both interact with the administration and participate in community-based activities.

Acquiring lessons from this experience, supporting ongoing work through at least mid-term funding, keeping up with the key orientation (women’s empowerment, local resource management, inter-community dialogue, awareness) would certainly help the local political representation to become a reality and to prevent further potential conflicts. Women have clearly shown their keenness to participate further in the decentralisation process. The future of the reforms in regions dominated by ST population, which started with PESA, lies in providing a community-based platform for the mobilisation of women .

References Aiyar, Mani Shankar. 2007. ‘We are Marginal in the Political Set-up’. Outlook, 9 April. Bhuimali, Anil. 2004. ‘Economic Development of a Country Depends on the Proper Village Economy. Sarvodaya 1(5). Government of Chhattisgarh. 2001a. Chhattisgarh State Forest Policy. Resolution No. F7-42/2001/F.C dated 22 October. ———. 2001b. Forest Policy. Raipur: Forest and Culture Department. ———. 2005. Human Development Report: Chhattisgarh. New Delhi: New Concept Information System Pvt. Ltd. Govindu, Venu Madhav, and Deepak Malghan. 2005. ‘Building a Freedom, J. C. Kumarappa and his Economic Philosophy’. Economic and Political Weekly 60(52): 5477–85. Guha, Sumit. 1999. Environment and Ethnicity, 1200–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kumar, Girish. 2006. Local Democracy in India: Interpreting Decentralisation. New Delhi: Sage Publication. Schumacher, E. F. 1993. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. New Delhi: Vintage.

SIX

Forest Conservation, Public Goods and Incentives in the Central Himalayas CARINE SÉBI

Forestry in the central Himalayas has been managed by many property rights systems which do not provide the incentives to use forests sustainably and this has led to deforestation. The van panchayats (forest councils) were created in the 1930s as a solution to overcome forest degradation. Nowadays, the efficiency of van panchayats is strongly dependent on informal collective action and social norms. Thus a field experiment1 in a van panchayat was conducted to examine the effect of different incentives on the tendency to cooperate. We present in this chapter only the experimental protocol and preliminary results. The survey presented in the first section is based mainly on Somanathan (1991), Singh (1998) and Agrawal (2001). It concerns the central Himalayan forest in Uttaranchal, a region comprising the Kumaon and Garhwal division. In this area, forests are very important for agriculture, since they are the main source of manure. Till the 1960s, oak forests were sometimes felled for making charcoal to be supplied to the hill towns and military bases. Due to felling, grazing and lopping of the new growth by the villagers effective regeneration was difficult and it led to the degradation of forests into scrubs. Forestry management is a real challenge since the local population (in the hills in particular) is largely dependent on forest output. Prabhakar et al. (2006) show that the Forest Survey of India’s widely cited figures considerably understate the extent of degradation. Degradation of forest has come about due to a drastic increase in the demand for timber for construction of rails at the end of the nineteenth century. The second reason is that nobody took care of the regeneration of the forest. Somanathan (1991) shows that the fundamental reason for deforestation was the prevailing system of property rights, which denied the local people certainty about future benefits from forests and which led to the well-known ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin 1968). This has destroyed the incentives to use forest sustainably. Deforestation often results from social injustice and political inequalities. Forests have great economic value and are a sustained source of income to many people. Therefore, they can be seen as a contested resource over which many different sectors of the society seek to assert control. Accordingly, the allocation of property rights with regard to forests assumes importance. In legal terms, to have a right allows/implies to have the capacity to call upon the collective power of an authoritative system to protect the said right, should the need arise. This authority system could be the government of a local village, a regional authority, or a national government. To have a property right, therefore, is to have secure control over a stream of future benefits. And the type of property rights regime that evolves in a community has a strong bearing on the economic and social dimensions of those who relate to its management and steer its governance. Today in this region of Central Himalayas, the institution that forms the principal locus of collective action to manage village forests is the van panchayat. The van panchayats were created to overcome forest degradation. About one-third of the villages in the region have Panchayat Forests. The rest use Reserved Forests, which are managed by the state government’s forest department, and Civil Forests, which are unmanaged village commons. Civil forests are generally very degraded (Somanathan et al. 2002). In what follows we define each of these property rights, and compare their efficiencies. In the second section we will focus on the van panchayat forests that represent the most efficient management. There, we run economic experiments in order to test villagers’ efficiency in cooperation. The public goods problem or Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ is either viewed as a problem of

extraction (like forestry in Central Himalayas) or that of contribution, which has a rich history in Economics and indeed in other disciplines like Anthropology, Sociology and Political Science. Common to the different ways in which this problem is phrased is the idea that a good or service that is non-excludable and non-rival in consumption is bound to lead to the problem of over-extraction or under-contribution due to the presence of free riders, who either over-extract or under-contribute in equilibrium (Ostrom 1990). The public goods problem may be viewed generally as an N-player Prisoner’s Dilemma (NPD) game with one Pareto2 dominated Nash equilibrium and numerous outcomes that are Pareto superior. The prisoner’s dilemma is a canonical example of a game, analysed in game theory that shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest to do so. And a Nash equilibrium (named after John Forbes Nash, who proposed it) is a solution concept of a game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only his own strategy unilaterally. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, early studies with subjects robustly revealed that people do not defect from the co-operative outcome to the extent predicted in equilibrium. Indeed this paradox of rationality has led to there being numerous experimental studies in both Economics and Psychology that have explored this deviation from Nash equilibrium for this game in a variety of settings (see Lave 1962; Andreoni and Miller 1993). For both the Common Pool Resources (CPRs) and Voluntary Contributions Mechanism (VCM) variants of the public goods game, numerous experiments have been published which explore not just contribution/extraction behaviour but also the effect of punishment both informal (Gardner et al. 1992) and those arising from costly payoff reducing sanctions on contribution behaviour (Fehr and Gachter 2000).3 The literature on laboratory experiments4 has a few issues that have been largely ignored. For one, most laboratory public goods games use group sizes of two to four. There is very little literature on group sizes larger than four, an exception being Marwell and Ames (1980). Furthermore, most subject pools consist of American and European college students, whereas a large number of extractors of CPRs and contributors to public goods are individuals in the ‘wild’ who may not even have a high school or college degree, yet make decisions which have great import for their own payoffs as well as those of the community (Cardenas 2000). This relative homogeneity of the subject pool has meant that there is very little exploration of the demographics of contributors versus free riders in most of the well-known experimental articles on public goods contribution. Fortunately Framed Field Experiments5 (henceforth field experiments) give us a chance to study decisionmakers in the field in controlled situations involving subjects who would be difficult to get to a laboratory in an urban setting (Cardenas 2000, 2003; see Binswanger 1981 for an early field experiment, and Harrison and List 2004 for a comprehensive review). This opening up of the subject pool has spawned a small but growing experimental literature on public goods that is concerned with studying the effects of demographic variables like age, gender, education and social status on public goods contribution. Anderson et al. (2008) investigate whether contributions to a public good in matrilineal societies differ significantly from that in patrilineal societies and find that participants in matrilineal societies contribute more on average. Bouma et al. (2008) use the Trust Game (an NPD game just like the VCM) experiment combined with a household survey in rural India to explore the interlinkages between social capital, community characteristics, and the provision of a local semi-public good (investments in soil and water conservation maintenance). Greig and Bohnet (2009) use a one-shot Public Goods game to explore the effect of sex and a group’s gender composition on the voluntary provision of public goods in a Nairobi slum. Gender heterogeneity hurts the voluntary provision of public goods because women (but not men) contribute less in mixed-gender than same-gender groups. Women contribute as much as men in same-gender groups. We use a standard VCM game with a moderately large group of ten and face to face communication enacted before the first, sixth and eleventh period of fifteen periods. The subjects, who were villagers in the Gori-Ganga Basin of the Central Himalayas, were not re-matched every period. According to their environment and way of life, it is undeniable that the population of this area understands and depends on collective action (in the van panchayat, labour exchange) for their survival and in a majority of productive activities they engage in. This very fact makes this population a good one for our field study. On an average, aggregate contribution to the common pool does not decrease as sharply as that seen in most laboratory VCM

experiments but is comparable to the field results from one of the three societies investigated by Anderson et al. (2008). Demographic variables like age, gender, caste and literacy are all seen to affect individual and therefore group contribution. Our experiment provides a simple extension to the basic VCM game (Isaac and Walker 1988a, 1988b) with a large group size in the field and explores motivations behind contribution that potentially go beyond the standard laboratory setting due to the uniqueness of our subject pool and experimental setting. In doing so, it adds to small but growing literature that takes this abstract game and investigates it with ‘real’ people in ‘real’ settings. The preliminary results of this experiment are presented in the last section.

Historical Setting: From Centralised to Decentralised Management Prior to the British conquest in 1815, virtually the entire forest area was implicitly designated as the exclusive common property of one village or another, with clearly demarcated boundaries recognised by members of adjacent villages. Intra-village patterns of use were regulated by norms, sometimes backed up by strict rules enforced by village councils. Due to the prospect of increasing revenue through the sale of timber demanded by the rapidly expanding railways, the State was to monopolise the use of the forest resources. With the creation of the Forest Department in 1868, the implementation of the Forest Act of 1878 and the Indian Forest Act of 1893, the rights of the forest communities were restricted to the use of agricultural land. In the name of ‘scientific forestry’, the forest communities were kept away from the management of their forests and various traditional practices and rights were curtailed. In fact, the British government simply refused to recognise traditional notions of community ownership and declared all non-private land to be state property. The Forest Department curbed the villagers’ rights to extension of agricultural land, stopped the customary practice of burning the forest grass in the summer, and limited the rights of access and use forest in different categories of forests. Thus between 1911 and 1917 vast areas of forest were taken over by the colonial government with a view to managing the extraction of timber from pines for railway construction. A common property regime was thereby transformed into a state property regime. The resulting restrictions on the use of forest resources by its inhabitants played havoc with the villagers’ customary patterns of use and led to massive popular protests and huge incendiary fires in 1911–1920. In response, in 1925, the colonial state granted some concessions to the hill communities on the recommendations of the Kumaon Forest Grievances Committee (KFGC) and restrictions were removed on the villagers’ use of most state oak forests: transforming a state property regime to one of open access. Class I forests, which contained little or no species of commercial importance were reverted to the Revenue Department. In Class II forests, the villagers were given rights of grazing, to lop off oak branches for fodder, and collect dry wood. The five-year period following this government order led to a rapid and unprecedented rate of deforestation as villagers, suddenly immune from the restraining effects of custom and local sanction, began encroaching into areas previously considered to be the property of other villagers. Deforestation implies lower annual output of different kinds of forest produce which include timber, fuelwood, pulpwood, resin, animal fodder, etc. The degradation of the forests has been a major blow to rural residents of the area who have suffered from the lack of firewood (the main source of energy for cooking and heating), fodder and grazing, and the adverse effects on springs which are the main sources of water for villages on the slopes. Degradation may also affect areas in the plains since it may increase the runoff during the monsoon, leading to increased flooding during the monsoon months and reduced water supplies at other times of the year. Finally, of course, the role of forests in carbon fixation is damaged. Later in 1930, the government established the system of van panchayats as a means of arresting the degradation. It was meant to enable the forests to be governed by village councils out of their remaining village forest (officially recognising councils with the powers to frame rules for use of the forests under their control), and out-of-state forests, provided they obtained, on a case-by-case basis, the consent of the government. In 1972, the state government issued a new set of much more restrictive rules which prohibited the transfer of state forests to village councils and the sale of timber from council forests, and made it incumbent on the councils to obtain government permission before felling green trees for local use. By 1998, more than one-third of the villages in the region had their own council forests. The rest used state forests and unmanaged village commons.

The Reserved Forest and Civil Forest In the Reserved Forest, villagers are allowed limited rights and privileges for fuelwood, fodder, grazing and timber. These rights extend to large blocks of‘Government Forest’ and are not exclusive to particular villages, a reversal of the situation that prevailed before reservation. Use is regulated by employees of the state forest department known as ‘forest guards’. These guards may reach tacit understandings with the villagers to overlook illegal harvesting up to a limit. The unmanaged village commons, the so-called civil forests, are a residual category, consisting of all village lands not in private hands or in a council forest. They are for the exclusive use of residents of their villages. The common pool problem is less severe in these lands than in state forests because the latter are open to the residents of several villages. But the lack of any regulation other than a ban on felling means that they are subject to overgrazing and other excessive harvesting.

Common Property: Forest Council (Van Panchayat) The van panchayats represent one of the most diverse experiments in devolved common property management ever developed in collaboration with the State. In fact they form one of the earliest examples anywhere in the world of decentralised resource management through formal state-community partnerships. It is important to note that forests managed by van panchayats are considered by local villagers to be collective property in a real sense. Panchayat or council members are elected by a show of hands in front of a government official once every five years. It may be mentioned here that community forests managed in accordance with Van Panchayat Act is a hybrid of state ownership and community responsibility. In its efforts to manage and control community forest use Forest Committees are guided by Revenue Department rules and by the technical advice of the Forest Department. In contrast to civil forests, community forests or Panchayati forests, as they are popularly known, are not ‘open’ forests. Access and use of forests is guided by rules elaborately designed and implemented by the communities. Nevertheless, it lacks the coercive authority of the State, in that if the accused refuses to pay the fine, the panchayat’s only legal recourse is to approach the courts to recover the fine, a very costly procedure that is never resorted to. Instead, social pressure is applied to force the violator to pay. Another weakness of the system is that some panchayats have no source of revenue other than voluntary contributions from villagers to pay for a watchman. The panchayats often have difficulty in getting access to the funds from the proceeds of such activities, as their bank accounts are in the control of a state government official. These weaknesses imply that the panchayats are hugely dependent on informal collective action and social norms.

State Property versus Common Property in the Central Himalayas Van Panchayats provide a favourable mechanism for overcoming the common pool problem in village forests (Somanathan et al. 2005). The institution is the only one of its kind in India, in having permanent control over its forest, with legal recognition from the government. Villagers are far more secure in their tenure in comparison with the system of Joint Forest Management6 between the state forest departments and forest user groups which spread widely in India in the 1990s. In fact, van panchayats probably compare favourably in terms of security of tenure and community control to most such institutions in developing countries. Somanathan et al. (2005) compare the different property rights in the Himalayas, the forest managed by village councils with state managed forest, in terms of conservation and cost. They find that decentralised management was as good and perhaps as better at forest conservation as centralised management. Moreover, decentralised management by forest councils cost an order of magnitude less per unit area than centralised forest management by the state government. It is likely that flow of benefits from council forests are of greater value than from comparable state-managed forests even though they have the same crown cover on average, since the former are managed locally by villagers for their own benefit. Their study shows that state control has been very expensive because of the cost of supporting a large hierarchical bureaucracy while not doing any better and possibly worse than community management on the resource conservation front. It also highlights the importance of putting in place an appropriate institution which facilitates community regulation of resource use.

However, it does not offer much solace to those hoping that devolution will lead to large reversals of forest degradation. It does not appear that the van panchayat system actually did very much more for conservation than did the state administration. The forests maintained by the van panchayats are not completely immune from misuse and their condition varies from poor to very good. However the forests in the communities studied as well as in Baland et al. (2008) are averagely in better shape than in other areas of the Central Himalayas. It is interesting to study experimentally in the next section those populations and test the demographic effects such as gender, age, caste, etc. on the tendency to cooperate in public goods such as the van panchayat or the construction of a school.

The Field Experiment Our population is that of the Gori-Ganga Basin of the Central Himalayas in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. The villages used for the experiment lie between 500 and 2500 metres above sea-level. The number of households in these villages range from 11 to 120 with an average of 42 families per village. Less than 50 per cent of the villages are at locations that are remote from the main highway. Over 90 per cent of the population are farmers cultivating rice, wheat, several kinds of millets and pulses. Most of the crops grown are for subsistence though a small proportion of the cultivated area is used to grow potatoes, a cash crop. The villagers typically rear cattle (goats, oxen, buffaloes and cows) for meat, milk and very importantly manure production. The animals are fed grass from common lands and forests. The average daily wage in the villages of this area is Rs 90 (1.40 Euro with an in-sample dispersion of (Rs 70, Rs 140) and with outside labour opportunities that can pay on average of up to Rs 105 per day. The forest of each village is managed by a van panchayat. The conservation of forests as public goods is important especially for communities living in remote areas of the Central Himalayas as they provide them with livelihoods that would otherwise be impossible. Furthermore, in this environment of subsistence, collective action in various activities like labour exchange in agriculture, construction and social functions such as marriages and illness in the community as well as the provision of local public goods such as construction and repair of roads, ropeway trolleys, bridges and schools become essential to the survival of these communities. Even though collective action is very crucial the level of efficiency in cooperation is not the same in every village and more details may be found in Chakravarty et al. (2009). Thus, the population of this area understands and depends on collective action, for their survival, in a majority of productive activities they engage in.

Experiments, Participants and Field setting In our decision-making exercise, ‘public good’ (the common pool) was described to the subjects as a fund that could be used for the construction of a common property resource like a bridge or school construction.7 In order to make the decision non-hypothetical, the subjects were informed at the beginning of the session that they would be paid anonymously an amount in cash according to their decisions and the decisions of the others. The sessions involved groups of 10 subjects, which is a larger group than those considered in standard VCM experiments. The subjects participated in a series of rounds, in each of which they chose their individual contributions to the public good. A total of 390 subjects from 20 different villages8 in the Kumaon region of the Central Himalayas were recruited for this experiment. An interesting contribution of our experiment to the literature on public goods games is the fact that many of the villages where we ran our experiment were so small that our cohort sizes were between 15 and 25 per cent of the population of the villages. Thus our results capture the attitude of the population towards cooperation in a way that no laboratory experiment (most of which use very small samples of specific populations like college students) could do. On a related point, our subjects were livelihood earners with a spread in ages that was much wider than most experimental studies in the literature. This makes our results far more relevant than those done with a small sampling of college age adolescents between the ages of 18 and 25. Table 6.1 indicates the demographic spread of our sample.

Before an experimenter explained the general instructions, we made sure that every participant was older than 18 years, and that only one member per family and per group participated. We then assigned ID numbers in the experiment by conducting a lottery with 10 blue coins and 10 red coins, on each of which was written an identification number (from 1 to 10). A colour corresponded to a group in the experiment to which the participants were randomly allocated. The game instructions were read aloud to all the participants. We controlled the subjects’ understanding of the instructions by administering a questionnaire with the answers to this questionnaire checked by the monitor before the start of the experiment. Subjects sat individually and randomly according to their identification number in a circle with enough space so that they would not be aware of another subject’s decision. Except when communication was allowed, subjects always had their backs turned to the centre of the circle. We used a partner design that had the same cohort interacting repeatedly for 15 periods. In each period, players made a decision to contribute as much (whole numbers only) as he/she wanted from her endowment of ten rupees to the common pool. Subjects knew from the instructions that for each rupee they placed in their ‘private account’ they would receive Re 1. For each rupee they placed in the ‘group account’ all members of the group, including themselves would receive 0.2 rupee each; in other words, the total contribution to the group account is multiplied by 2 and divided among the 10 players.9 Before periods 1, 6 and 11, the ten participants were allowed to communicate for five minutes. A table of possible gains according to their own contribution in rupees to the group account (x) and according to the total contribution of the group to this account (X) was made available for each subject. The table indicated the total gain in rupees. During the 15 periods, they wrote down anonymously (subjects were identified through an identification number) their own contribution to the group account for each game. Once the 10 players of each group made their decision, they handed their decision slips to the experimenter. The aggregate contribution to the pool and the individual’s payoff were then calculated. One session lasted approximately 3 hours. The average gain for a player during an entire session of 15 rounds equalled the value of 2.5 days of work, i.e., Rs 250. Thus the payment was high (with respect to their regular income) in comparison to most previous laboratory public goods experiments and it is safe to say that most subjects did make decisions that were salient. Finally, they filled out an exit survey questionnaire on demographic data. We present the main experimental results in Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 Demographic Classification of Experimental Sample

Preliminary Results from the Economic Experiment Observation 1 The aggregate contribution to the common pool is decreasing over time. The average of aggregate contribution, i.e., the sum of individual’s investment, is equal to X=48.17 (i.e., 48.2 per cent of the total

contribution). Thus, less than half of the total endowment is invested in the common pool. From period 1 to 15 there is a total decrease of 20 per cent of the aggregate amount invested in the common pool (X= 55.15 at period 1, and X= 44.10 at period 15, see Figure 6.1). This is a slight decrease of aggregate contribution over a period compared to Isaac and Walker (1988b) who find a decrease of 50 per cent between period 1 and 10 (see Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.1 Aggregate Contribution to the Common Pool over Periods The communication rounds have little effect on aggregate investment. However from periods 4,5 and 6 (Figure 6.1) there is an increase just before the second communication round and there is a decrease of 8 per cent right after when participants have communicated. This decrease in contribution after a communication round is consistent to the results shown by Isaac and Walker ( 1988b) who find that face to face communication in a larger group (8 participants) does not reduce the incidence of free riding behaviour. The lack of efficacy of communication in our setting may be due to the small marginal per capita return (MPCR) of the public good in our experiment (0.2 as opposed to 0.4 for Bochet et al. [2006] and the larger size of the group. This increase in free riding behaviour due to a small marginal return on the public good is documented in Isaac and Walker (1988a). In conclusion, we may add that we obtain a relatively high level of individual contribution which is quite stable over periods, in comparison to most studies in the literature with similar group size/MPCR.

Observation 2 Women contribute more to the common pool on average. With a panel comprising 271 males (69.5 per cent of total population) and 119 females (30.5 per cent of total population), we find that males contribute on an average significantly less to the pool compared to females (x=4.7 for males vs. x=5.4 for females) (Wilcoxon p > 0.000; see Figure 6.2).10 This result of less free riding among women is also in agreement with the results in Anderson et al. (2008) who conducted a field experiment involving public goods in Northeastern states of India. The experiment yields some observations regarding norms related to gender roles and relations that we did not start out intending to study, but are nevertheless interesting enough to list. First, when the participants arrived at the experiment they formed natural gender groupings as is true for numerous social events in India, although during the experiment site they took their decisions seated at spots which were randomised by the experimenters. Second, during the communication rounds, men formed groups which often did not include women but no corresponding significant aggregations of women were observed by the experimenters. Third, it seemed from their communication that some men in the groups urged the women to

contribute a larger amount compared to average contributions. The fact that women contribute on an average a rupee more than men may be partially affected by this communication and crucially highlight the fact that earning decisions in families in India are still a male dominated activity, and women who are individually less rational may actually believe the advice given by their male players in their group in what they consider an income generating activity. We find later in this study that even this effect is not homogeneous across demographic groupings related to caste. Since men free-ride more they earn on an average higher profits than women (Wilcoxon p > 0.000; men’s profit=15 per period, and women’s profit=14.5 per period). As aggregate investment to the public good decreases, profits are consequently affected and decrease over successive periods (Figure 6.3).

Observation 3 Participants from scheduled tribes (STs) invest more in the common pool compared to upper caste and scheduled caste (SC) participants. It is clear from Figure 6.4 that participants belonging to the scheduled tribe (ST) category invest more on an average in the common pool compared to general caste and schedule caste participants (Wilcoxon p > 0.000; x = 5.6 for schedule tribe, x= 4.7 for general caste and x=4.6 for scheduled caste). On an average the scheduled tribes earn more than the other castes (Wilcoxon p > 0.000, profit=15.3 for scheduled tribe, profit=14.7 for general caste, and profit= 14.8 for scheduled caste). It seems that scheduled tribe participants interact more during the communication step and coordinate better than other groups, leading to efficient outcomes. In general, societies that display higher levels of cooperation are the ones which have strong norms regarding formal and informal sanctions against free-riders and non-cooperators (Keefer and Knack 2008). The reason why tribal communities may succeed better at collective action may also be related to a main argument in Olson (1965) who posits that large groups will face relatively high costs when attempting to organise for collective action while small groups will face relatively low costs. Furthermore, individuals in large groups will gain relatively less per capita of successful collective action, whereas individuals in small groups will gain relatively more per capita through successful collective action. Thus, given that the dominant upper caste mainstream has higher costs as well as lower rewards from collectivisation than smaller minority groups (like SCs and STs), one may well see a higher prevalence of free riding among the former vis-à-vis the latter.

Figure 6.2 Individual Contribution to the Common Pool by Gender

Figure 6.3 Individual Profits by Gender

Figure 6.4 Individual Contribution to the Pool according to Caste over Periods

Observation 4 Figure 6.5 below shows cumulative distribution functions (CDF) of individual investment by a group’s gender and caste composition, and Table 6.2 shows contribution rates by sex and caste. When we look more precisely at the individual contribution to the common pool according to caste and gender, we see a difference between genders in the upper caste: males contribute less compared to women (Wilcoxon p > 0.000, t-test p value = 0.000, x=4.72 for male and x=5.4 for female). However there is no significant difference in individual contribution between male and female for the scheduled castes (Wilcoxon p > 0.485, t-test p value = 0. 6452, x=4.58 for male and x=4.47 for female) and the scheduled tribes (Wilcoxon p > 0.465, t-test p value = 0.3938, x=5.52 for male and x=5.7 for female). Furthermore, the scheduled tribe participants (both males and

females) behave as women participants from the general caste and the schedule caste participants (both males and females) behave as the men participants from the general caste. A conjecture that may explain these facts is that there is a ‘marginalization effect’, which makes contribution to the common pool from marginalised communities (women, SC, ST) higher as well as more equal across genders. Greater gender equality in tribal cultures in India (as compared to the Hindu mainstream) has been documented in Fürer- Haimendorf (1960, 1983). Furthermore, as stated in the last section, the payoff to cooperation is less costly and more rewarding in smaller communities like SCs and STs (Olson 1965). Table 6.2 shows that SCs and STs have more equal contributions across men and women than the upper caste participants where there is a significant difference in contribution with men free-riding more frequently. The STs who are traditionally more marginalised have higher rates of contribution than both SCs and the dominant upper caste Hindus.

Table 6.2 Composition of Free-riders according to Gender and Caste (Please note that ‘Investment’ denotes money invested in the public good; and ‘Strong free-riders’ denote the share of subject investing zero in the public good.)

Figure 6.5 Cumulative Distribution of Amount Contributed by Group’s Sex and Caste Composition

Conclusion We ran a field experiment using a linear VCM and a population comprising villagers from the Gori-Ganga basin in the Kumaon region of Uttaranchal. Our results are somewhat different from laboratory experiments using a similar design such as Isaac and Walker’ (1988a, 1988b). A noteworthy general observation is that even with a relatively low MPCR and a large group we find a steady contribution rate around 55 per cent which diminishes slightly at the end of the session to around 45 per cent. We also delved into the demographic characteristics of our subject pool and interestingly found that individual contribution to the common pool is determined by gender, age, and caste. However, face to face communication is not seen to increase average individual contribution to the common pool.

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SEVEN

Unpacking Policy Discourses and ‘Scientific’ Management of Forests in Meghalaya SANJEEVA KUMAR

The chapter examines the fate of community management of forest in the real world context of pressure through external interventions in Meghalaya, a small State inhabited by people who are legally in control of forests. The State claims to be trying to ‘develop and manage forests scientifically', but in the process such forests are being taken away from the communities whose lives and livelihood have been supported by the same for centuries. This study identifies several discourses mainly inside, but also outside the policy arena, which impact on the community resource management to show how certain discourses and practices opposed to community management have come to dominate others. It also articulates the fundamental contradiction inherent in the policy/expert discourses, which while claiming to promote indigeneity, at the same time blame indigenous practices for the demise of the environment. In the process the study tries to unpack the discourses on development and participation surrounding wide-ranging State-led interventions like joint forest management, park management, ‘controlling’ the primitive practice of shifting cultivation, and the recent, post-Kyoto, epistemic community-led initiative on carbon trading which are not only delegitimising community but are also creating new and hitherto unknown subjectivities for them. The chapter demonstrates that the hidden normative position in such interventions is to establish greater State control over community forest so as to use it according to its modernist vision for which a variety of technical positions for ‘better, scientific and productive’ management of forest have been assumed, in opposition to indigeneity.

Community Control of Forest and Its Limitations Till recently the accepted public policy was to manage the forest through the government. The basic premise of this policy was that conservation required the protection of forests and since the members of local communities needed the forest for fuelwood and fodder, they over exploited it leading to degradation. However, the inadequacy of this top down, exclusionist approach leading to continuous degradation, led policy-makers, practitioners and donors to turn to communities to improve the management of ‘their natural resources (Agrawal 2005). A plethora of literature has consequently emerged that celebrates communities. But the sustainability of community management within the political economy and policies of modern States has mostly been neglected in such studies. They also overlook the fact that even the effects of participatory measures proposed by the community advocates to roll back State power and strengthen community, have the capacity to further strengthen the State’s territorialisation project and provide various other opportunities (e.g., through bureaucratic expansion, donor funding, international legitimating) for the intensification of the rule as such State interventions are legitimised by powerful discourses of ‘rational’ use of forest. The State, for instance, may appear to be supporting community management explicitly, but in practice community forestry may bear many of the hallmarks of scientific forestry wherein technical and productivity aspects rather than social considerations are emphasised. This element is related to what is called political technology. First introduced by Foucault (1980), it refers to the fact that political problems may often be removed from the realm of political discourse and recast in the neutral language of science. Through this process of depoliticisation the problem can be reformulated and presented as neutral. By depoliticising community forestry as a technical, neutral management issue, the State policy design may offer straightforward technical solutions that do not require engagement with often uncomfortable issues of power and equity. Against this background this chapter will look at the community management of forest in Meghalaya, where people have

historically been in control of forests, but the discourses attempting at ‘scientific’ management of forests are delegitimising communities.

Community Control of Forest in Meghalaya: Past and Present Meghalaya is a mountainous State having a population of about two million, with 85 per cent of the population belonging to indigenous matrilineal tribes—Khasi, Jaintia and Garo. The Forest Survey of India (FSI) has estimated about 70 per cent of the geographical area in Meghalaya—16,839 sq. km out of a total 22,429 sq. km—as the actual forest cover in 2003 (FSI 2003). Out of the total forest cover only 1027 sq. km (6 per cent) is under the control of State and the rest of it (94 per cent) is with the community (ibid. 2003). Forest management in Meghalaya has long been described as exceptional because the Indian Constitution provides for control over almost all forests in the region to the indigenous people, unlike the rest of India where the state forest department owns and manages most of the forest. Before the British conquest in the first half of the nineteenth century, in Meghalaya, then a part of Assam, traditional institutions looked after the affairs of the community. These traditional institutions had a complex system of regulation of natural resources, which granted rights not only over land/forest use to the community but also defined rights to trees, fruits and fuelwood. Religious sanctions were also used to conserve forests. Though the traditional heads were gradually made subordinate to the British rule and were to pay tribute to the British, inaccessible and inhospitable terrain compelled the Raj to follow administrative practices based on non-interference and exclusion, resulting in continuation of communal forms of forest management. After India’s independence in 1947, framers of the Indian Constitution in the early 1950s provided for the establishment of Autonomous District Councils (ADC), an elected body of the indigenous people based on adult suffrage, which was also entrusted with, among others, the power to manage forests. Thus forest management in Meghalaya continued to be exceptional because of community control but it is estimated to have lost a large part of its forests in the last few decades. There is also a drastic fall in the quality of cover as dense forests are reducing and open forests increasing (Ray and Alam 2002), forcing the apex court of the country to ban logging in Meghalaya in 1996, along with other parts of India (Nongbri 2001, Lainé in this volume). The indigenous community has predictably been blamed for the state of affairs, providing support for the discourse, which reframes the issue of deforestation by endorsing more State intervention, questioning the discourses that celebrate community. This is evident in the subordination of the discourse on indigeneity by the modernist, metropolitan policy discourse.

Indigeneity vs Modernity Two contrasting discourses can be located in Meghalaya. First, the discourse on indigeneity which emphasises on collective rights in land and natural resources, favouring traditional community land management systems as an alternative to private and State ownership regimes and the second discourse on modernity, which shares the vision of the metropolitan-secular view of nature and its economistic and material uses for the nation, based on extraction of natural resources and expansion of modern nation State to the community space. I will demonstrate how in Meghalaya the metropolitan-secular discourse has established domination over the indigeneity discourse. As we saw earlier, the creation of ADCs was a continuation of the policy that originated in the colonial period wherein the tribal areas were treated as protected enclaves. The ADCs backed by the central government envisaged an arrangement wherein tribal people could supposedly pursue customary practices including kinship and clan based rules of land allocation emphasising indigeneity. The discourse on indigeneity remained powerful in the 1950s and was re-enforced by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru through his policy of ‘Panchsheel’ or five principles of tribal autonomy which stressed that tribal rights in land and forest should be protected. But as Meghalaya was still a part of Assam and the indigenous people resented the fact that the politics, administration, trade and commerce had predominance of the plainsman from Assam, ultimately the indigenous state of Meghalaya was created in 1972. However, immediately after independence and along with the indigeneity discourse, a multi-faceted development narrative emerged in the region. The use of rich natural resources was seen as a response to the

needs of the growing national economy, which could be achieved by integration with the rest of the country. The emerging pan-Indian discourse which drew a blueprint of development saw the exclusiveness, isolation and inaccessibility of Northeast India as a major problem in need of conventional development trajectory— planning and allocation of funds to departments such as road construction and industries and inflow of capital from the entrepreneurs of industrialised regions (Barua 2005). Once the presence of industry was defined as progress, its absence by definition became a mark of backwardness and a vision of the future which incorporated more industries and the displacement of the local resource national and global resource use regimes were taken for granted (ibid.). Thus an infrastructure of State institutions was thought to be necessary to achieve this (ibid.). Under the circumstances the only hope for the indigeneity discourse was Meghalaya’s own development discourse after the creation of an independent state. But Meghalaya continued to follow the conventional, pan-Indian path of development, albeit more speedily. Thus in his inaugural speech to celebrate Meghalaya’s statehood in 1972, its first Governor B. K. Nehru charted a road map for the future development, which demonstrates how the project of modernisation was being shaped. He focused on pedagogy of development, followed in the rest of India that underlined that people of Meghalaya were lagging ‘behind their brethren in other parts of the country’ and highlighted the need for a conventional development strategy. Clearly the local people were seen as lagging behind and in need of general integration into modern mainstream development, for which settled agriculture, infrastructure, developed means of communication, extraction of natural resources and industries were seen as solution. It also indicated a new representation of forest from subsistence to commercial (GoM 1970). Thus Meghalaya’s official policy documents continue to see its hilly terrain, ‘unfavourable’ climate condition, geographical isolation, lack of infrastructure and smallness, as major problems and industrialisation and ‘infrastructure’ as solutions. However they add two more ‘hurdles’ to development—sparse population and ethnic identity (GoM 2005). The pan-Indian yardstick of development—road network—is still assigned a major place in the official documents. A recent government document laments that the total road length in the State is 7886 km with a road density of 36 km per 100 sq. km as on 31 March, 2005, which is lower than the national average. It proposes to add more kilometers of road construction (GoM 2006a). Another official document (GoM 2005) expresses satisfaction that the State has seen a record increase in the number of registered vehicles from 3,831 to 73,382—a ratio of one vehicle for every 32 persons in 2002 as against 1:264 in 1972—a sign of ‘development’. The fact that the prime mover of these projects are elected representatives of Meghalaya and its middle class shows that discourse on development has assumed hegemonic proportions at least among policy-makers and politicians. This is strikingly different from the indigenous discourse reflected in the Meghalaya Indigenous People’s Forum’s assertion that ‘state should not adopt industrialization for (the) sake of industrialization, as land to the tribal is more precious than coal and lime stones …. we should develop our state according to our own genius’ (Shillong Times 2006). To conclude, while both the central and regional planning authorities have acknowledged the specificity of Northeast India, they have failed to adopt a suitable alternative strategy, which could develop the region without disturbing its ecological balance and the identity of the people. Instead the conventional development strategy has been followed. Thus it is only natural that with the opening of the Indian economy, the Meghalaya government is projecting itself as an investorfriendly place, where the abundant natural resources are the major selling point. For instance a document of the Department of Industries, Meghalaya states, ‘with its rich and vast minerals, water and forest resources, Meghalaya offers tremendous opportunities for investment’ (Karlsson 2003). Development in this vision is to be achieved through further extraction of the ‘untapped resources’ including forest with active support of the State.

District Councils As mentioned earlier, autonomous district councils were created in VI Schedule areas to protect the interests of the indigenous people. Commenting on the formation of ADCs, Barua (2005) rightly observes that it was necessary to find a middle ground that would enable the penetration of pan-Indian institutions and at the same time allay the fears of the people of this sparsely populated area. District councils were a good way to ensure both the penetration of the State and the creation of local stakeholders in the pan-Indian dispensation. It is not surprising therefore that the modern, elected institution of ADCs were given authority over the

traditional institutions based on hereditary and local customs. In fact in this new arrangement traditional chiefs were made subordinate officials of the ADCs, liable to be dismissed on charges like insubordination (Gassah 1997). The ‘compliance’ of ADCs to the ‘modernisation’ project was achieved in two ways. The first was their financial dependence on state and central governments because they lacked resources to run their huge establishment. Their ‘obedience’ was further ensured by way of the supremacy of state legislation which could override the legislation passed by a district council. While these ‘disciplinary procedures’ were important to align ADCs to the pan-Indian development discourse, the role of hegemonic development discourse in the shaping of the ADCs should not be overlooked. It is interesting to see how the ADCs became governmentalised localities that carried the State version of development and opened new territorial and administrative spaces in which new regulatory communities were to function. Thus it is natural that ADCs share the all-India discourse of modernity that equates development with industrialisation, infrastructure and exploitation of natural resources of the region. They spend a major portion of their budget on road construction. The national and State political parties participate actively in the elections to the District Councils and fierce political battles are waged to capture power (Phira 1991). The management of forests under district councils is equally statist. Thus legislation for management and control of forest by the district council passed in 1958 recognises various categories of forests based on customary usages and practices but at the same time vests all powers of management and control of these forests in the district council. Despite various amendments overtime, it mentions nothing about community management and its elaborate regulatory provisions are limited to the registration of forests, removal of forest produce, felling of trees and controlling transportation of timber. It also provides for an elaborate classification and schedule of rates of royalty for different kinds of timber and minor forest produce (GoA 1958). The indigenous community forest is an important source of livelihood which not only provides food, fodder, fuel but also timber, fruit and medicine in Meghalaya but the deployment of forest for the pan-Indian industrial development opened the door to non-tribal businessmen who have leased forest on a contractual basis from local landowners and sold or transported the timber outside the state. Those who are rich have also set up their own saw mills bringing the industry into the village with assistance from the State owned Meghalaya Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC). While the logging ban in 1996 has checked felling of trees temporarily, deforestation has continued due to increasing extraction of charcoal from timber and illegal logging.

The ‘King’ Charcoal Charcoal was an important domestic fuel consumed during the usually cold winter of Shillong (Zimba 1978) but with the onset of industrialisation its demand increased many fold and charcoal burning itself became an important industry. Charcoal was initially linked to progress as it was seen as a must for industrialisation of the State. As a result a number of Ferro alloyed units have been established in the state, which need charcoal on a very large scale. An environmental discourse has emerged in the last few years in the state, blaming charcoal for deforestation and pollution, mainly popularised by the media, which has led to a change in the meaning of charcoal from a substance of progress to regress, compelling the government to regulate its trade. But such attempts are facing opposition from industrialists, indigenous charcoal dealers and forest owners on the ground that their livelihood depends on charcoal. The state level politicians also share this perception. For instance, the Co-Chairman of the Meghalaya State Planning Board thought that the ban might affect the people of the state badly and could even lead to starvation deaths in the state (Shillong Times 2004). This shows how actors having different interests have formed a strong coalition to support charcoal, which earns the epithet ‘king for it. It is also an indication that while discourse on industrialisation has strengthened, environmental discourse, which could have checked deforestation has not been able to garner any support from the civil society, not even from the likes of the Khasi Students’ Union, which represents an indigenous discourse opposing export of natural resources to other parts of the country.

Privatisation of Community Land The most visible process of privatisation is the conversion of village community land (Ri Raid) to clan/private land (Ri Kynti) by dubious means as pressure on land under changed economic circumstances is mounting.

The process was facilitated by the customary law that so long as an area of land was under cultivation and not allowed to remain fallow, the possession of the family continued. With the ascendancy of market economy the people quickly realised that, ‘as long as they plant enough shoot to keep the forest growing, the land will remain in their possession’ (Chattopadhyay 1985). Also, due to the non-existence of any law putting a ceiling, land is being concentrated in the hands of a few rich tribals (Dasgupta 1999). Nowhere in these areas would customary practices permit such a concentration of land, but for the new linkages that have brought with them hitherto unknown phenomena like absentee landlordism, realisation of land rent, sharecropping, land mortgage, landlessness and so on (Kama, Gassah and Thomas 1998). It is obvious that the egalitarian system of community ownership is being replaced by private ownership in the region (Tiwari and Singh 1995). The twin forces of modernity reflected in privatisation and extension of State control in community spaces are also changing gender relations both within and outside households, weakening the indigenous forms of natural resource management.

Privatisation and State Formation in Gender Spaces The Khasi society is a matrilineal society where descent and inheritance are through the mother. In matrilineal systems women have rights over ancestral property but community-owned forest is being registered as private lands, which is not construed as ancestral property but ‘selfacquired property’—a new classification in the wake of modernity wherein the men have the right to inheritance (Kelkar and Nathan 2003). Further, the emergence of timber industry has enabled men as husbands to take control of the family’s economy. Women’s ownership of land is no longer an important feature of the Khasi property system, but has been reduced to a vestigial right (ibid.). Besides privatisation, the State intervention too has contributed to marginalisation of women and indigenous forms of management, as it has led to the formalisation of external relations and an increase in dealing with the bureaucracy to the disadvantage of women. As Nongbri points out in the context of the India’s apex court’s order on logging, ‘The concept of the working plan mooted by the Supreme Court, according to which forests can be used only in accordance with centrally approved plans ignores women’s role in resource generation and also intensifies men’s control over them’ (Nongbri 2001). Recently, introduction of formalised village management of the economy, the setting aside of earlier fallow as village reserve forests, and the associated flow of funds into the village through projects like the IFAD-funded Northeast India Natural Resources Management Project has also led to increased control of men over the domestic economy (Kelkar and Nathan 2003). To sum up, the relationship of subjects with the environment needs to be examined in their emergence not simply as a part of larger politics by pre-existing interests but more so how the practices in relation to the environment transform actors and interests. The success of ADCs and community control projects depend on the production of people who see the need for community self-management, followed by a practice close to it. But the pursuits of development, industry, infrastructure and market have changed the stake of the people in the forest. As a consequence the discourse on indigeneity has considerably weakened.

Unpacking Policy Discourse on Community Self-management of Forest in Meghalaya In the previous section we saw the interaction of two contrasting discourses, one based on metropolitan secular extraction of natural resources and the other on indigeneity, and how the former has established domination over the latter and its consequences in practice. In this section we enter a specific but complex domain—locating the predominant policy discourse on forest in Meghalaya and its meaning—not only explicit but also, and more importantly, implicit and what it entails for community resource management. For instance, the stated forest policy may be to restore forest plantation, restricting shifting cultivation as it is seen threatening forest or watersheds. Yet the policy may stand for politically more controversial action like middle-class concern for the loss of forest or the government desire to get control over the land or the need to supply wood from forest plantation to the industries. Similarly notions of stability and fragility may sometimes be used to legitimise policies such as resettling villages or forbidding some agricultural practices that are thought to be detrimental such as shifting cultivation (Jasanoff and Martello 2004). In the context of Meghalaya, I will try to show how wide-ranging and seemingly unconnected forest related interventions—

schemes to check shifting cultivation, joint forest management, wildlife management and carbon trading purportedly for the sake of conservation and efficient and scientific management of forest—have actually been prompted by the State’s desire to get control of the community land and use it according to its modernist vision of development.

The ‘Degrading’ Shifting Cultivation The State of Environment Report 2005 on Meghalaya, which was finalised after wide ranging consultations not only with many departments of the government such as environment and forest, agriculture, industry, and planning but also academicians and NGOs, says that ‘the communities in general, the land owning clans/communities […] and the management systems in place for the management of these forests are to be blamed for such a decline in quality of the forests of the state, as the government does not have any interference in the management of community forests’ (GoM 2005). A similar disdain for community management practices is evident in the policy perception of shifting cultivation. Shifting cultivation is a traditional subsistence farming system that has been practised on the steep lands of the tropical forest zones of the world for centuries. It relies on clearing forest, burning, cultivation of subsistence crops for one or two years and then abandoning the plots, moving on to another plot and allowing the forest to regenerate in the previous plot. The cycle of cultivation to ‘fallow’ forest is traditionally more than 10 years. It is still widely practised on the hills in Meghalaya, covering about 20 per cent of forest. Though the area under such cultivation is said to have declined, still approximately 46,600 households are involved in it. The practice of shifting cultivation was described as ‘a rude system of culture’ and ‘wasteful and barbarous’ in the colonial discourse, as the shifting cultivators kept moving from one place to another, and could not be subjected to either revenue assessment or control (Guha and Gadgil 1995). In the post-independent period, old epithets like ‘destructive’, ‘degrading’, ‘uneconomic’, and ‘primitive’ were frequently used in policy documents. Once the urge to control it, driven by modernity discourse to appropriate community land to use it ‘rationally’, gained momentum it was referred to in more apocalyptic terms like ‘suicidal’ (Malik 2003). In official reports lands under shifting cultivation are still termed as ‘waste lands’ and ‘unproductive areas’ (ibid.). The result of such discourse is a plethora of government-run schemes to take control of such land or ensure its use which suits the State’s vision of development, starting from Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) induced ‘rational land use strategies’, resettlement of scattered villages in 1960s and 1970s, and then a multitude of horticulture, plantation and afforestation schemes which simply employed shifting cultivators as labourers or compelled them to shift from one clan land to another, which was against the community ethos (ibid.). Though many studies in India and abroad have shown that traditional methods of shifting cultivation cause the lowest amount of soil erosion and have also revealed that many popularly established notions of environmental degradation such as deforestation and desertification may not simply be blamed on local land use or increasing population, as commonly suggested (Tiwari 2005; Leach and Robin 1996), these have been overlooked by the modernist state discourses and in fact a new ‘crisis narrative’ has emerged in Meghalaya to further de-legitimise shifting cultivation and use the land ‘productively’. Thus a recent document to develop watershed management in shifting cultivation areas talks about the global energy crisis due to depletion of fossil fuel resources and proposes a massive scheme of Jatropha (a source of biodiesel) plantation on these ‘enormous areas of unproductive, waste lands’ to help the industrial sector achieve self-reliance for its energy needs (GoM 2006b). The state discourse on shifting cultivation portrayed through a series of crisis narratives is clearly driven out of its desire to get control of the community land and use it for the purposes that suit its modernist agenda, overlooking the fact that it is inseparably linked with the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of their life and community ownership of the indigenous people. Such negative projection of communal modes of resource management, justifying state control practice, is not limited to shifting cultivation, but has resulted in a variety of state practices, both coercive and persuasive that impinge on community space and extend state management and control on natural resources, as we will see further below.

Joint Forest Management (JFM) The JFM approach provides communities with a share of timber and non-timber forest products from public

lands in return for forest protection and it has been extended to most of the states in India. Though JFM has allowed communities to gain some rights and responsibilities regarding state forest, it has little relevance for Northeast India, where communities have historically controlled their forest resources. Entering into sharing agreements with the state forest departments decreases their authority and resources, rather than enlarge them (Poffenberger et al. 2006) and thus it weakens indigenous forms of resource management. Nevertheless the state of Meghalaya adopted JFM in September 2003. This is applicable across the entire state and especially to areas under clan and village ownership. Work has started which includes the ‘entry point activities' like creation of nurseries as well as advance work for the creation of plantation (GoM 2006a). The document on JFM in Meghalaya starts with a typical crisis narrative of degradation of forest and eco-systems due to unsustainable biotic pressure. While its stated objectives are to ensure participation of local communities in afforestation and conservation, it has several features that clash with the indigenous and subsistence-based management practices. For instance, in formulating the JFM approach, the forest department in Meghalaya tried to give some credence to the villagers’ own forest use practices and thus one of the objectives of JFM was 'to ensure proper synergy between the technical expertise and infrastructure of the forest and environment department and traditional knowledge and untapped human resource of local tribal communities to ensure conservation’ (GoM 2003). Nevertheless the acknowledgement of traditional knowledge does not undermine the need for the project and procedures, educate villagers and monitor their activities so as to introduce ‘scientific’ management. Joint Forest Management Committees (JFMCs) have been burdened with lengthy procedures and thick dossiers which are difficult to comprehend. The focus of JFMC in many of the villages is on tree plantation, which mostly involves the rich, a common finding in studies on JFM in other parts of the country (Jeffery and Sundar 1999). The practice of JFM weakening community forestry is also evident in the selection of plots for plantation, which were mostly private rather than communal. The private landowners however prefer JFM, not out of any concern for conservation, but to assert their individual claims on land, as the local custom entails that, if the land remains fallow for a certain period, it reverts to village common. Thus despite its avowed claim to promote participation and conservation, in effect, JFM seems not only to extend State control to community space but also tends to delegitimise community.

Wildlife Management In India, a select group of naturalists have been in the forefront of wilderness conservation by making these areas out of bound for the human population and they share a common ground with the forest department, looking to extend State control. This resulted in the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972 creating a massive network of parks and sanctuaries, extinguishing all community rights such as collection of minor forest produce in the parks while severely restricting them to sanctuaries. The Act is operative in Meghalaya also. Thus despite the powers given to the ADCs, they have not been given the power to make laws with regard to the protection of wildlife. As such they cannot set up any protected areas such as national parks and sanctuaries for the protection of wildlife, which remains the prerogative of central government (Dutta 2001). Accordingly two national parks and three sanctuaries have been set up under the control of the forest department. Meghalaya has a sizeable number of elephant population. These are not contained within the protected area network under direct control of the state government. In fact a significant population resides outside the protected area network and moves from one forest block to other, enhancing elephant-human conflict (GoM 2006c). Both the state and conservationists assert that the main hurdle to wildlife management in Meghalaya is that most of the forest is under community management. They allude to the study conducted by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), an organisation of wilderness conservationists in 1980s, which pointed out that the single most important cause for the man-animal conflict is that most of the forest in Meghalaya is under the control of the district councils and not under the forest department. Thus the increasing mananimal conflict in Meghalaya has become an apologia for extending control over community forest, wherein the forest department has found a useful ally in conservationists. This shows that though wilderness is a concept that by definition runs contrary to modernity and politics, it is in reality a product of both (Peet and Watts 1996), which can be used for coercive conservation.

Local Community or Global Carbon Workers?

In 2002, India ratified the global convention on climate change—Kyoto Protocol—which envisages a marketbased regime where India will trade its carbon emission with the developed countries in lieu of ‘clean’ technologies. The World Bank is one of the facilitators of carbon-trading regime. In March 2006, the South Asia Environment and Social Development Unit of the World Bank prepared a paper for further discussion entitled ‘Carbon Finance and the Forest Sector in Northeast India’ (Meijer and Damania 2006). It looks at the potential for carbon-trading in the region based on its forest resources and concludes that conversion of marginal farms to forest via carbon-trading provides the greatest potential to increase rural incomes and generate simultaneous environmental benefit. It makes elaborate calculations as to how permanent pastures, grazing lands, culturable wastelands, fallow lands, all of which have ‘low returns’ should be converted to forest. But there is no mention about indigenous people and the negotiated use of landscape by the community and their spiritual and social dependence on the natural resources. Thus it treats afforestation basically as constructing empty spaces, which are to be harnessed to fight climate change. The role of forest in carbon sequestration, impact and trade and its potential for Meghalaya is now widely discussed and has found place in official documents of the state (GoM 2006a). Thus emission trading in Meghalaya, as and when it becomes operational will convert the forests into carbon sinks and further weaken community control, wherein ‘local’ will be transformed into social anonymity or at best, in this case, into an idealised ‘global carbon worker’ (Jasanoff and Martello 2004).

Conclusion: Wither Community Control? In this chapter I have tried to show that just after India’s independence indigeneity was the most significant frame in Meghalaya and it found expression both in discourse and practice of various actors—central government, civil society groups and indigenous people of the state. However as the new policy discourses started, the significance of modernity gained momentum, both nationally and locally. Indeed the example of Meghalaya indicates that among politicians, civil servants and the middle class at large, modernity has not only gained currency but hegemonised the discourse, by displacing issues in the frame of indigeneity and community self management of forest. I have also demonstrated that the presumption of the superiority of modern discourse and of community as poor land managers have provided the basis for the construction of a set of crisis and ‘degradation narratives’, which while deriding community control have rationalised state intervention for ‘progress’ and ‘development’. Yet the claim that the forest administration can protect the forest can also be contested. There is evidence for instance of degradation of reserved forest under the state control due to unregulated logging like the illegal felling in two reserved forests in southern Garo Hills in the 1990s where an independent commission found that about 45,000 trees had been illegally cut inside the reserves (Karlsson 2003). However, as evident in my chapter, metropolitan- secular discourses and their practices have led to constriction of community space. Thus the varied and seemingly unconnected activities like privatisation of land, creation of wildlife sanctuary, JFM afforestation programmes or state plantations to control jhum are a product of a single project of modernity. At the same time it is also evident that the hegemony of the discourse on modernity is still challenged by the indigenous discourse in community domain. While alternatives for industrialisation advocated by the Meghalaya Indigenous People’s Forum is one such example, there are a few more manifestations of indigeneity. In the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, the villagers of Mawphlang are building on a four-hundred year old sacred forest traditions, by ordaining new forests in 18 villages (Poffenberger et al. 2006). Expressions of indigeneity can also be seen in assertions like giving indigenous names to important places, changed by the colonial administration, a struggle over geographic names through which indigeneity is expressed. The powerful Khasi Students’ Union, which has been a carrier of indigeneity discourse, is demanding that the name of the world famous site, Cherrapunjee, which experiences the highest rainfall in the world and is known as the ‘Wettest place on planet Earth’ should be restored to Sohra, its original name, as ‘Sohra was forcibly erased (during colonial rule) ignoring the very sentiments of the local people […] which was an insult towards the forefathers of ours who have sacrificed and fought for setting up and building this very important, now world famous Sohra’ (KSU 2006). But while such articulations are focussed on the loss of unique tribal identity, their material counterpart—a critique of conventional development strategy or

opposition to diminishing community control—has not emerged. Recently, environmental debates have suggested that social movements perform a crucial role in communicating local environmental knowledge to policy process. Escobar, in Jasanoff and Martello (2004), remarked: ‘We need new narratives of life and cultures…. They will arise from the meditations that local culture is able to effect…. This is a collective task that perhaps only social movements are in a position to advance.’ Such social movements have not emerged in Meghalaya. In their absence the prospect of survival of community control alongside the discourses on modernity does not appear to be too bright.

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Government of Meghalaya. 2003. JFM. Notification dated 9 September 2003. Guha, R, and M. Gadgil. 1995. Ecology and Equity: The Use and Abuse of Nature in Contemporary India. London: Penguin Books. Jasanoff, S., and M. L. Martello (eds.). 2004. Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Jeffery, R, and N. Sundar (eds). 1999. A New Moral Economy for India's Forest? Discourses on Community and Participation. New Delhi: Sage. Karlsson, B. G. 2003. ‘The Politics of Deforestation: The Case of Meghalaya’. Paper presented at the Centre for North East India, South Asia and Southeast Asia Studies of OKD Institute in Guwahati. Karna, M. N., L. S. Gassah, and C. J. Thomas. 1998. Power to People in Meghalaya (Sixth Schedule and the 73rd Amendment). New Delhi: Regency Publications.

Kelkar, G., and D. Nathan. 2003. Patriarchy at Odds: Gender relations in Forest Societies in Asia. Available at http://www.gendermainstreamingasia.org/img/bl. Accessed on 10 September 2006. Khasi Students’ Union (KSU). 2006. Memorandum to the Government of Meghalaya. 17 September. Leach, M., and M. Robin (eds). 1996. The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment. Portsmouth: James Currey. Malik, B. 2003. The ‘Problem' of Shifting Cultivation in the Garo Hills of North-East India, 1860–1970. London: Sage Publications. Meijer, S., and R Damania. 2006. Carbon Finance and the Forest Sector in North East India. Memorandum submitted by South Asia Environment and Social Development Unit, World Bank. Nongbri, T. 2001. ‘Timber Ban in North-East India, Effects on Livelihood and Gender. Economic and Political Weekly 36 (l): 1893–1900. Peet, R, and M. Watts (eds.). 1996. Liberation Ecology: Development, Sustainability, and Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism. New Delhi: Routledge. Phira, J. M. 1991. Working of the District Council in Meghalaya. Shillong: Techno Quip. Poffenberger, M., S. K. Barik, D. Choudhury, V. Darlong, V. Gupta, S. Palit, I. Roy, I. Singh, B. K. Tiwari, and S. Upadhyay. 2006. Forest Sector Review of Northeast India. Santa Barbara: Community Forestry International. Ray, B. D., and K. Alam. 2002. Forest Resources in North East India. New Delhi: Omsons Publications. Shillong Times, The. 2004. www.theshillongtimes.com 22 September 2004. ———. 2006. www.theshillongtimes.com. 5 November 2006. Tiwari, B. K. 2005. ‘Shifting Agriculture in North-east India: Some Insights in Spatio-temporal Patterns and Processes’. Paper presented at the workshop on Shifting Agriculture, Environmental Conservation and Sustainable Livelihood of Marginal, Mountainous Societies, 6–10 October, organised by the National Institute of Rural Development at Guwahati. Tiwari, B. K., and S. Singh. 1995. Ecorestoration of Degraded Hills. Shillong: Kaushal Publications. Zimba, D. T. 1978. Geography of Meghalaya. Guwahati: Standard Printing Press.

PART III TRANSORMATION OF NATURE

Introduction LORAINE KENNEDY

The three chapters that make up Part 3 of this volume examine the intended and unintended effects of state intervention and analyse the social and environmental trade-offs implicit in policy choices regarding the environment. Two of the chapters engage with the issue of the legitimacy of public action in the name of development, by referring to the ‘losers’ in the process and the powerful interests that drive policy. Although each of the three authors explores specific questions applied to a particular context and uses conceptual tools from different disciplinary traditions, they all take as a starting point public policy or state action. Hence by way of an introduction to Part 3, I will discuss the field of policy studies and its methods, highlighting the advantages of a ‘policy process’ framework for organising social science research. As a field of enquiry, policy research has refined its toolkit over the years, including in France where there has been significant development of the field in the last decades. This introduction refers specifically to recent French scholarship in this field, some of which has not been translated into English. A ‘policy process’ framework appears particularly adapted to the study of so-called ‘development’ policies, because these are often assumed to be politically neutral. In recent years, critical social science research has started examining more closely the politics of policy-making in India, in ways that go beyond the modalities of implementation.1 In particular, there is increasing attention to transparency, accountability, and the mechanisms through which local communities mobilise and make demands on the administration (Jenkins and Goetz 1999). It should be noted that NGOs and activists have greater scope for monitoring as a result of new machinery, like the Right to Information Act, and social auditing practices which are increasingly built into government programmes.2

Policy Research Methods The study of policy was relegated for many years to the ‘science of government’, a sub-field of the American political science tradition. It was concerned primarily with efficiency or ‘getting the policy right’, and did not engage with the study of politics. In the European tradition, policy studies were until recently subsumed under studies of the state, a reflection no doubt of the dominant strain of political philosophy that emphasised the state as the foremost institution, shaping and transcending society. In the 1980s, there was a renewal of the field with attention to a more dynamic approach to the ‘state in action’ (Jobert and Muller 1987). The analytical tools mobilised in this interdisciplinary field originate from three main sources: studies of administration and bureaucracy, including classical sources such as Hegel, Marx and Weber; the theory of organisations, which originated in the USA in the 1920s and was considerably enriched by the French sociology of organisations (Crozier and Friedberg 1977); and public management, a normative field focussed on meeting political aims with utmost efficiency and improving the performance of public administration. The functioning of the contemporary state, in both developed and developing countries, is structured around policy. In post-war Europe, the emergence of a welfare state increased the number of areas of state intervention, as did rapid technological change, which called for regulatory measures. At about the same time, in newly independent nations across Asia and Africa, popular expectations led to a burgeoning developmental state, usually taking on entrepreneurial role in the economy in addition to providing much needed social services. Policy is defined as a governmental programme or intervention in a particular sector of activity or in a specific place. According to Mény and Thoenig (1989), a policy consists of five main elements:

a set of concrete measures; coercion is more or less present in every policy decision; a policy is part of an overall framework of action whether explicit or not; policies correspond to constituencies, whether mobilised or not; a policy defines certain objectives, expressed in more or less concrete terms (e.g., reduce the percentage of the population below the poverty line; reduce the distance to the nearest school or medical facility; increase industrial output in a particular region; reduce environmental pollution, etc.) One method for the study of policy, the sequential approach, was developed early on and reflects a simple and depoliticised conception of policy analysis. The steps are: identification of the problem, elaboration of the policy solution to the problem and legitimising it by gathering support for it, implementation of the policy, evaluation, and termination of the policy. Although the sequential method offers a useful framework, it has some obvious limitations. The first one being that ‘problems’ do not exist independently of people’s apprehension of them and even then, not all problems result in a policy response. Moreover, not all policies are reactive; some are proactive seeking to control or influence a situation by causing something to happen. This is the case with economic development policies that include incentives for achieving a particular end. In general, policies that aim to create social or physical infrastructure are designed to meet a deficiency and to create conditions for attaining new objectives, such as economic growth or better communication, which can help balance spatial and social inequalities. This is the case with the examples used in the chapters presented in this section, i.e., roads, dams and industrial corridors. Naturally, they can also correspond to political objectives, enhancing state presence, for instance, in remote areas or weakening opposition movements, as well as personal ambitions of officials, such as monetary gain or increased social status. Understanding the complex mechanisms at work requires a toolkit composed of concepts that allow us to open the ‘black box’ that is the state (ibid.) and examine in turn actors, power, strategy and instruments. One useful framework is the ‘3 I's': ideas, interests and institutions. Regarding the role of ideas in policy-making, every policy is informed by a particular vision of reality. This has been called the referential (Jobert 1992): before a policy can be drafted a representation has to be created, and it is in reference to this representation that actors apprehend a problem, compare various solutions and define their plans for action. The referential also refers to the norms and trends that shape policy at different levels, from ideological frameworks at a macro level, e.g., neoliberalism, to their expression at a micro-level, e.g., cost recovery mechanisms in public services. Norms that are currently salient in the Indian context include for instance: public-private partnerships in infrastructure and service provision, civil society participation in implementation of development projects and political decentralisation. However, as the latter example suggests, the presence of an idea or norm, e.g., political decentralisation and the ratification of formal policy measures to promote the idea (viz., 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments Acts) do not guarantee that the stated objectives will be reached. Policies are not always sufficient to change a situation and do not always provide a solution to problems. Indeed, they may act simply as a communication device, flagging the government’s attention to an issue but not necessarily ensuring a commitment to it. ‘Interests’ also offer a compelling entry point for policy analysis, by bringing to the fore the questions: ‘Who is responsible for getting a problem or goal onto the political agenda?’ and of course: ‘Who stands to gain from a particular policy?’ Converting an issue into a policy measure is always the result of specific efforts undertaken by social actors: trade unions, politicians, NGOs, neighbourhood associations, professional lobbyists working on behalf of organised interests, ad hoc interest groups, etc. To investigate these questions, it is useful to trace the origins of policies, starting with the main actors and their strategies. This raises the issue of social movements, mediators and political entrepreneurs, power relations, social dynamics, decisionmaking processes, etc. and opens the analysis onto the institutions that shape mentalities, behaviour and outcomes. In order to take into account this wide range of factors and the complexity of their interactions, scholars have begun to favour a holistic approach wherein the object is the policy process, as opposed to a more narrow focus on public policy. This notion and related ones, like policy network, allow social scientists to relativise the analytical boundaries separating the state and civil society, and to better apprehend the dynamics at work.

Presenting the Chapters and their Analysis of Policy The chapters in this section give variable importance to policy analysis, and engage differently with the notion of policy process; their common concern is with the effects of policy. David Kong Hug’s paper on governance and environmental issues in Gujarat engages directly with the policy process. In particular, he is concerned with the ‘governance process’ in the state, which tends to inhibit citizens’ involvement in decision-making. Taking as a departure point the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) project, he traces the state’s aggressive industrialisation strategies and its willingness to subordinate environmental and social issues to the preeminent goal of economic growth. He places the analysis however within the wider context of contemporary capitalism, notably re-territorialisation strategies, which translate into space-based policies in the form of production platforms. Global and national interests converge to favour selective investments in cities and corridors, where there is higher potential for capital accumulation. Hug cites a directive from the central Commerce Ministry in relation to DMIC that suggests that environmental concerns should not impede industrial development. This reflects the underlying vision, the referential in Jobert’s terms, that informs economic policy in much of India’s political establishment today, including in Gujarat. Hug is mainly concerned with the adverse effects of industrial policies on the environment, in the form of air, land and water pollution, which tend to affect some social groups more than others, notably the poor who are most vulnerable. There is an implicit trade-off: whereas the gains of clustering (spatial concentration) accrue to investors (private interests), the environmental costs are carried by the community, especially those exposed to immediate health risks. The analysis goes beyond official policy statements to examine implementation on the ground, and the role of citizens’ collectives in advocacy and monitoring. There is a discussion of existing policies, designed to ensure that clearances are obtained prior to setting up production, and compliance to standards once in operation. Indeed there is even machinery in place for an inclusive policy process complete with environmental public hearings. However, we learn that in practice the hearings do not give adequate voice to the adversely affected communities, nor are activists’ views taken into account. Hug criticises prevailing institutions in Gujarat, which inhibit citizens’ involvement in decision-making on the same level as the state and private industrial interests. He provides evidence to show the crucial role played by civil society (individuals and organisations) in risk prevention, in pressurising for implementation of environmental laws and regulations and in monitoring industrial activity. The second chapter in this section byjoël Cabalion, analyses a dam project and its impending social consequences, with special attention to social reproduction in the context of large-scale displacement. The author begins with situating the case under study, Gosikhurd dam in the Vidharba region of Maharashtra, by retracing the region’s history and the political stakes of its ‘underdeveloped’ status. Attention is given to the genealogy of the policy, tracing it back thirty years, and its uneven trajectory through various levels of public administration. This offers important insights into the political motivations of this policy, ostensibly aimed at improving agricultural production through irrigation. The author advances a critical appraisal of what he calls development by dispossession, and examines the legitimising techniques used by the Indian state. It is worth noting that large dam projects have come under attack in India and given rise to powerful resistance movements, some of which, notably the Narmada dam, have had considerable influence on international debates (Baviskar 1995; Drèze, Samson and Singh 1997).3 The core of the chapter’s analysis is centred on the social impacts of displacement and relocation, in particular the differentiated effects among social groups. Cabalion mobilises a rich corpus of recent sociological literature, notably that of Pierre Bourdieu, which provides the theoretical framework for his empirical based study. Using field surveys in the soon to be submerged villages, he examines the various strategies deployed by affected groups, which depend on capacities and resources. Concerns range from mere survival to anxiety about maintaining social status. In the course of the study, the politics of compensation and ‘rehabilitation’ are discussed, as well as the inherent difficulties of valuation, themes that are very much in the forefront of contemporary development debates in India. For instance, as Cabalion mentions, the 2005 Special Economic Zone Act has met with fierce resistance, particularly in places where the state has assisted private investors in land acquisition, to the

detriment of local communities and local livelihoods. Conflict over displacement and compensation has already led to a series of revisions, providing a compelling example of how policies affect politics. The democratically elected political leadership is faced with the dilemma of conflicting policy goals. Interestingly, given that the policies analysed here span a thirty-year time period, they allow us to examine continuity of state action at a time when much reflection in social sciences centred on liberalisation and globalisation, tends to emphasise rupture. It is a useful reminder that although India’s development model has undergone substantial revision and the modalities of intervention are undergoing radical change, there are aspects of the way the state functions, notably the social groups with which it allies, that have not fundamentally changed. This is particularly compelling in Cabalion’s chapter, where the dam in question was first proposed in the 1970s. Salomé Deboos’s chapter is an anthropological study of changing identities in a relatively remote Himalayan region of India, the Zanskar Valley. The specific focus is on the Buddhist and Muslim communities, their perceptions of self and other, with special emphasis on intercommunity relations. Her ethnographic research, built on testimonies collected in the village of Padum, places the catalyst for social change on state action, in particular the building of a road. Geo-political considerations contributed to the decision to construct roads through the Zanskar Valley, as part of a larger policy to station a military base in the sensitive border region between Pakistan and China. But once the road was built, it paved the way for administrative services, commercial activity and tourism. And as Deboos shows, opening up the valley to outsiders and outside influences has had multiple unintended consequences, not the least of which has been to weaken cohesion among local religious communities. This study highlights the powerful indirect effects of policy, and the way in which state institutions mediate between different social groups. It also provides a compelling illustration of the way policies can contradict one another or produce perverse effects. It can be argued that the Indian state’s enhanced presence in Jammu and Kashmir was a response to a perceived political and security risk (reactive), and was intended to contribute to nation-building (pro-active). The fact that state policies would have a divisive effect at the local level was not, and arguably could not have been, anticipated. Indeed, as the author points out, the social processes underway are complex, and are the result of the interaction of numerous local and extra-local factors (e.g., tourism, Hindu nationalism, insurgency in Kashmir). Whereas there can be little doubt that the referential informing policy is no longer what it was in the first decades after independence—in broad terms, there has been a gradual shift from a welfare state model of reference to a liberal state model—the changes on the ground are not as striking as one might expect. This is in part a result of the constant gap between political discourse and development outputs, and between stated objectives and administrative capacity, but fundamentally it underscores continuity in the social alliances between political and economic elites, despite the fact that democratic processes have led to a renewal of political leadership in recent decades. Jos Mooij (2005: 31) suggests that: ‘… one can hypothesize that the relative importance of state professionals and politicians in economic policy-making (as compared to the other proprietary classes) diminishes with the inclusion of more people from the “lower” castes in politics and the bureaucracy.’ A ‘policy process’ analysis should allow social scientists to test this hypothesis by analysing the actors and strategies involved in elaborating economic policies, as well as the institutions through which effective decision-making takes place.

References Baviskar, Amita. 1995.In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Crozier, Michel, and Erhard Friedberg. 1977. L’Acteur et le Système. Paris: Le Seuil, (English edition: Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action. University of Chicago Press, 1980). Drèze, Jean, Meera Samson, and Satyajit Singh. 1997. The Dam and the Nation: Displacement and Resettlement in the Narmada Valley. Delhi, New York: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, Rob. 1999. Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, Rob, and Anne-Marie Goetz. 1999. ‘Accounts and Accountability: Theoretical Implications of the Right-to-Information Movement in India’. Third World Quarterly, 20 (3): 603–22. Jobert, Bruno. 1992. ‘Représentations sociales, controverses et débats dans la conduite des politiques publiques’. Revue Française de Science Politique 42 (2): 219–34. Jobert, Bruno, and Pierre Muller. 1987. L’État en action - Politiques publiques et corporatismes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mény, Yves, and Jean-Claude Thoenig. 1989. Politiques publiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mooij, Jos E. (ed.). 2005. The Politics of Economic Reforms in India. New Delhi: Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

EIGHT

The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor and Some Issues of Environmental Governance* DAVID KONG HUG

In July 2007, both Indian and Japanese Ministers of Commerce, Kamal Nath and Akira Amari, signed an economic partnership agreement, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC). The project aims at developing existing industrial clusters along a Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) linking Delhi to Mumbai. Presented as a ‘global manufacturing and trading hub’, Gujarat took a lion’s share out of the project. The distribution of the length of the dedicated freight corridor indicates that Gujarat (38 per cent) and Rajasthan (39 per cent) together constitute 77 per cent of the total length of the alignment of freight corridor, followed by Haryana and Maharashtra (10 per cent each). On both sides of the alignment of DFC, areas up to 150 km to 200 km are planned to benefit from high economic impact with quality infrastructure. The Project Influence Area for Gujarat comprises 62 per cent, while representing 60 and 58 per cent for Haryana and Rajasthan respectively (Ministry of Commerce and Industry 2007: 4). Development of secondary cities (petroleum and petrochemical investment region in Bharuch, industrial estates in Palanpur and Valsad) is also contemplated. Gujarat is thus consolidating its position among the most industrialised states in India: 83 product clusters1 across 182 industrial estates,2 including 55 Special Economic Zones (SEZs).3 An investment of about US$ 100 billion is expected in Gujarat on account of DMIC. The expected joint ventures are to provide employment to around 800,000 people (Government of Gujarat 2007: 4). This chapter examines some environmental governance issues in Gujarat along the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. On the one hand, deliberate policies have already fuelled strong urban corridor development in Gujarat, especially in the periphery of its main cities of Ahmedabad, Vadodara and Surat, with their negative corollaries of air, water and soil pollution (Gujarat Ecology Commission 2002). On the other hand, crucial environmental issues such as pollution control, hazardous wastes, deforestation, water management, and industrial risks have not been properly tackled by the authorities. Given the fact that the Government of Gujarat’s industrial policies (2009) and Gujarat Special Investment Region Bill (2009) have come out providing various incentives for global investments in potentially polluting industries in minerals, agro- and food-processing, electronics and IT, textile and garments, pharmaceuticals and petrochemicals, plastics, and engineering ancillaries, environmental associations fear that the scale of the DMIC project might worsen the environmental situation.4 As a matter of fact, the Central Ministry of Commerce and Industry suggests that States expeditiously examine and clear proposals relating to DMIC as ‘environmental conservation should not impede any development imperatives’ (Ministry of Commerce & Industry 2007: 29). This study is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the theoretical framework, the methodology and the context. How do global and local economic policies articulate? Have economic policies spurred environmental degradation? Has industrial spatialisation enhanced unequal exposure to environmental risks? The second part tackles with the multilevel environmental management and the citizens’ participation subsumed under this framework. Although Gujarat’s environmental problems are multi-pronged, our case focuses on industrial risk and more specifically on the 2008 accident in Bharuch in the third part. Industrial risk was chosen for its current relevance both in relation to the world’s largest industrial catastrophe in Bhopal (1984)5 and with the way it epitomises lacunae in management. In fact, the way a state manages its environment is often revealing of the way it deals with other issues. The poor and the minorities are the first affected by water, air and land degradation since they live in most vulnerable areas. The case shows the involvement of some citizens in the environmental regulatory process prompted by the

authorities’ negligence. The aim of this chapter is also to analyse how regional economic policies vigorously led by the state and private players have entailed a partial shift of effective power affecting the governance of environmental responsibilities. A special attention is given to the question of citizenship and the role of citizens’ informal participation in the process of governance. It is argued that they play a crucial role in informally regulating environmental issues by using their rights as citizens. Finally, we will attempt to answer the question: does the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project trigger a shift in governance favouring globalised economic development at the expense of environmental issues?

Part I: Method and Context This empirical study is based on personal interviews conducted in Gujarat in February and September 2008 with industrialists, activists, government officers, and researchers. The relevant ‘grey’ literature was also reviewed. In order to contextualise the current economic trends epitomised by the Industrial Corridor, our analysis of the environmental governance engages with the recent ‘rescaling’ and ‘re-territorialization’ theories (Purcell 2003; Brenner 2004). Re-territorialisation means that the international division of labour has brought nationally scaled regions of accumulation, mainly around cities. In Gujarat, industries have developed in clusters in and around major urban centres. A similar trend has been observed in other competing states where growth clusters are found around Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad (Kennedy 2007). In the case of DMIC, the Gujarat Special Investment Region Bill, 2009 declared the Gujarat Infrastructure Development Board (GIDB) as the apex authority while the Gujarat Industrial Corridor Corporation (GICC) was set up as the project development agency.6 This para-statal company7 is thus given wide implementation power with little accountability to local authorities and their constituencies. In other words, institutional hierarchies had to adjust to global economic realities by imposing their logic on other bodies of the same configuration (Brenner 2004). In order to present favourable environment to business, the State of Gujarat has enforced discretionary policies and propaganda (Figure 8.1). For instance, the SEZ Act 2005 provides for drastic simplification of procedures and for single window clearances on matters relating to central as well as state governments, including the environmental clearance. Similarly, the Gujarat Industrial Policy (2009) aims at developing Investment Regions and Special Investment Regions along the DMIC, with convergence of industrial, social and urban infrastructures globally benchmarked and conducive to attracting business internationally (Government of Gujarat 2009). As the state territorial power is being decentralised, the theory also argued that market forces have triggered a switch in governance, leading to a peculiar form of citizenship, voicing the politics and the corporate sector while muting the civil opponents (Purcell 2003). ‘Re-territorialized’ and ‘re-scaled’ citizenship in Gujarat therefore poses fundamental questions about how national and subnational political elites engage with globalisation.

Figure 8.1 Billboard in Ahmedabad Photo: Courtesy of Lalit Vachani (From the film In Search of Gandhi, 2006).

Economic Growth and Environmental Cost A separate state since 1960, Gujarat has a territory of 195,984 sq. km (6 per cent of India), its population (41.3 million) represents 5 per cent of India and its density figure ranges around 258 inh/sq. km (India’s average 325), dwelling in 18,192 villages, distributed in 26 districts, of which Ahmedabad (3.6 million), Surat (2.8 million) and Vadodara (1.3 million) are major urban agglomerations.8 The 1991 liberalisation process and the 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992 greatly redefined relations with the central government as planning for economic and social development was delegated to the state. Since 1995, the BJP-led coalition in Gujarat has propelled private participation schemes for infrastructure development. In 2001, Gujarat boasted of a 38 per cent urbanisation rate (27.8 at all-India level in 2001). Its state domestic product growth of 10.2 per cent per year is above average (2002–7), combined with an annual industrial growth of 12.5 per cent (2002–7), a per capita power consumption of 1313 units (national average 592), exports representing 14.3 per cent of India and industrial investments 18 per cent of India in 2006 (Government of Gujarat 2007). Due to its pro-industrial policy and initiatives, Gujarat has attracted many small, medium and large-scale industries since the seventies. Most of these are in chemicals (43.4 per cent share of the national production), petrochemicals (55 per cent), fertilisers (47.5 per cent), drugs and pharmaceutical sectors (45 per cent), engineering (44.6 per cent), followed by food products (43 per cent) and dyes (18.5 per cent) (industries Commissionerate 2003). Most were established before the enactment of the Environment Protection Act in 1986. Therefore, they do not follow the current environmental norms. Proposed financial incentives combined with loose environmental regulations have resulted in about 80 per cent of all industries in Gujarat to settle in the ‘golden corridor’, a 400 km belt of industrial estates, extending from Vapi in the south to Ahmedabad in the north. Kashyap and Mehta (2007) denounced the fact that the impending danger to environmental and public health has been neglected, as industrial effluents are a major source of water pollution. Moreover, the development of a diversified industrial structure, along with growing population has led to severe environmental degradation in several regions, in the form of declining vegetation, soil erosion, deforestation, water logging, increased salinity of land and water arising from over usage of canal water and overdraws of ground water. This industrial and urban expansion has strained the physical, social, economic, and environmental factors and actually increased the susceptibility to the impact of hazards (UNISDR 2004). Studies have shown that large industrial units in backward areas tend to exploit the region through distorted land markets and

segmented labour markets (Hirway 1999). In addition, the industries are allowed to use natural resources including non-renewable ones like minerals at a cheap rate. They are not even forced to pay for the pollution that they create in the region (ibid.). Thus, the inhabitants are confronted with an environmental, social and economic cost with water-related and environmental health risks leading and huge health rural/urban inequalities. Disparities also remain within the six distinct geographical regions of the state. Although the cities are well connected by road, rail and even air, some villages are still in need of roads and electricity, especially those inhabited by tribes. Among the regions of Kutch, Saurashtra, North Gujarat, the Eastern tribal belt, Central Gujarat and South Gujarat, the availability of natural resources, economic activities, human development of population are largely unequal (Bagchi, Das and Chattopadhyay 2005). In 2009, the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation has identified urban Gujarat as ‘moderately food secure’ while rural Gujarat remains ‘severely insecure’ (UNWFP 2009). For instance, a city like Jamnagar in Saurashtra, a prosperous centre surrounded by petrochemical industries, still has more than 40 per cent of its population living below the poverty line. Gujarat claims of being a proactive government with a transparent private sector investment process, sound fiscal base, a robust regulatory framework, sector specific policies implemented, and enhanced public accessibility through E-governance, which is partially true. But as in other parts of the world, industrial development in Gujarat had taken place without due consideration accorded to environmental management. Responding to global economic pressure, industries have evolved through clusters, industrial estates, SEZs and have now reached the Special Investment Regions phase. With every transition, the scale has expanded along with the opportunities offered by the Dedicated Freight Corridor and the amount of investments attracted by the DMIC. Since previous economic policies have spurred environmental degradation, the risk brought by large-scale projects cannot be eliminated. Moreover, benefits linked to the economic activities bear an environmental impact that is shifted on to certain areas and groups of population, usually the less privileged.

Part II: Environmental Governance and Citizens’ Participation In 2002, a Tata Consultancy report rated Gujarat as one of the most polluted states due to loose policies and poor implementation of environmental norms. What has the prevailing form of environmental governance been? Do the existing or proposed laws and policies have the necessary room for community participation? Governance refers to ‘the inherent human need to create and maintain social order and to distribute material and cultural resources. Politics, to which citizenship is closely related, is a set of methods and techniques, such as deliberation, compromise, diplomacy, and power sharing, through which the problem of governance can be resolved non-violently’ (Faulks 2000: 5). Environmental governance involves multilevel stakeholders in ‘a complex tapestry of competing authority claims’ (Mehta et al. 1999: 18). Since 1986, the Ministry of Environment and Forests has been issuing policies to prevent and control pollution. Nevertheless, in spite of a complete and restrictive legal framework set up in 1986 (Environment Protection Act), the implementing state agencies had not been up to the task (Curmally 2002). At the state level, the Gujarat Environment and Forests Department is the apex body for the implementation of all environment related matters including the Environment Protection Act (1986), the umbrella Act on environment in the country. The main mandate of the department is to achieve sustainable development and introduce sound environmental management practices with a budget of US$ 820,0009 in 2007 at its disposal (Forests and Environment Department 2007). The Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) is entrusted with the task of implementing the standards laid down and monitoring industries. In 2004–5, it also launched a special drive to check the quality of emissions from flue gas stacks of industries in Ahmedabad. Consequently, 16 erring units were supposed to modify their system.10 However, the GPCB traditionally adopts a soft attitude towards polluting industries by simply issuing warnings. As a result, laws are more often violated than respected and a large number of industries operate without proper safety and pollution control measures (Curmally 2002). Moreover, being constrained by the lack of staff, insuffient means and poor equipment, the board has sought collaboration from the industries. In 1995, a High Court ruling has led the GPCB to issue directions to industries and associations to monitor themselves all the individual units in their respective

estates, thereby making the associations partially responsible for the effluent generation. In 1997, the Ankleshwar Industries Association (AIA) heading over 5000 large and small chemical plants set up a common effluent treatment plant. The AIA acts as a government regulator by monitoring and disciplining its own members when some industries do not pay for the treatment of their wastes (Kathuria and Sterner 2006). But the role of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board cannot be under-stated, since it is the primary interlocutor to whom the citizens address their grievances, since in theory the GPCB has wide powers to penalise offenders, including ordering the closure of manufacturing units. Section 5 of the Environment Protection Act enables the state government to stop the supply of water and electricity to such units not complying with the various provisions of the environmental and pollution control laws; especially on ash generated by the coal/lignite based thermal power plants and the ozone depleting substances (MoEF 2007). But any punitive measure raises protest from industrialists, since water disconnections can be haphazard and financially counterproductive. In February 2008, the Bharuch Industrial District Committee fined the industries that had consumed more than their set level of water, including those that do not discharge effluents. Although pollution was not caused, the common effluent treatment plant could not handle the water load (Times of India, 16 February 2008). There are other shortcomings like the GPCB is a regulating body that proposes neither technological solutions nor expertise for abating pollution. Some industrialists are ready to comply with the norms but do not have access to any means for achieving it.11 As for the citizens, they have also complained about the lack of political will to regulate pollution effectively. Corruption is also often mentioned as a main cause of ineffiency in monitoring and controlling industries.

Flimsy Environment Impact Assessment As the Pollution Control Board acts ‘downstream’ by regulation, the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) first notified in 1994, then amended twelve times, tackles the pollution upstream. It requires that projects that cause pollution, displacement, destruction of natural resources, etc., be it in the nature of expansion or as greenfield ventures, must go through a series of clearance steps as per standards and with the prior consent of a variety of statutory agencies, both at the state and central levels, as applicable. The procedures laid down require project developers to comply with various national legislations such as the Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act, Water and Air (Control of Pollution) Act, and a range of international treaties, in particular the Rio Declaration of 1992.12 Failure to comply with the procedures laid down in the EIA Notification is a criminal offence punishable under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related criminal procedure laws.13 As the EIA should be a joint process based on adequate information policy and a monitoring system, environmental public hearings have been made mandatory by the Government of India in 1994.14 Initially, those hearings were set up as a democratic tool for project affected people to have their say in court. It functions as a comprehensive decision support system including administrative units, the private sector and the wider public. The Forests and Environment departments have therefore constituted district level committees consisting of officials as well as non-officials for conducting such processes.15 However, in Gujarat, an EIA consists of a single application under the three laws (water, air and hazardous waste)16 with grant of consolidated consent and authorisation for a period of five years. An Environmental Appraisal Committee under the state Department of Environment, which issues No Objection Certificate (NOC) has been created. Dubey (2002) denounces the fact that projects have been cleared despite poor assessment, including plagiarised studies, as consultation with independent expertise agency is de facto no longer mandatory. In situations where additional environment and wildlife impact studies have been asked for, they are either ‘rapid’ assessments which are inadequate to assist in decision-making, or detailed studies to be conducted after the clearance has already been granted (Menon and Kohli 2007). In reality, often the factory is already running or has invested in equipment and land. And any delay in obtaining the EIA might arouse protest from the owners. Infrastructure that necessarily accompany industrial growth have been ensured fast clearances for a variety of regulatory regimes ranging from land related clearances to development permissions. In 2007, the Township Policy created a ‘green channel’ for fast clearances through third party verifications and/or self certification by high-rated developers (Gujarat Urban Development Ltd

2007). Moreover, large projects are often split in small ones, so that they do not qualify for central environmental clearance. Finally, the 2009 amendment waives EIA for projects that increase capacity or modernise infrastructure without increasing pollution load and do not require additional land or water. Selfcertification is enough to get a waiver.17 Moreover, according to the Centre for Social Justice, Ahmedabad, clearances have been granted completely ignoring people’s inputs (Upadhyay 2005). Environmental activists participating in public hearings are sometimes assaulted and dragged out. Gopal (2002) denounced public hearings for 19 industries taking place in a single day, due to which the affected communities did not get to attend the hearings. Involving 15 units manufacturing synthetic dyes in the Vatva Industrial estate, near Ahmedabad, the hearings were about industries that had been operating without any environmental clearance and with a higher installed capacity than permitted. Environmental public hearings are crucial in the democratic decision-making for permitting industries to be set up. First of all, they ensure access to information to project affected people and their defenders, environmental and human rights groups and representatives of local self governments. Secondly, information can make it harder for industries to circumvent rules. If adequate environmental rules are implemented properly, most of the industrial hazards can be controlled. However, according to researcher Rutul Joshi, Centre for Environment Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, very few NGOs are specifically working against pollution problems in Gujarat because they have not been able to mobilise grassroots-level support. As a matter of fact, industries are providing jobs that are needed by the population, even if it means working and living in an environment detrimental to their health. Most of the time, environmentalists denounce this publicly. In 1999 for instance an ad hoc Indian People’s Tribunal revealed in the press sludge storage sites and an artificial unlined pond on the bank of the river Damanganga (South Gujarat) containing huge quantities of toxics.18 But those initiatives require finances, the origins of which might not be completely neutral. The Indian People’s Tribunal was partly funded by the World Bank, the Gujarat Ecology Commission by Tata, etc.19 Kathuria and Sterner (2007) argue that lobbying efforts through the media by activists maybe just effective in influencing industry behaviour as an ‘informal channel’ of pollution control. In that particular case, local news covered monthly polluted water from four spots in Gujarat (1996–2000). While all these tools might have more influence at the local level experience limits their impact in a wider structural sense. Can concerned citizens therefore be considered as actors along with the traditional state and industrial decision makers? The Right to Information (2005)20 has made a breakthrough in Indian legislation since policy documents are supposed to be made public and then disseminated to all panchayats, municipalities, legislatures and parliamentarians in national and regional languages in order to encourage debate on its contents. The Right to Information has provided a key advocacy tool in Public Interest Litigation (PIL), where a writ petition can be filed under Article 226 of the Constitution since 1981 by any party in cases that affect individuals. PILs are undertaken to design remedial measures, prevent further pollution, restore the ecology and possibly provide compensation. The Gujarat Environment Department is the respondent in the High Court and Supreme Court of India and has to ensure compliance of the directions of the Court. In Vadodara, Hema Chemicals’ illegal dumping of 77,000 tonnes of toxic chromium waste from 1965 to 2001, despite the enactment of the Hazardous Waste Rules in 1989, has spurred one of the most important public interest litigations in Indian history. The GPCB has sued the industry for US$ 4.25 million. The case was under appeal in the Supreme Court in 2004. The Indian People’s Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights reported that the dumping of gypsum at the site was still going on despite a Gujarat High Court order restraining the company from doing so (Prajapati 2003). All in all, these litigations yielded some positive and negative results. Citizens have definitely developed awareness about pollution. But the courts do not possess the equipment needed to work out the reorganisation of spaces to minimise, or outlaw, industrial risk (Ramanathan 2004).Confronted with the mushrooming of environmental consultants and lawyers, activists have to sharpen their expertise while people living around industries have to bear risks (ibid.).

Part III: Industrial Pollution: The Case of BEIL

Industrial pollution having been clearly identified, the Blacksmith Institute, Greenpeace21 and the Gujarati Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS)22 have located more than 20 very heavily polluted and hazardous sites, including cities like Ankleshwar, Vapi, Vadodara, ports like Alang (dismantling asbestos, contaminated ships), mines, rivers (Amlakhadi, Sabarmati) and watersheds (PSS 2000).The Ministry of Environment and Forests has notified the Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Rules 1989 in order to curtail illegal dumping, which is often hard to trace. These rules regulate the collection, storage, transportation, treatment, disposal, export, import and recycling of hazardous wastes. In 2007, the Ministry intended to prepare a national inventory on hazardous wastes, and update the law with a new Hazardous Material Rule, 2007. It would include not only the waste material, but also the raw material (inputs), processes and finished products. The chemical industry believes that the inclusion of the word ‘material’ would ruin their business prospects. If the notification were enforced by the lawmakers in this form, it would affect more than 2,500 chemical units across the state (Parag 2007). So far, Gujarat has installed five incinerators, while the rest is still buried in dumping grounds. But in April 2008, the fire at Bharuch Enviro Infrastructure Limited (BEIL), a facility set up to safely store and dispose of hazardous waste, has revealed how dangerously waste is managed in the country (Figure 8.2).

Manmade Disaster Tempered by Natural Elements The BEIL warehouse had stored over 12,800 tonnes of hazardous chemical solvents and waste oil, which far exceeds the capacity of its incinerator. The Disaster Prevention and Management Centre in Jitali, only two kilometers away, got warned only when seeing flames, since the BEIL alarm at the panchayat building failed to ring. Chance was about the only factor since high wind velocity and a change in the direction towards empty fields of the wind from west to east prevented a big disaster. Wind velocity of over 20 km per hour did not let the smoke settle, otherwise the barrels lying all over the place would have caught fire and it could have spread to all the nearby factories in the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation notified area and villages (CSE 2008). Brought under control within 24 hours, the fire did not produce any casualties, although people in surrounding villages were affected by toxic gases. In order to understand the effects of pollution on the 89 affected people, the toxins had to be identified, since 37 kinds of waste were stored at the landfill site. On the second day after the fire, the GPCB installed machines at Jitali, BEIL and at Aventis’ factory to monitor the air quality. But the GPCB did not collect samples for dioxins, furans and volatile organic compounds, which would indicate the toxicity of the air, since only one laboratory in Hyderabad is equipped to test dioxins and furans. Testing is cumbersome and costly because dioxin presence is toxic even at one part per trillion.23

Figure 8.2 Fire at Ankleshwar exposed careless handling of Waste Photo: Courtesy of R. Kaur (2009).

BEIL: Environmental Time Bomb? Violations of environmental and safety norms at treatment, storage and disposal facilities are not exceptional, as fire was probably due to a pyrophoric reaction between steel drums and stored waste (CSE 2008). In fact, the Industrial Health and Safety Department had registered a case against BEIL under the Gujarat Factories Act (1948) for making seven sheds for storing hazardous waste when it had permission for only two.24 It was the seventh shed that caught fire. Furthermore, the District Crisis Group report noted many safety lapses at BEIL (ibid.). There were no sensors to detect gas leakage; dangerous chemicals were not identified and not kept in a separate area. In case of emergency, there was very little fire-fighting equipment, no emergency exit in the high compound wall and workers did not wear safety masks. In such a case of negligence and humaninduced fire, the sub-divisional magistrate and two other members of the ad hoc District Crisis Group proposed strong action against BEIL under the Indian Factories Act.25 But it is beyond their power to lodge a First Information Report (FIR), the Indian legal document that sets the process of criminal justice in motion. The District Collector26 under pressure from political and administrative higher-ups has to give directions to ignore the lapses.

Environmental and Financial Costs The environmental costs are obviously more difficult to assess than the financial ones. The released contaminants are bound to settle on land and water. Toxins are normally incinerated only at very high temperatures, but the fire burnt the hazardous waste at a much lower temperature. Besides, some irregularities were found. According to the records it submitted to GPCB, 12,825 tonnes of oil were lying in its compound though it could not treat more than 50 tonnes a day. The Hazardous Wastes Rules state that an industrial unit cannot store waste in its compound for more than 90 days. The BEIL charges factories Rs 15 (US$ 0.375) per kilogram of hazardous waste for incineration and the money is taken in advance. That means it collected over US$ 4.8 million for 12,825 tonnes of waste oil but did not treat it. Activists also point out that the fire saved the company US$ 94,000, the cost of treating 250 tonnes of waste (ibid.).

Twenty-five years after Bhopal27 However, industrial units are now worried that the accident draws negative attention to the belt just as it gears up for a second phase of growth. The BEIL does not want to lose the bid of over a million dollars contract to incinerate the hazardous waste lying at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal (Raghu 2008). The AIA which represents the manufacturing units in the region, claimed that following an agreement with the Pollution Control Board, Bharuch was the first industrial estate to set up a toxic solid waste disposal incinerator in the region. The Gujarat government also announced the opening of a new incinerator with a capacity of 30 tons per day, nearly three times the capacity of BEIL’s existing facility (ibid.). Nevertheless, the BEIL case raises several questions for most industries. First, the industrial risk has not been correctly assessed, either by the private or by the public sector (Expressindia, 12 April 2008). Second, a larger disaster has been avoided in extremis thanks to natural factors and the efficient intervention of the fire fighters, who did not hesitate to tear down a wall to bring the fire engine into the plant. Third, some citizens worked to ensure the accountability as well as the transparency of private and public authorities. They filmed, documented, investigated, analysed and even assessed through various methods including scientific ones. Citizens’ role in environmental governance has been essential in mitigating industrial risks. But as independent views are beneficial to the process, citizens’ avenues for participation are limited. It therefore questions the room the state of Gujarat gives to citizens in the decision-making of the environmental risk prevention, pollution abatement, policy implementation, and monitoring of operation.

Conclusion This chapter aimed at analysing regional economic policies led by the state of Gujarat and private players and how it affected the governance of environmental responsibilities. The current era of economic reforms and decentralisation of power emphasises on economic growth and profit generation, which may create stress on environmental regulations. As global economic policies have reterritorialised and rescaled the regional policies, states and even cities are now vying against each other in order to promote their economic growth by enacting several Acts like the SEZ Act, 2005, and the Gujarat Special Investment Region Bill, 2009. Similarly, the DMIC plans to further catalyse industrial development in the state of Gujarat. At the same time, the Government of Gujarat has also rhetorically admitted that environment has become a growing concern, as it could really impede economic growth. The state strategy is therefore two fold. First, it seeks to ensure fast tracking of approvals with public institutions’ blessing to reassure investors and the public. So the mandatory environmental clearances along with the environmental impact assessment procedures have been simplified to accommodate industrial growth. Second, the state invests in risk mitigation and ecology via international funds and cooperation. Researchers for instance have already designed an environmental information system for monitoring water and air quality in urban areas in order to be able to better address and visualise pollution corridors (Patra and Pradhan 2005). At the same time, Gujarat has already proposed two water treatment and one urban transport projects with minimal investments of US$122 million each from the whole DMIC budget of 12 billion dedicated to infrastructure development (Government of Gujarat 2007: 8). The DMIC plans to install environmental protection mechanisms with an emphasis on ecological design, clean production technologies and resources recovery through public-private partnerships. However, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor project also raises fear that economic development will be carried out at the expense of environmental issues. Moreover, the environmental governance process has left little space to citizen’s voices questioning how national and subnational political elites engage with globalisation. Have industries, associations, chambers of commerce and international stakeholders been compelled to pressurise the government to dilute environmental norms? I would answer in the affirmative. It seems that the clash is structured in the institutional system, as the current international trend emphasises on technical cooperations, not on regulations. Bjorn Stigson, President of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development in Geneva, told the Delhi Summit on Sustainable Development in February 2009 that he made out a case for ‘technical cooperation’, not ‘transfer’ of technologies.28 But clean development mechanisms are only a part of the solution. On the contrary, with a

clever use of media campaigns based on Gujarati pride and culture like ‘Nirmal: A Clean and Green Gujarat’29 or the environment education bus,30 the ruling BJP party shows people the official face of environmental commitment. But this trend actually accentuates the pace of industrialisation with little accountability to citizens. As a consequence, traditional environmental governance has witnessed the emergence of some countervailing power in the form of citizens’ organisations, made up of individuals exerting their civil rights to offset business’s excessive advantage. This partial shift of governance from the local citizens to local, national and international business stakeholders deepens the concern for sensible environmental policies and management. Moreover, although environmental issues need to be addressed in public actions, Gujarati citizens have failed to form efficient united groups. Their boundaries are not clear and fields of expertise not well-defined. As a result, measurable risks related to infrastructure, and industrial and natural hazards are considered as a second priority by the population. According to the activist Achyut Yagnik, popular religious leaders want to maintain their equation with the political and social middle-class establishment while stifling the civil society. The case of BEIL shows indeed that ecological and social issues are not properly tackled under the present governance and DMIC’s potential economic benefits might be rapidly thwarted by territorial and ecological constraints leading to further social unrest. In October 2008, farmers in 59 villages in Bharuch and Vadodara districts have already opposed land acquisition in the name of public purpose. Furthermore, in September 2009, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forest ordered a ban on new industrial expansion in the three industrial estates of Ankleshwar, Panoli and Vapi, stating that existing industries had not complied with the pollution norms (Sulaimani 2009). As the Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy (2001) simply stated, the core of the solution is that we have to respect the environment. References Bagchi, A M., P. Das, and S. K. Chattopadhyay. 2005. ‘Growth and Structural Change in the Economy of Gujarat, 1970–2000’. Economic & Political Weekly 40,15 July, http://epw.in/epw/uploads/articles/847.pdf. Brenner, N. 2004. New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Delhi: Oxford University Press, http://metropoles.revues.org/116. Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). 2008. ‘Toxic Waste Kept for Safe Disposal in Bharuch Catches Fire’. Down to Earth 16 (23), 21 April. Curmally, A. 2002. ‘Environmental Governance and Regulation in India’. India Infrastructure Report 2002: Governance Issues for Commercialization. Delhi: Oxford University Press. http://www.archidev.org/IMG/pdf/ ENVIRONMENTAL_GOVERNANCE_AND_REGULATION_IN_INDIA.pdf. Dubey, Sunita. 2002. ‘Disarming the Law’. IndiaTogether.org, http://www.indiatogether.org/environment/articles/eial202.htm.

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Faulks, K. 2000. Citizenship. London: Routledge. Forests and Environment Department. 2007. Draft Tenth Plan 2002–07, Annual Plan 2002-03. Government of Gujarat. http://gujenvfor.gswan.gov.in/department/budget/Draft-Tenth-Plan-2002-07-%20AnnualPlan-2002-03-Proposed-Outlays-physical-Target-Achievements.html. Gopal, Krishna. 2002. Corporate Attack on Public Hearing Process. Independent Media Centre India, india.indymedia.org. 8 August, (accessed June 2010) http://india.indymedia.org/en/2002/08/1973.shtml Government of Gujarat (GoG). 2007. Gujarat: A Promising Investment Destination. Japan-India Economic Parnership Report, 3 July. www.dipp.nic.in/japan/japan_cell/presentations/Gujarat.ppt ——. 2009. Industrial Policy—2009. Industries Commissionerate. January. http://ic.gujarat.gov.in/pdf/industrial-policy-2009-at-a-glance.pdf. Accessed on 9 October 2011. Hirway, I.1999. Dynamics of Development in Gujarat: Some Issues. Working Paper I, Ahmedabad: Centre for

Development Alternatives, www.cfda.ac.in/…/Dynamics_of_Development_in_Gujarat.pdf. Kashyap, S. P., and N. Mehta. 2007. ‘Gujarat 2020: Viewpoints & A Vision’. Keynote paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Gujarat Economic Association, Gujarat, 27–28 January. Kathuria, V., and T. Sterner. 2006. ‘Monitoring and Enforcement: Is Two-tier Regulation Robust? A case study of Ankleshwar, India’. Ecological Economics 57: 477–93. ——. 2007. Informal Regulation of Pollution in a Developing Country: Evidence from India’. Ecological Economics, 63: 403–17. Kaur, R. 2009. ‘Too hot to handle’. Down to Earth, 28 February. http://www.downtoearth.org.in/node/3030. Kennedy, L. 2007. ‘Shaping economic spaces in Chennai and Hyderabad: The Assertion of State-level Policies in the Post-reform Era’. Purushartha, La ville en Asie du Sud, No. 26, Paris, EHESS Editions, 315–51. Mehta, Lyla et al. 1999. Exploring Understandings of Institutions and Uncertainty: New Directions in Natural Resource Management. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. Ministry of Commerce & Industry (MCI). 2007. Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor. New Delhi: Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion. Menon, K., and K. Kohli. 2007. ‘Environmental Decision Making: Whose Agenda?’ Economic and Political Weekly 30 June, Issue 26: 2490–94. Parag, D. 2007. ‘Gujarat’s Chemical Units Dread Draft Hazardous Waste Rule’. The Economic Times 13 December. Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (PSS). 2000. Golden Corridor: Digging our own grave: A Report. Bharuh: PSS. Patra, B., and B. Pradhan. 2005. ‘Design of an Environmental Information System for Monitoring Water and Air Quality in Urban Areas’. International Journal for Disaster Prevention and Management 14 (3): 326– 42. Prajapati, R. 2003. ‘Mockery of Environmental Laws: An Assessment of Gujarat’s Record in the Implementation of Environmental Laws’. Combat Law: Globalisation and Environment 1(5), December 2002–January 2003. Purcell, M. 2003. ‘Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27(3): 564–90. Raghu, S. 2008. ‘Is Ankleshwar estate an environmental time bomb?’ Livemint. com, 12 April. http://www.livemint.com/Articles/2008/04/08235436/Ankleshwar-fire-exposes-mess-i.html. Accessed on 9 October 2011. Ramanathan, U. 2004. ‘Communities at Risks’. Economic and Political Weekly, October 09-15. 39 (41) : 4521– 27. http://www.ielrc.org/content/a0405.pdf. Roy, A. 2001. ‘Défaire le développement, sauvez le climat’. L’Ecologiste 2 (4): 3–4. Sulaimani, K. 2009. ‘Centre orders ban on new industries expansion in three industrial estates’. Indianexpress.com, 1 September. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/centre-orders-ban-on-newindustries-expansion- in-three-industrial-estates/509657/. Accessed on 9 October 2011. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). 2002. State Environmental Action Programme: Industrial Pollution. Phase III, Sectoral Report, Vol. 1. Ahmedabad: TCS. Upadhyay, V. 2005. ‘Disaster management: Putting people http://www.indiatogether.org/2005/apr/vup-disaster.htm.

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Internet Links

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Gujarat Ecological Education & Research: http://gujenvfor.gswan.gov.in/geerfoundation.htm Gujarat Ecology Commission: http://www.gec.gov.in/ Gujarat Ecology Society: http://www.gesindia.org/news.htm Indian Economic Survey 2007–2008 http://indiabudget.nic.in Industries Commissionerate: http://ic.gujarat.gov.in/promo-sch/env-prot.htm Ministry of Environment and Forests: http://www.moef.gov.in; http://envfor. nic.in The Gujarat Environment Management Institute: http://www.gemi-india.org United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction: http://www.unisdr.org

NINE

The Gosikhurd Dam Project and Transformation of Rural Social Space in Vidarbha, Maharashtra JOËL CABALION

Introduction: For a Sociology of Displacement Large dams and construction projects continue to be at the centre of considerations with regard to economic development and nation-building. As one might expect, a paradigm is hard to debunk if its interests continue to be defended and embodied by institutions, lobbies, political parties, corporations, etc. In fact, one cannot expect to reduce the scope of a paradigm’s legitimacy by simply believing in the power of words, albeit critical ones, however necessary it is to discuss global and national politics with as much epistemological vigilance and critical distance as before. Both an imagined and performed community (see Anderson 1983) of progress (discourses about the emerging India, the global India, the shining India, etc.) carried by so-called ‘middle classes’ gearing for unimpeded economic liberation and generalised material welfare cannot be refrained or diverted from what they consider ‘natural’ options. Such a task might even be more difficult than we think to envisage considering rural areas are themselves revealing a certain ‘contagion of needs’ (see Bourdieu and Malek 1964: 22) and internalisation of the cultural myths of development, however being the first demarcated zones dislocated and drowned for the ‘benefit of the majority’. Social sciences can explain and question directions, orientations, practices, spontaneous theories, etc. fuelling development by dispossession through an act of knowing that it is not irremediable or natural for history to repeat itself durably to the disservice of the same sections of society. In other words, it is more than imperative to extend a transdisciplinary body of knowledge able to empirically restitute the ‘chains of interdependance’ between social phenomena (such as between the improvement of economic well-being among certain groups and the increase of poverty among others), to identify the ‘circuits of domination’ (such as linking or separating the urban and the rural), that is, in Pierre Bourdieu’s words, to ‘reconstitute the causal series that lead from the most central places of the State to the most dis-herited and decapitalized regions of the social world’ (see Bourdieu et al. 1999: 182). This chapter thereby situates itself in a larger need to empirically confront, where it is observable, the political economy of deprivation and dispossession through the lens of a large dam and its multidimensional effects on villages of Eastern Vidarbha.1 Large dams are partial symbols of a larger paradigm (nation-building and economic power) whose frame is as flawed as before but has reinstated itself in a context of radical changes in economic policies raising crucial questions about the state’s treatment of rural areas. The perspective of a state-monitored project does no longer today impede the possibility of routing benefits to private entities bypassing the usual interrogations on the notion of public interest. Indeed the notion of public purpose has been legally extended to make space for private interests. Special Economic Zones, industrial corridors, large dams, highways, thermal plants, mining fields, urban development plans and the like take place in a highly antagonistic context of struggles for resources (both economic and symbolic) reminding the hierarchical structures of the social world and by far naturalising the option of voluntary displacement. In India there has been growth indeed, but despite the loud claims of the Planning Commission and the Central Government, it is far from being inclusive. It has in fact been shown to become highly unequalising. India does not have any official contemporary record on displacement and rehabilitation which could provide a realistic view of the abysmal figures and inequalities with regard to the social costs of developments. Rather, the Union Government has wanted to eclipse such a need for appropriate research and public recognition by sketching a new national policy alleged more sensitive to people’s situations2 to be affected by future development projects.

Large dams have historically appeared to be practical solutions answering the dual problem of food security and electricity production while triggering hopes of a generalised impetus towards agricultural growth and social well-being. In the case of the Gosikhurd project, the temporality of its erection led to its partial redefinition. From being a project meant to fufill a single purpose demand, i.e., irrigation, it today stands to meet a range of conventional dominant demands like drinking water, electricity production, industrial development, etc. In brief, what can one learn of a project’s evolution over 25 years of political redefinition and social struggles, particularly inasmuch as such a project is yet to be fully implemented and the dam to be impounded? Can there be any specific understanding on the signification of such projects at the level of an entire region’s course of development? This chapter thus intends to show that a development project such as the Gosikhurd project can help decipher the implications and stakes of economic development and social struggles on the condition that it is studied in a multidimensional way; that is insofar as such an object of study is inherently heterotopical (see Foucault 1984: 46-49; Arsenio 2003) given that it produces effects at various levels (it raises the question of Vidarbha’s underdevelopment), confronts agents of different social natures (opposing the world view of engineers to the reality of dispossessed villagers) and destabilises lives of thousands in a way irremediable but differentiated. Such a project, through its all-encompassing characteristics, leads to major upheavals in the rural social space unveiling conflicting dynamics about the total appropriation of space.

Vidarbha: A Model of Relegation? Vidarbha is a region of Eastern Maharashtra, not exactly existing on paper and yet granted some form of official consideration3 due to its specific cultural and historical course. It is today composed of two administrative divisions: Amravati and Nagpur. Geographically, or rather agronomically speaking, it is common to divide this region according to two broad categories pertaining to its soil: to the East, one finds red soil, where there is more rice and soyabean cultivation than other crops; to the West, one finds black soil where mostly cotton is grown. Cotton was known to Vidarbha as the white gold; the region being historically one of the most important places for the growth of cotton. Until the opening of the Nagpur textile mills in the 1970s, Vidarbha was economically one of the most prosperous regions in Maharashtra. As Vijay Jawandhia4 remarks, the saying goes that Vidarbha’s famous black soil breeds lazy farmers as ‘one only needed to throw seeds to have cotton grow instantly and give a rich harvest’.5 With orange orchards, cotton was the main cash crop and was grown everywhere throughout Vidarbha even where it has today completely disappeared. ‘Cotton was like god to us,’6 reminds Rajendra Mulak from Umred, a region cultivating soyabean, rice and chillies today.

Figure 9.1 The Gosikhurd Dam Photo: Courtesy of Joel Cabalion (2010). As detailed by Ajit Kumar (see Kumar 2001:4614-17), Vidarbha has been historically the object of a strong regional sentiment amounting to a demand for a separate state—Mahavidarbha. Contrary to the recent struggles for statehood for Telangana or those earlier for Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, politicians are yet to come to an agreement about Mahavidarbha.7 The political agreements of the past had promised much to Vidarbha in order to maintain this region in the state of Maharashtra in the context of the 1956 Nagpur pact.8 Its backwardness, among which infrastructure and irrigation are most notable, is today the biggest inertia that confronts all political agents of the state. Vidarbha, a third of the state territory, is mostly a dryland agricultural region contrasting sharply with certain areas of western Maharashtra where sugarcane paradoxically grows in drought-prone areas given the political support they receive from state leaders (most notably Sharad Pawar). The region’s labour force, perhaps more than other parts of Maharashtra, remains highly dependent on agriculture as it is not that industrialised.

Map 9.1 Location of the Gosikhurd Dam/Nagpur distric/Maharastra Source: Mathieu Coubat and Joël Cabalion. As indicated by the 2001 Census of India, the average proportion of agricultural workers in the total workforce in the state of Maharashtra was 55 per cent. Such an absolute figure is however misleading due to the distorting demographic weight of Mumbai. If we take into consideration only the 11 districts composing the region of Vidarbha, we reach a rather typical figure of 70.2 per cent (Bhandari and Kale 2007: 108-9). Furthermore, the share of workforce in agriculture between cultivators and labourers also indicates that an equal amount of land, as compared to the 1991 census, gets cultivated by fewer people, a result of multiple potential factors partly indicative of a casualisation of agricultural labour squeezing out people from the primary sector and pushing them to self-employment (or unemployment).

Emergence and Legitimisation of the Gosikhurd Project The Gosikhurd project was decided way back in 1978 but received official clearance later, in 1982, from the

state of Maharashtra, and in 1986 from the Central Water Commission before being inaugurated by Rajiv Gandhi on 22 April, 1988. It was initiated under the tribal sub-plan of the Sixth Five Year Plan (1980-1985) of the Government of India, aimed at developing in particular the tribal region of the district of Chandrapur,9 situated in the command area. The project was initially under the control of the Irrigation Department of the state but was eventually transferred to the Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation (VIDC), founded in 1997, in order to accelerate and improve the handling of water-basin projects of that region, albeit lacking the necessary funds to do so. Although the dam work is technically accomplished, its impounding cannot be fully expected until the end of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2012) due to the ongoing struggles around rehabilitation, which makes it one of the oldest river-basin projects to be achieved. Two-hundred villages are affected, including 93 supposed to be physically displaced amounting to 63,000-80,000 people who need to be resettled on new housing sites. Covering three districts of the Vidarbha region—Nagpur, Bhandara and Chandrapur—718 villages are supposed to benefit directly from the construction of this dam.10 Flow and lift irrigation together will amount to 250,890 hectares of newly irrigated land (Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation 2005; Government of Maharashtra 1988). The dam works, canals and submergence areas have led to the acquisition of 40,228 hectares of land out of which 28,559 hectares correspond to farmers’ holdings, 6882.44 to governmental properties and 4786 hectares to forest land. The break-up of affected social categories is as follows: 19 per cent of Scheduled Castes, 3 per cent of Scheduled Tribes, 60 per cent of Other Backward Classes, 14 per cent of Nomadic Tribes, the rest being negligible and composed of Brahmins, Marathas and other social groups (Gosikhurd Prakalpgrast Sangharsh Samiti 2007). The most impressive evolution of the Gosikhurd project concerns its cost. It has started with a much deflated cost of Rs 3722 million in 1981-82 to reach a newly accepted official figure of Rs 77,770 million in 2007-2008. Until 2004 the project remained a major stake of struggle between western Maharashtra and Vidarbha due to paucity of funds. The recent mediation of the Central government has made it gain momentum. The Gosikhurd project is a state government funded project but eventually garnered national funding in 1997 through the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme. The VIDC has since then lobbied for a complete conversion of its status as a national project in order to get central funding up to 90 per cent. The financial package announced by Manmohan Singh in the context of the agrarian crisis loan waiver has guaranteed financial provisions for it. At last, the Technical Advisory Committee of the Central Water Commission has not only accepted the revised budgetary estimates but also allowed the recent conversion of the project as one of the 10 national priority irrigation projects eligible for central money. In spite of an ideology inscribing the project in economic needs linked to a defective climatic nature with regard to droughts or unequal distribution of means of irrigation, the Gosikhurd project advocates more than just new cropping patterns. Beneath these well promoted factors he other less publicised reasons and uses. The government makes a political use of the dam, although it does not acknowledge it officially. Internal documents of the VIDC, if discreet, are yet very eloquent of the political surplus gain that the authorities tend to foresee: ‘Development of these regions will increase income of the beneficiaries and reduce the poverty and definitely will help to reduce Naxalite movements’ (Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation 2001). Naxalites are quite active in the tribal zones of Chandrapur (and Gadchiroli), which the dam is going to benefit. Indian laws and regulations do enable central financial aid to a large dam project on the condition that it has multi-state implications. However the Gosikhurd project only affects districts of the same administrative division of eastern Maharashtra. As a result the Naxalite dilemma appears to have been a convenient political argument to justify central aid. As it is not officially recognised, it is difficult to say how much it counted effectively. It however tends to work as an indirect compensating strategy legitimising the request of the Irrigation Department to accelerate procedures to ‘reduce Naxalite activities and to develop the backward and tribal area, speedy completion of the project is necessary. Hence to convert project as national project is the need of the hour’ (ibid). The status of the project gets entangled in a historical context of interregional competing economies where the region of eastern Maharashtra usually lags behind, albeit being the producer of much of the state wealth. The official documents ultimately reveal the propensity of state authorities to use a development project in order to fulfill or evoke indirect political functions of containment and cultural integration in the mainstream process of modernisation.11 In other words, the Gosikhurd project is also a way to extend a political form of authority where it had so far not reached or been minor, a way to extend the reach of market structures and dis-embed local economies from their traditional circuits.

The Struggle on Land Rates For agents of the juridical field or the concerned affected people, however, one does not often indulge in understanding the principles of calculation of compensation that are constructed by the state in its practice of the evaluation of land value. It is nevertheless important to understand the issues raised by the readyreckoners inasmuch as the latter are part of a state’s effort to regulate and construct a market wherein the value of land paradoxically seems to get minimally compensated thereby ending up being opposed by farmers. The landowners of most villages in the districts of Nagpur and Bhandara started being awarded their compensation for agricultural lands in the year 1998-1999. The awards included, as per legal definitions, all other immoveable agricultural properties such as wells, fruit trees, tanks, etc. They were calculated according to the details of the village form 7/12 indicating the necessary information such as tax cess (lagaan mahsool), qualitative aspects of the land and so on. The villagers today consensually assert they were obliged to accept the awards at the time they were given not knowing what else they could do and in spite of considering them unreasonable. Indeed only very few people filed cases or collectively gathered in order to find a way to protest. Most peasants were awarded a sum of approximately Rs 30,000 per acre of dry land and Rs 50,000 to Rs 100,000 per acre of irrigated land (depending on facilities). Individual situations vary tremendously and it is not rare to meet people who assert that they have been compensated at the rate of dry land for irrigated land. Such conflicts inform of a very confused nature of surveys and official efforts to achieve compensation without discrepancies. Compensation is therefore a highly politicised issue. Within a couple of years, the Project Affected People could learn in different newspapers about the awards declared for the villagers whose lands were acquired for the thermal plant in Mauda,12 a plant whose existence partially relies on the waters of Gosikhurd. They received approximately Rs 800,000 per acre, a figure more than 20 times the awards granted in Gosikhurd’s affected villages, a figure also very far away from the skyrocketing sums evaluated today in the vicinity of Nagpur (see Hardikar 2008).

Figure 9.2 Jabran Jot Andolan, Bhoodan Bhavan, Nagpur Photo: Courtesy of Joel Cabalion.

Rehabilitation and Resettlement Pitfalls When it comes to land for land policies, the Government of Maharashtra and the VIDC face administrative and legal deadlocks particularly revealing of the latent struggles opposing departments in the Indian state. The region of Vidarbha comprises around 80 per cent of Maharashtra’s forest cover. In the Nagpur, Bhandara and Chandrapur districts, the designated forest area is 30, 46 and 47 per cent of the total area respectively for

an actual forest cover of 20, 26 and 35 per cent.13 Many politicians decry this situation of so-called forest land protection under the central Forest (Conservation) Act of 1980 as it renders very difficult the dereservation of areas that could be redistributed through land reforms or in the case of development projects. Such is the case, for instance, with the category of zhupdi jungle, traditionally used for nonforestry purposes by Scheduled Tribes. As a matter of fact, Vidarbha, contrary to western Maharashtra (where the horizontal extension of cultivation is practically no longer possible), contains some possibility of land redistribution, allowing potential policy moves to provide affected people with holdings that do not anymore correspond to forest land per se. Such withholding of land by the state ultimately contributes to the emergence and reinforcement of specific social movements of ‘encroachers’ such as the jabran jot (forcible cultivation) movements14 claiming the right to trespass in forest land in order to secure land resources often already possessed before or needed for obvious economic reasons of livelihood. In places of the district of Bhandara, a similar issue is raised in the realm of nistarit land, a type of land right secured for Scheduled Tribes in government forests (in activities such as cattle grazing and collection of jungle produce). Such a right was seemingly revoked in the case of the Gosikhurd project where such lands were transferred to the forest department. The VIDC has therefore not been able to propose any systematic land for land option, not even on paper. Rehabilitation laws (Government of Maharashtra 1997) stipulate that efforts are to be made in order to share the costs and benefits within both areas, namely affected and non-affected. For instance, tenants with small landholdings who are affected or landless labourers are supposed to obtain official assistance to acquire irrigated land while the landed gentries would risk dispossession of part of their excess landholdings.15 Such projects are called Lift Irrigation Schemes. In the case of the Gosikhurd project, there are four such schemes amounting to about a third of the total shared irrigation potential. If they indeed increase the value of land significantly, they also paradoxically create specific difficulties for those who are affected, for those who find themselves unable to acquire new landholdings whose rates end up being a complete mismatch to their economic capacities and the awards they received. As a result, land exchanges that happen mostly take place between rich landowners.

Erosion of a Moral Economy and Beginning of Downgrading of the Displaced For some people, whose economic and social position was clearly not only important in terms of status (symbolic capital) but also socially recognised throughout the area (by social capital), the perspective of dislocation, relocation (in bad conditions) and rehabilitation in new conditions is almost inherently a threat that looms upon their former condition as if it could instantly precipitate some kind of downgrading due to a breach in the old rural social system. Such fears are sometimes expressed in a revealing manner by social activists of the displaced people’s movement who are in fact, perhaps primarily,16 important landlords embedded in a moral economy they fear to see so destabilised: ‘Sarkar nepura grameen ka sanskriti nasht kar diya hai (the government has totally destroyed the culture of villages).’ The term here for ‘destruction’ (nasht) partly refers to the ancient balutedari system. Such a system still partly exists essentially through a ‘grain for work’ system of redistribution rooted in the old principles of caste-based moral economy. In Vidarbha, one still thinks in terms of the traditional type of agricultural contracts (as in the hunde, a type of group contract for fast and intensive cutting of crops) and measurements (kudo, bora, paheli, etc.). However, these vestiges have not prevented the impersonal logics of the market to enter and dominate people’s lives. Van-majoori (forest wage labour) workers can therefore today decide (if it is not actually decided for them) to go for a traditional way of retribution and be paid in kind (grains, chillies, etc.) or work for a minimum wage salary that varies depending on the task, gender or the type of crop. The fear of dislocation, far from being abstract, not only pertains to the loss of a specific social position endowed with assets but also informs as much of a fear of the dispersion of social positions, most notably within the family structure. The village of Navegaon, also the strongest base of the movement surrounding those affected, has for instance refused its resettlement map as it is considered far too intolerable to disperse people and families. The problem is as acute in other villages although most of them have ended up constrained, eventually accepting the options they were presented with. In fact, by wishing families, relatives and neighbours to be resettled the way they are presently laid out everyone was contributing to the

reproduction of the ‘community’ (as in the word samaj that people use in place of jati very often) without even needing to explicitly ask for it. However, the Government of Maharashtra, also pressurised by the affected people’s movement led by a Dalit of a much progressive ethos, seems to have come to terms (at least in this project) with the usual option of relocating people according to caste lines and caste bastis as it has been observed in the past (see Karve 1969). Most people are therefore today facing a lottery system supposed to neutralise their own incapacity to avoid internal struggles and conflicts for the better residential plots. In spite of being forced to adjust to new morphological realities, people usually regret not being able to reorganise according to the present layout they experience in their village as it is synonymous to them with specific solidarities, if not explicitly to the internal division of capital within families.

Production and Reproduction of Socio-economic Inequalities Population displacement tends to provide an experimental basis for comparison with allegedly ‘ordinary’ situations of observation enabling one to understand and explain how development contributes to produce and reproduce configurations of inequality. Provided one studies the issue at a very local level, it is however not possible to illustrate such a process. It is therefore necessary to define and agree on a scale that starts from a village or group of villages in order to provide a solid empirical basis for further extension of hypotheses. The village of Ambhora Khurd is situated in the tahsil of Kuhi in the district of Nagpur. It is among the 93 villages that will be displaced and whose site of resettlement has already been proposed, demarcated and accepted by the villagers. Approximately 75 per cent of the villagers’ landholdings are going to get submerged. Recently some have started shifting due to a relative stability in their present financial situation and partly thanks to some of the state’s incentives and solatium grants (anudaan) distributed by the rehabilitation department in order to accelerate relocation. This village however remains an exception as most other villages have so far hardly started construction of new homes but for a few just in front of the dam wall. These are particularly pressurised by the authorities who progressively close the dam’s gates according to a fixed agenda. The village is composed of 14 different social groups, dominated by a couple of agrarian middle castes (Teli and Kunbi). The poorer sections usually come from the Scheduled Caste Mahars (former ‘Untouchables’ converted to Buddhism) or from the tribe of fishermen, the Dhiwars (‘Nomadic Tribe’ in the official terminology). Each caste however has its share of landless households, even for the more affluent ones who actually own land in large quantities within few families, or lineages. It is clear from various field surveys that even powerful and landowning families are going to face risks of downgrading due to an absence of land already explained above and due to an increase in the value of land rendering complicated any new form of acquisition. However a few families, usually very important landowners, are able to anticipate and short-circuit risks of downgrading by re-investing almost instantly their whole economic capital gotten from compensations in new economic strategies of not just survival but clear reproduction of assets and conditions. In Ambhora Khurd, for example, the elder son of a major landowning family plans to buy a car soon and build the biggest house in the resettlement site, proud to display economic power and well-being much intact in spite of everyone else’s problems. This clearly indicates an inequality in foreseeing risks or in anticipating the aftermath of relocation. Such a problem is often expressed by a few conscious villagers who find themselves criticising their own neighbours for not realising the need to think of what is to come. It is particularly displaying the unequal capacities of people who end up unable to reproduce anything but the biological capital of families (by expenses met with only in food, health and other types of daily items if not used to recover from earlier debt traps linked to marriages). State authorities do not sufficiently take into account the fact that, below a certain level of economic security, provided by a sufficient amount of land, fishing equipment, i.e., stable employment and a certain minimum income, ‘economic agents’ can neither envisage nor perform most of the ‘rational’ behaviours that are presupposed to get a grip on their future (see Bourdieu 2000: 17-41), such as the management of resources over time in terms of anticipating priority needs in the same way the state is considering them, including recourse to credit or search for land, moving out to a new area where land is available, invest in new activities, accept or decline irrigated state land offers, etc. As expressed by Vinayak Palandure, son of an important Kunbi caste peasant family, in a long interview about his family’s future position in the resettlement site:

[... ] when there is no activity left to do how do we fill our tummies haan? No activity will be left anymore after your land is gone. You have so many families. How will one manage even a day with all this? Because of this unemployment will rise. Our own unemployment will rise. What will the young people do? Today there are educated young people too, they can’t just go and carry gravels and sand as construction labourers. He’s got a status. And what construction will he do? When there isn’t a single governmental work programme around then where will they work as labourers? The second thing is even if he goes to work as a labourer, how will an educated boy go and do this? He should get a different job, according to his status; now each man, even if you go to the villages, has got some education. However poor he is he’s got some education so there should be some work according to that and also there is ... the status he’s got... 10th class, 12th class or graduation, postgraduation, he should get some job according to that or whatever activity or whatever at all and then this unemployment and uselessness will decrease. But the government has done nothing up to now. The government should think hard about this.... So far the government only thinks of documents, it thinks on paper. Notices and documents! It’s written, it writes that it isn’t like that, that such a programme is coming but such things never reach the villages!17 Even the one who has attained the position of patil (former customary village chief) of the village was wondering: ‘But what are we going to do if we don’t have any land anymore? We, we can’t become daily-wage workers [mazdoor]. We’ve always been what we are [patil], we can’t start working like agricultural labourers. With this dam, even the powerful [in Hindi bade bade log] become all small [chote chote]. Even the powerful are going to become labourers.’18 The expression of such an anxiety pertaining to the outcome of his family reveals the extent to which the state sacrifices entire categories of population, even the ‘powerful’ on whom it usually bases itself to develop the foundations of future green revolutions.

Conclusion The Gosikhurd project reveals, however flawed, a will from the administration to handle displacement and resettlement processes with care and knowledge. It is nonetheless clear that such intentions weigh little in front of what can be termed as structural incapacity to prevent usual risks of impoverishment. The project has however witnessed unprecedented effort in Maharashtra regarding vocational training or in relation to house construction schemes for the Below Poverty Line families. Such targeted schemes, added to the benefits won by the struggles of the Gosikhurd Prakalpgrast Sangharsh Samiti, have brought in the pre-displacement phase some reasonable successes to the people in the submerged area. The question remains whether this attention and care will be prolonged and materialised in a strict and durable follow-up of the people once resettled. Last but not the least, it is yet to be seen how much its handling will really bolster a new agrarian impetus in the command area of Chandrapur district, its initial and most important challenge.

References Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Arsenio, Gonzalez. 2003. ‘La controverse mondiale à propos des grands barrages : d’une réalité hétérotopique à la construction d’un espace restreint de représentations (la world commission on dams)’. Regards Sociologiques 25/26. Bhandari, Laveesh, and Sumith Kale (eds). 2007. Indian States at a Glance 2006-2007: Maharashtra, Performances, Facts and Figures. New Delhi: Pearson Education. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. (eds). 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——— . 2000. ‘Making the Economic Habitus: Algerian Workers Revisited’. Ethnography l(l): 17-41. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Sayed Abdel Malek. 1964. Le Déracinement. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Cabalion, Joël. Forthcoming. Gestions politiques et conflits autour d’un grand barrage indien. Les enjeux socioéconomiques du déplacement et de la réinstallation à Ambhora Khurd, village du Maharashtra. Paris: School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS). Foucault, Michel. 1984. ‘Dits et écrits 1984, Des espaces autres’ (conférence au cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967). Architecture, Mouvement, continuité 5, October: 46-49. Gosikhurd Prakalpgrast Sangharsh Samiti. 2007. Gavatil kautumbik mahiti sankalan. Nagpur: Published by the Samiti. Government of Maharashtra. 1988. Cost Estimates, Financial Statements and B.C Ratio (updated). Nagpur: Irrigation Department, Irrigation Project Investigation Circle, Vol.l. Hardikar, Jaideep. 2009. ‘Big Dam Project may Lead to State-AP Standoff. DNA 2 January. Hardikar, Jaideep. 2008. ‘Rs 33,000 cr: That’s what Nagpur’s Land Boom is Worth’. DNA 20 October. Karve, Irawati. 1969. A Survey of the People Displaced through the Koyna Dam. Poona: Deccan College. Khagram, Sanjeev. 2004. Dams and Development: Transnational Struggles for Water and Power. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kumar, Ajit. 2001. ‘Maharashtra: Statehood for Vidarbha’. Economic and Political Weekly 36 (50): 4614-17. Pimple, Minar, and Manpreet Sethi. 2005. ‘Occupation of Land in India: Experiences and Challenges’. In Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, ed. Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros. London: Zed Books. Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation. 2001. Brief Note: Conversion of Gosikhurd Project as National Project. Nagpur: Gosikhurd Project Circle, Gosikhurd Rehabilitation Division. ———. 2005. Governor’s Note, 4/3/2005. Nagpur: Gosikhurd Project Circle.

TEN

Consequences of Road Construction in Padum, Zanskar Valley, Northern Himalaya SALOMÉ DEBOOS

Located in northwest India, in the federal state of jammu and Kashmir, the Ladakh region covers almost 100,000 sq. km lying between the Himalayan and the Karakorum ranges. The region was for a long time a restricted area because of the tension between Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. The Zanskar valley is one of the five regions that form Ladakh. Padum, the main village, is 3600m above sea level. It is the old capital city of the Kingdom of Zanskar and is now the administrative capital city of Zanskar. It is inhabited by Muslims and Buddhists. In the years 1970-1980, it was decided to build roads between Leh and Srinagar, and Padum and Kargil. During 1980-1990, when Kashmir was stricken by terrorist attacks, the Indian government promoted the road between Leh and Manali. This facilitated the Indian army to carry the men and materials to the border and made it possible for Ladakh to explore its tourism potential. Soon after, Leh became the headquarters for Indian military operations. An airport was created and a number of garrisons constructed. Civil satellite installations were forbidden in the Zanskar valley till 2002. In 1990s, following the unstable political situation in Nepal, most of the tourists, instead of heading towards that country, visited Ladakh. In order to take advantage of this, Leh and Kargil built many hotels and the government developed facilities like roads and electricity. The Zanskarpas (people of Zanskar) often discuss their highly valued relationship with the people of Padum. In fact, in their representation of the world, they put Padum at the centre of it. Even recently, a Buddhist father would rather give his daughter to a Muslim boy in the neighbourhood than see her leave the valley in order to be married to a Buddhist family outside the valley. The history of the Zanskar valley, especially of Padum, for the past half of a century shows two wellidentified phases: before the construction of the road between Padum and Kargil, and after this construction. The second phase clearly shows how sharing of space and lifestyle affects a group’s sense of belonging and how the relationships within and between the Buddhists and Muslims are organised. This communal cohesion between the two religious groups shows strong influences of ecology and history. Through the present study based on Padum, I will consider the different exogenous factors which have impacted the way an individual from Padum perceives him/herself first of all as a Zanskarpa and secondly as a Buddhist or a Muslim. The following discussion will focus on the way building a road has changed the way of belonging to a community, and the impact of the globalisation on the village of Padum in the Zanskar valley. Finally, I will highlight the strategies and mechanisms used by the two religious groups to maintain this peaceful relationship between them.

Being a Padum before the Leh-Kargil Road In the past, the Zanskar Valley (7000 sq. km) provided an open market during four summer months for anyone enterprising enough to undertake the risk and hardship of bringing in items like cooking oil, spices, cotton cloth and tea from outside and selling them to the villagers. The valley was isolated for eight months a year due to snowfall on the passes. ‘Naturally, in the peculiar conditions of Zanskar, such entrepreneurs mounted highly complex cash-cum-bearer operations. Typically these involved, in addition to household

necessities and precious stones, the Zanskari horses which were much in demand all over the western Himalaya; sometimes they extended to Delhi, Calcutta, Kalimpong and on the occasion, even to Lhasa’(Rizvi 1999: 143) . My research involved collection of stories from both the religious groups. Besides, I collected historical narratives from authors like Crook and Osmaston (1994: 435-75) and various relevant historical documents. I also looked into newspapers published by the Mongols. The Buddhists and Muslims of the valley lived together in apparent tranquillity. In fact, the Zanskarpas did not mention any killing or violence between the two religious groups. Only robberies related to food were reported during the winters. This explains the presence of a blacksmith who manufactured locks. Gutschow (1998: 25) writes: ‘The violent deaths that occurred during the Pakistani invasion were the first and the last incidents of homicide in the century. According to Zanskar’s oldest villagers, several of them were rumoured to have been born just around the turn of the century, there has not been a single homicide in Zangskar in their own as well as their parents’ lifetimes.’ During my field work in 2004-5, I did not notice any verbal or physical clashes. Testimonies collected from Padum attest that Buddhists and Muslims have the same version regarding the conditions and time of the Muslims’ arrival in Zanskar. Muslims are grateful to the king who allowed them to stay by offering them Buddhist wives. The alliance is renewed in each generation, which maintains a continuous social link between the two religious groups. Thus the fundamental elements of the relationship between the two religious groups are established. This inter-religious marriage may seem at first glance a little curious. According to the parental theory (Lévi-Strauss 1949), it is always the same group which is ‘donor of woman’ and always the same group which is ‘receiver of woman’. However, the history of Padum goes like this. The king of Padum brought two Muslims as a butcher and a scribe. In order to ensure that those men did not go back, he gave them each a woman (Testard 2007). Thus, he created a new community of Muslim husbands and Buddhist wives. This community recognises the king of Padum as protector and originator of them. Padum is administered by a lambardar (Clastres 1974), an authority like a mayor, who reports to the tehsildar, a magistrate, regarding the domestic affairs of the community. The lambardar is chosen by the Buddhists from amongst the Muslims, and he is assisted in his task by gobis, who are four in number. This council consists of two Buddhists chosen by Muslims and two Muslims chosen by Buddhists. The occasions when the two religious groups meet are well codified and highly formal. On such occasions they exchange food and even medical care. The recognition of each other as a religious group is a necessity for their survival. Indeed, even with the opening of the road and the intensification of exchanges, the appreciation of the need for mutual coexistence is clearly visible. This situation can perhaps be described as what Vincent Descombes calls ‘mental holism’: ‘The holism teaches that a whole, whatever it is, but particularly the whole of an organization, is not only one simple assembly of constituent parts, but that it has an integrality or a totality... because of the functional mutual relations and of the interdependences between these various parts’ (1996: 95). For centuries the population of Zanskari (a Tibeto-Burman language) speakers comprises both SunniMuslims and Mahayana-Buddhists. In the past, the Muslims mediated the political and economic relationships between the Tibetan-speaking Zanskar Kingdom and the Urduspeaking Mughal empire, ensuring both political independence of the former from the latter and a smooth supra-regional caravanbased trade (Deboos 2007). Even after the formal merger of the local kingdoms with the Indian state the traditional role the Muslims played and the ritualised exchanges did not cease to be relevant. As a result the Zanskar Valley still stands out as a case of peaceful co-existence between two religious groups. However, the Zanskar Valley communities are not immune to influences from the wider social, political and economic environments. In fact, the conditions that have facilitated the multi-religious co-existence are under increasing pressure for the end of such a scenario. The Scheduled Tribes policy of the Indian state favours the allocation of state-financed jobs to inhabitants who are able to produce documents showing that they are ‘autochthonous’, and are, of Buddhist origin. Such origins must also be demonstrated in order to be

able to acquire landed property rights or to establish a business in the local area. At the same time the state expects that the people speak the officially recognised Urdu language with which only Muslims are familiar. As a result, Buddhist and Islamic identities are separately valued for political and economic gains.

Construction of the Road and Coming of Tourism As stated earlier, the people of this valley were engaged for centuries in the trans-Himalayan silk-route trade even before the Leh-Kargil road was built.

Figure 10.1 Census of the Main Villages in Zanskar Valley in 20031 In 1980, a road suitable for motor vehicles was built to reach Kargil through the Penzi La Pass. This marked the beginning of the modernisation of Zanskar valley. In fact, a few years later, an administrative headquarters with a sub-divisional magistrate or tehsildar, court, sheep husbandry, schools, handicraft, block development office, treasurer’s office, grocery centre, farm, fuel electricity generator, etc. were established. In the 1990s, a telephone line between Padum and Kargil was installed. All this led to the beginning of a monetary economy, as salaries were paid to local civil servants in cash. At the end of 1990s, there was the Kargil war and the murder of monks in Rangdum Gumpa took place, which justified the necessity to have a military base in Zanskar. The Zanskarpas were actually so frightened that they asked the state government to establish a permanent Indian army camp in the valley. Few years later, the Indian army started to build permanent buildings in Padum. In 2004, a garrison of 40 soldiers was stationed there on a permanent basis. This created employment opportunities for the people of the valley. Even though they preferred to work for the Indian administration, those who were not qualified for such jobs were happy with the jobs offered by the army. The Zanskarpas support the military presence for a number of other reasons. For instance, the army ensure that fuel-tanks are filled in for the electric generator to function properly. They provide the people with various goods at subsidised rates, guarantee that a satellite line is ensured between Leh and Kargil in case of emergency (health or otherwise), and organise medical checks and distribute medicines free of cost. Therefore, they have not only instilled a sense of security in the minds of the local people, but have also provided helicopter services in case of emergency. At the same time, the army, by creating structures to promote women’s activities, have transformed the activities that men and women performed in the past. For instance, traditionally, men were tailors and women worked in the fields, but with the initiatives of the army weaving machines were procured for use by women. This has changed the division of labour within the

community. However, military2 officers stationed in Zanskar do not mingle with inhabitants even during festivals. In 2003 the Zanskar valley had 13,200 inhabitants and the village of Padum only 874 permanent inhabitants (519 Muslims and 355 Buddhists), which however went up to 1944 in the summer. This sudden rise in the population of the village in the summer was the result of two new realities: first, a new settlement of civil servants working in Zanskar (post office, police station, hospital, public schools, sheep husbandry, block development office, magistrate’s court, sub-divisional office, etc.), and second, many seasonal migrants came to Padum during summers to work as school teachers, shopkeepers, road construction and field workers from Bihar and Nepal, butchers and wood-traders from Kashmir, and tourist guides and porters from Nepal and Ladakh. In mid-1990s, the number of tourists in the valley increased also because of the Maoist violence in Nepal. In the month of July, travel agencies brought tourists in jeeps up to Lamayuru, and from there tourists continued their journey on horses.

Figure 10.2 Tourist flow in Zanskar 1990-20073 This flow of tourists lasts the whole summer, leading to changes in villages, especially along the trekking routes. For instance, several hostels and guest houses have opened. Another major change due to tourism is the opening of a branch of the Bank of India in Padum in 1990s. In the first few years, it opened only for a few months in a year, and only the bank manager and the accountant were there. Today, 10 people are working full time in the bank. So a cash economy is growing rapidly. Tourists pay the full amount in cash in advance to agencies in Leh for porters, guides, horses, food, and accommodation, etc. and yet the people in Padum earn quite a lot from the tourists. For the Western tourists, the Himalaya symbolises a ‘Buddhist land’. This perception has a strong bearing on the tourist industry in Padum. For instance, the festivals of the monasteries in Ladakh and Zanskar are taking place more and more frequently during the summer season. The tourists come in large numbers to witness the Buddhist dances and they are often housed in the guest houses opened by the monasteries themselves. That is why when tourists arrive in Padum, a large number of them consider the presence of a mosque there as an invasion on the cultural landscape of the valley. The Western imagination of a Buddhist

land seems to be partly responsible for growth of a Ladakhi identity. Besides, travel agencies from Leh prefer to accommodate their clients in Buddhist-run guesthouses. As a result the common identity of the Zanskarpas, especially Padumpas (inhabitants of Padum), without any religious distinction is under severe threat of extinction, as the Muslims have begun to give priority to Muslims and Buddhists to Buddhists in various matters. This division of the Padum community into two religious groups can be considered as an unfortunate change sweeping the people of the valley. While monetisation of the valley economy might have been an important cause of this, the rather swift demographic changes taking place in this previously sparsely populated valley are another important factor. As long as Buddhists were in majority in Zanskar, the administration did not interfere in the age-old relationship between the Buddhists and Muslims. But as the Muslims grew larger in number, due particularly to a massive migration of Muslim civil servants from the Kashmir region, and especially after the Muslims began to control the trade in timber, fruit and vegetables the Buddhists feel excluded from the decision-making process.

Conclusion For several decades the state of Jammu-Kashmir has witnessed political tensions between the Muslim majority and various arms of the Indian state resulting in violence (Jaffrelot 1998; Egreteau 2008). Reflecting aspirations for political independence the violence in the state is allegedly inspired by Islamic fundamentalism emanating from neighbouring Pakistan (Gaborieau 1995; Allés 2000; Racine 2002). Similar violence based on religious intolerance also haunts other nationstates in South and Southeast Asia—Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia (Horstmann and Wadley 2006). The Zanskar valley community is however targeted not only by the advocates of religious orthodoxy from the Islamic world but also from the Buddhist circles. While Sunni-Islamic orthodoxy is believed to spread from Saudi-Arabia to Kashmir and ultimately the valley an allegedly uncontaminated form of Mahayana Buddhism is increasingly preached by NGOs supported by the Tibetan government-in-exile and expatriate Tibetans in France and Switzerland. Thus both Buddhist and Muslim identities are increasingly informed by mutually exclusive ideologies entering the valley from outside. This is perhaps most vivid in the organisation of a Himalayan mountain trek for affluent foreigners, as this excludes Muslims from serving as guides and horsemen. Such exclusion is attributed to the perception of such tourists that only Buddhists act in accordance with the Oriental vision of a pure and peaceful ‘GreatTibetan’ culture, which is aggressively marketed by the international tourist agencies. In the Zanskar Valley religious separatism is still incipient, but they have already affected the districts of Kargil and Leh and the valley may unfortunately follow suit. In Kargil District, Muslims violently attacked Buddhists recently and the latter burnt copies of the Koran. In the town of Leh, Buddhists and Muslims now live in separate quarters, each maintaining their own economies separately. Yet I maintain that while threat to the continuity of the age-old relationship between the two religious communities in the valley is genuine the people still continue to transcend their religious identities and live as one multi-religious community. How long the people can fight the exogenous forces dividing them is however anybody’s guess.

References Allés, Elisabeth. 2000. Musulmans de Chine. Une anthropologie des Hui du Henan. Paris: EHESS. Clastres, Pierre. 1974. La société contre le pouvoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Crook, John, and Henry Osmaston. 1994. Himalayan Buddhists Villages: Environment, Resources, Society and Religious Life in Zanskar and Ladakh. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Deboos, Salomé. 2007. Être musulman au Zanskar. PhD. dissertation, EHESS Paris. Descombes, Vincent. 1996. Les Institutions du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Egreteau, Renaud. 2008. 'Les milices de Birmanie, entre insurrections et maintien de l’ordre’. In Milices armées d’Asie du Sud. Privatisation de la violence et implication des États, ed. C. Jaffrelot and L. Gayer, 122-49. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. Gaborieau, Marc. 1995. ‘The Kashmiri Muslims in Tibet’. The Tibet Journal 20 (3): 31-41. Gutschow, Kim Irmgard. 1998. ‘An Economy of Merit: Women and Buddhist Monasticism in Zangskar, Northwest India’. PhD. dissertation, Harvard University. Horstmann, A., and R Wadley. 2006. Centering the Margins: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Bordelands. New York/Oxford: Bergahn Books. Jaffrelot, C. 1998. La Démocratie en Inde. Religion, caste et politique. Paris: Fayard. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1949. Structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: PUF. Racine, Jean-luc. 2002. Cachemire, au péril de la guerre. Paris: CERI (collection “Autrement”). Rizvi, Janet. 1999. Trans-Himalayan Caravans: Merchant Princes and Peasant Traders in Ladakh. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Testard, Alain. 2007. Critique du don, étude sur la circulation non marchande. Paris: Syllepse.

About AJEI

Since its creation in 1998, the objective of the Association Jeunes Études Indiennes (AJEI) has been to set up a pool of information and network of students, young researchers and senior scholars involved in the field of Indian studies whilst actively promoting dialogue between French and Indian academics. The AJEI has undertaken several activities towards that. For instance, from 1998 it has been holding a Young Researchers’ Workshop in Social Sciences (Ateliers des Jeunes Chercheurs en Sciences Sociales) on a yearly basis, which has enabled students working in different parts of India to come together and exchange with senior researchers their fieldwork experiences and methodologies. Besides these workshops, which take place exclusively in India, the first seminar (Séminaire Jeunes Chercheurs) devoted solely to young French researchers took place in Paris in November 2001. Due to its success and the enthusiasm with which it was received by the scientific community, the seminar takes place now on a yearly basis in France. AJEI is also maintaining a website (www.ajei.org) which offers a range of practical information for students (administrative procedures, affiliations, funding, useful addresses, etc.) as well as a regular update regarding upcoming seminars, conferences and workshops held in France and India in the field of social sciences. All these activities are made possible with the support of several institutions in France and India. AJEI takes this opportunity to thank the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi (CSH), the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (FMSH), Paris, the Center for Indian and South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS), Paris, and the Gecko Laboratory (Centre de recherche de géographie comparée des Suds et des Nords), University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. This publication is to thank and renew AJEI’s gratitude towards all of them for their financial support and encouragement that are vital for the life of the Association.

Contributors

Sarah Benabou is a doctoral student in Socio-economy of Development at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. Samuel Berthet is the coordinator of the Europe-South Asia Maritime Heritage Project founded by the European Union (EU) in collaboration with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Joël Cabalion is a doctoral student in Sociology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi. Emilie Crémin is a doctoral student in Environmental Geography from the University of Paris—Vincennes and Centre for Himalayan Studies (Villejuif). She is also a member of the ANR project ‘Brahmaputra Studies'. Salomé Deboos is a post-doctoral research student at Münster University, Germany. Mohamed Ali Iqbal is the founder of Adivasi Harijan Kalyan Samity, an NGO that helps villagers cope with the administrative apparatus and value their rights, as well as promoting sustainable development. Loraine Kennedy is a Socio-economist, CNRS research fellow posted at the Center for Indian and South Asian Studies (EHESS-CNRS). David Kong Hug teaches in Saudi Arabia. Sanjeeva Kumar works in the Ministry of Defence, Government of India. Nicolas Lainé is a doctoral student in Social Anthropology at the School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. Frédéric Landy is Professor of Geography, University of Paris, and Head of Laboratory GECKO. Jacques Pouchepadass is a Senior Research Fellow (CNRS) in History at the Center for Indian and South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS). Raphaël Rousseleau is Professor in Social Anthropology and History at Lausanne University and associated member of the Center for Indian and South Asian Studies (CNRS-EHESS), Paris. Joëlle Smadja is a Senior Research Fellow at the CNRS and Head of the Centre for Himalayan Studies (CNRS) in Villejuif. Apart from her research in the Himalayas, she coordinates the geographical section of two ANR projects ‘Brahmaputra Studies: Language, Culture and Territory in North-east India’ and ‘Governance and Justice in Contemporary India’. Carine Sébi is a post-doctoral fellow in Economics at Laboratory “Grenoble Applied Economics” GAELCNRS. She is also an associated researcher at the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi. T. B. Subba is Professor and Head, Department of Anthropology, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, India.

Notes Foreword 1. Sacred groves are patches of forests traditionally protected by local communities as sanctuaries of local deities. 2. As Lynn T. White, Jr. has shown long ago in a classic article, 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis' (1967). 3. See for instance Jacoby (2001), which focuses on conservation's impact on local inhabitants at the origins of the USA's first parklands, and traces the effect of criminalising such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. 4. Significantly, the theme chosen for the Eighth World Forestry Congress, 1978, was 'Forests for People'. 5. As regards, for instance, American Indians, see Krech III (1999).

Introduction 1. Among many others see Descola and Palsson (1996), Ellen and Fukui (1996) and the more recent theoretical essay of Descola (2005). 2. Pioneering in the discipline of Environmental History in the country, their work is rapidly becoming popular and has served as a departure point for many other scholars (see Saikia 2005 on Assam, and Skaria 1999 on Gujarat).

Part 1: Introduction 1. In 2005, the world average was 3.4 per cent and 11.6 per cent if only land areas are taken into account (cf. Héritier and Laslaz 2008, Milian and Rodary 2008). 2. Nevertheless, these are very often only 'passive encroachers', as F. Landy qualifies them, in as much as they merely have the new borders forced on themselves. They now live in an area forbidden to them, but which previously made up their territory (cf. F. Landy, paper presented at the International Workshop ≪Espaces protégés, acceptation sociale et conflits environnementaux≫, 16–18 September 2009). 3. This is the case of Kaziranga, as was the case in South Africa with the 'shoot on sight' guidelines (Neuman 2004, cited in Rodary 2008). 4. Water and Forestry Administration. 5. cf. Saxena 1997; Wheeler and Hoces 1997; Kollmair and Müller-Böker 1999; Rossi 2000; Silori 2001; Cambell 2003; Kollmair et al. 2003; Ripert et al. 2003; Shrestha 2003; Soliva et al. 2003, etc. 6. Among others: Ostrom 1990; Shivakoti et al. 2005; Agrawal and Ostrom 2001, 2008; Brondizio, Ostrom and Young, 2009. 7. And by the building of dams, the effects of which are partly similar to those of protected areas: displacement of populations, no account taken of populations with no property title, loss of natural resources used by populations, over-exploitation of resources in their surrounding area, impoverishment and de-structuring of societies.

Chapter 1 1. From the Greek mega 'huge', and lithos: 'stone'. 2. I take the opportunity to thank Mr Freeman Kharlyngdoh, former Director of the Department of Art & Culture of the Government of Meghalaya, and above all Mr Gabriel Sumer, archaeologist, as well as Professor Ivan M. Simon, and the authorities of Assam and Meghalaya for their help and kindness at the time of my short researches in Meghalaya (2000 and 2003). A one month mission (2003) on the megalithic

monuments of Assam, Meghalaya was financed by the Lerici Archaeological Foundation (Polytechnic, Milano, Italy). A first survey, in 2000, was financed by the joint Project 'Genetic & Languages' LACITO—Musée de l'Homme, Paris, co-directed by François Jacquesson. 3. For a fuller treatment of this subject, see Rousseleau 2008a. 4. This interpretation, in the case of Nartiang, is now doubtful. 5. Near this bridge a megalithic coffer is still visible. 6. This stone is protected by a shed since 1955. Gurdon (1914) saw only a rice offering to the founders by the doloi (local official).

Chapter 2 1. According to Anil Agarwal (2000), 'Ecological poverty is defined as the lack of natural resources, both in quantity and quality that are needed to sustain a productive and sustainable biomass-based economy. An excellent indicator of "ecological poverty" is the amount of time a rural household spends on collecting basic survival needs like water, fuel and fodder from the local environment.' 2. According to Amartya Sen (1999: 87), capabilities are 'the substantive freedoms he or she enjoys to lead the kind of life he or she has reason to value.' 3. In 2000, the adjacent Valley of Flowers National Park (87.50 sq. km) has been included to the NDBR and the buffer zone has been expanded (5148.57 sq. km). Nevertheless, the case of the Valley of Flowers is not examined here. 4. The trade ended with the Indo-China war of 1962, which led to the closure of the borders. 5. The right of eminent domain is the right of the sovereign State, through its regular agencies, to reassert, either temporarily or permanently, its dominion over any portion of the soil of the State including private property without its owner's consent on account of public exigency and for the public good. 6. The Jawahar Rozgar Yojna (JRY) was a large poverty alleviation scheme developed by the Government of India. Launched in 1989, following the merger of the National Rural Employment Programme (NREP) and the Rural Landless Employment Guarantee Programme (RLEGP), it aimed to create supplementary employment opportunities for the rural poor during agricultural slack periods. This Yojna was replaced by the Jawahar Gram Samridhi Yojna in 1999, which was later merged with the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojna in 2001. 7. Between 1961 and 1981, despite the end of the trade with Tibet in 1962, the Bhotiya population of Chamoli district has grown regularly. However, between 1981 and 1991, it fell by 15 per cent, and between 1991 and 1996, it fell again by 13 per cent (Silori 2001). 8. The wool carding machine yields Rs 10 for one kilogram of wool, out of which Rs 2 goes to the manager, two go to pay the fuel, and the rest is for the WWA.

Chapter 3 1. As defined by the Indian constitution, the Mising group is classified as a 'Scheduled Tribe'. 2. The environmental constraints include social and natural processes. 3. Natural criteria ix (to be outstanding examples representing significant ongoing ecological and biological processes in the evolution and development of terrestrial, fresh water, coastal and marine ecosystems and communities of plants and animals) and x (to contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation) of the World Heritage List. 4. The 1950 earthquake (8.7 on the Richter scale) strongly modified the hydrology of the Brahmaputra floodplains. The Himalayan Mountain slopes have subsequently liberated sediments which were deposited in the plains, raising the level of the river bed. When combined with aquifer saturation as a consequence of high monsoon rainfall (about 2584 mm average a year) this situation causes regular floods and land erosion which entails severe damage to homesteads (Sarma 2005). 5. When comparing the 1958 land use plan of the Bokakhat Subdivision with satellite pictures of 2005 and 2007 (Google earth 2005, ONUSAT 2007). 6. The Ali Aye Ligang is celebrated in the month of Falgun (February) of the lunar calendar to celebrate the ancestors and to ensure good paddy cultivation. 7. The hali rice has been cultivated in the Brahmaputra floodplain since the rule of the Ahoms (thirteenth century).

8. Polyculture is an agricultural system using multiple crops in the same space, including arboriculture and avoiding large stands of single crops, or monoculture. 9. Agrobiodiversity or agricultural biodiversity, 'encompasses the variety and variability of animals, plants and micro-organisms which are necessary to sustain key functions of the agroecosystem, its structure and processes for, and in support of, food production and food security'; see Caillon 2005: 20. 10. The sixth addition is the largest with 376 sq. km of riverine stretches of the Brahmaputra River and was added in 1999. However, it is yet to be materialised fully due to litigation. 11. http://www.assamgov.org/ecosurvey/Population.htm (June 2008). 12. The migration of families from Bangladesh to Assam is an important issue since 1971. 13. The Mising Agom Kebang (Mising Language Society), the Takam Mising Porin Kebang (Ail Mising Student Union), the Mising Mimag Kebang (Mising Action Committee) and other groups. 14. Convention OIT 169, Convention on the biological diversity (CDB), Rio Declaration on the environment and the development of 1992 and Indigenous Peoples Rights Declaration adopted the 30 June, 2006 at Geneva and validated by the UNO in September 2007, support the indigenous people's claims and in India; the 'Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers Act' recognise the forest rights. 15. Sixty per cent of those 27 villages are inhabited by Misings. 16. See http://forestrightsact.com/.

Chapter 4 * The author is grateful to Dr M. C. Behera of Rajiv Gandhi University, Arunachal Pradesh for his comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the paper. 1. Tai-Khamtis are Shan and Tai speaking people who migrated from Upper Burma to Assam in the mid-eigtheenth century following the dismemberment of Shan Province by King Alampra in Upper Burma. They were first allowed to settle along the Tengapani river by the Ahoms (another Shan people who dominated the Brahmaputra plains since the thirteenth century). They rapidly took advantage of the instability that occurred in the Ahom regime during the Moamaria Rebellion for extending their territory to Sadiya at the end of the eighteenth century. Since then they began dominating upper Assam till the advent of the British, bearing the reputation of terrorising and practising slavery. After a series of disruptive rebellions against the British, the latter decided to divide and relocate them in four different parts of Assam in the nineteenth century to take control over them. Presently, around 12,000 Khamtis are living in the Lohit and Changlang districts of Arunachal (Government of India 2001). 2. At the time of the occupation of Assam by the British (1826), Tai-Khamtis were settled up to Sadiya. Rapidly this place became an outpost for the British and Khamtis rendered good service to them. The Khamti-British relations continued to be friendly until 1839 when the Tai-Khamtis organised themselves against the British government. They killed Colonel White, the political agent in charge at Sadiya and his men. The British government sent three expeditions, the first one being under Captain Hannay to the Khamti area and finally in 1843 the Tai-Khamtis surrendered to the British under agreement of good behaviour. Following this incident, their relations remained cordial save on a few occasions (Barpujari 1998). 3. The present-day Arunachal Pradesh formed part of the North-east Frontier Tracts of Assam during the colonial period. In 1954 the region became the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) and was directly administered by the Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. On 20 January, 1972, NEFA was renamed as Arunachal Pradesh, and in the same year it was declared a Union Territory. It was finally declared a State in 1987. 4. China claims today that the state of Arunachal is a part of China. 5. For instance, Chokhamon Gohain became the first Member of Parliament (MP) for the whole of the NEFA region from 1951 to 1960. His younger brother was elected to Parliament from 1971 to 1976 (Misra 1994). 6. Between 1977 and 1985, five saw mills, one plywood mill and one veneer industry were established in Chowkham (Behera 1994). 7. It has been shown that only 0.7 per cent of Arunachal Pradesh's total revenue comes from within the State whereas as much as 90 per cent comes from the Central Government (Roychowdhury 1992). 8. In the post-independence period of India, a series of five year plans have been prepared by Central government. This led to a rapid growth in the industry of timber for the said communities. 9. During the Fourth Five Year Plan (1969–1974), the transport and communication sector was accorded the highest priority with 53 per cent (Government of Arunachal Pradesh 2007).

10. In the country this situation was not an isolated one. At that time the Rabhas from the Duars valley of West Bengal (adjacent to Assam State) were facing same problem. Karlsson reveals that illegal felling, corruption and alliance between the contractor, forest department employees and high profile political leaders was prevalent there too. This situation led to what the author called a 'timber mafia' (Karlsson 2000). 11. Basically the Godavarman case is a result of a series of non-responsiveness of the various state governments to the issue of forest conservation. The prime focus of Godavarman was the effective implementation of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980. 12. Before the 12 December, 1996 case, under various legislations, 'forest' in India was either classified in different categories (like reserve forest, protected forest, etc.) or was simply defined as per vegetative specifications. 13. Down to Earth, 10(17), 2002. 14. On the basis of a report submitted by the High Power Committee, it was found that most of the timber acquired was illegal and from sources unaccounted for. 15. Back in 1980, 490 captive elephants were employed in the State. Two-eighty elephants were employed in timber extraction in the Lohit district (Behera 1994). 16. The application, abstention and fare for getting the Restricted Area Permit (RAP) have been reduced to $50 each. Foreign tourists can now visit in a group of two or more persons as against the earlier requirement of four or more persons. The stay permit for foreign visitors has also been extended to 30 days from the previous permit of 10 days. 17. On the national level India has been listed after 1996 as an importer of timber products (Polycarp 2003). 18. In 2006, the government of India launched the National Bamboo Mission for development of bamboo as a resource for economic development. Following this, the government of Arunachal Pradesh has launched a 'State Bamboo Mission' and made arrangement for the development of bamboo as a resource (Sinha 2008).

Part 2: Introduction 1. As the French administration puts it.

Chapter 5 * This article is based on the 35 years of continuing field work of M. A. Iqbal, who conducts local development and micro-finance projects in collaboration with local authorities and international organisations, as well as on the field work conducted from 2003 to 2006 in the region of Jagalpur and Dantewada by Samuel Berthet, as part of his post doctoral study under Centre de Science Humaine. The outcome is the result of a joint field study and a questionnaire elaborated by the two authors in 2005 and proposed to 120 women in the Dantewada and Jabalpur district in 2006. 1. The Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi published the First Citizens' Report on the State of India's Environment in 1982. The Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha was launched in 1982 from a trade union previously created in 1978. The Ekta Parishad was formally launched in 1990 from a group of Gandhian organisations. Nevertheless, it is important to underline that none of these movements had a significant presence in Bastar. The new approach of poverty formulated by Amartya Sen in the 1990s also added to this rethinking of the paradigm of development emanating from India. 2. Anita Hawser, 'Big Banks Eye Micro Market, Global Finance', June 2007, http://www.gfmag.com/index.php?idPage=498, Indian Express, 3 October 2006: After consumer credit, rural lending is the next big opportunity, interview with K. V. Kamath. 3. PSU banks are Big Competitors, interview with K. V. Kamath for rediff.com http://www.rediff.com/money/2005/may/10inter.htm, 10 May 2005. 4. http://www.empowerpoor.com/backgrounder.asp?report=80. This background is based on a presentation titled 'Local Self-Government and the PACS States' made by George Mathew, Director, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, at the national seminar on 'Advocacy for Realising Rights and Eradicating Poverty', organised by the PACS Programme in New Delhi on 30–31January, 2004. 5. Two-Child Norm and Panchayats, The Hunger Project, July 2005, http://www.thp.org/india/2005/july/index.html. Accessed 21 November 2011. 6. Arti Dhar, Aiyar opposes 2-child norm for Panchayat Polls, The Hindu, 20 January, 2006. 7. Thin, round-shaped crisps made of gram flour which is dried and then fried. 8. Long and thin mats made out of jute fibre, used in schools for pupils to sit on the ground.

9. Commission agents appointed by the co-operative to manage the phad (collection centre). 10. Women and Children Welfare department. 11. Two Child Norm and Panchayats, The Hunger Project, July 2005, http://www.thp.org/india/2005/july/index.html. Accessed on 21 November 2011. 12. As in the case of the Credit Project jointly funded by the World Food Program, Forest Department, the NGO Care through local NGOs (Adivasi Harijan Kalyan Samiti/Chhindgarh, Ramkrishna Sharda Seva Ashram/ Katekalyan, Prangaya Sevasamanvaya Sansthan/Kuakonda) in Dantewada district.

Chapter 6 1. Experiments are used to test the validity of economic theories. Using cash-motivated subjects, economic experiments create real-world incentives to help us better understand why markets and other exchange systems work the way they do. Experiments may be conducted in laboratory settings or in the field (natural environment). 2. Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (1848–1923) was an Italian industrialist, sociologist, economist, and philosopher. He made several important contributions to Economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices. 3. See Kim and Walker (1984), Isaac et al. (1985) for the earliest experiments on the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism game. See Ostrom, Gardner and Walker (1994) for details on both field and laboratory studies of the Common Pool Resources game. 4. A conventional laboratory experiment is one that employs a standard subject pool of students, an abstract framing, and an imposed set of rules (Harrison and List 2004). 5. A framed field experiment is one that employs a non-standard subject pool with a field context in either the community, task, or information set that the subjects can use (Harrison and List 2004). 6. The policies and objectives of JFM are detailed in the Indian Comprehensive National Forest Policy of 1988 and the JFM Guidelines of 1990. 7. The context of the 'public good' depended on the existing co-operative systems of the villages. 8. Except in one village, we recruited two groups of 10 people in each village. 9. This is referred to in the experimental literature as the Marginal Per Capita Return (MPCR). 10. The Wilcoxon test, which refers to either the Rank Sum test or the Signed Rank test, is a nonparametric test that compares two paired groups. The test essentially calculates the difference between each set of pairs and analyses these differences. The Wilcoxon Rank Sum test can be used to test the null hypothesis that two populations have the same continuous distribution. If Wilcoxon p>0.000, it means that there exists a significant difference between both populations.

Part 3: Introduction 1. For instance, on the politics of economic reforms, see Jenkins 1999 and Mooij (ed.) 2005. 2. This is the case, for instance, with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which aims to provide 100 days of employment to rural households who are willing to work for a minimum wage. Social audits are intended to allow beneficiaries to verify rolls and out-payments, and thereby check corruption. 3. Subsequent to strong opposition and criticism of the project's social cost, the World Bank withdrew funding from the Narmada project.

Chapter 8 * I would like to thank Isabelle Milbert, Véronique Dupont and Loraine Kennedy for their useful comments on an earlier draft. 1. In theory, lusters foster a concentration of industries in a wide area around a focal core of highly competitive industries. 2. Area of land set aside for industrial development usually located close to transport facilities.

3. Geographical region that has economic laws that are more liberal than a country's typical economic laws in order to increase foreign investment. 4. Interview with Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti (environment protection committee), February 2009. 5. An industrial disaster that took place at a Union Carbide subsidiary pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal, India. On 3 December, 1984, the plant released 42 tonnes of toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, exposing more than 500,000 people to toxic gases. The first official immediate death toll was 2,259. A more probable figure is that 8,000 died within two weeks, and it is estimated that an additional 8,000 have since died from gas-related diseases. 6. See http://pib.nic.in/release/release.asp?relid=47774&kwd= 7. Para-statals are semi-government organisations, companies or agencies owned or controlled wholly or partly by the government, which have their own governing boards. 8. Census of India, 2001. 9. Calculated at 1INR = 0.040 US. 10. Available at http://www.cpcb.nic.in, accessed on 6 December 2007. 11. Interview with P. S. Ramanathan, Director, Gharda Chemicals, 9 September, 2008. 12. Principle 17 of the Rio Declaration states: 'EIA, as a national instrument, shall be undertaken for the proposed activities that are likely to have a significant adverse impact on the environment and are subject to a decision of a competent National Authority.' 13. Ministry of Environment & Forest; http://envfor.nic.in/legis/eia/so-60(e).html, March 2009. Accessed on 9 October 2011. 14. See 'The People's Commission on Environment and Development India' at http://www.pcedindia.com/peoplescomm/advocacy_a.htm. Accessed on 3 April 2008. 15. See http://gujenvfor.gswan.gov.in/profileframe.htm. Accessed on 9 October 2011. 16. 1977—The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Cess Act; 1981—The Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act; 1989—The Hazardous Waste (Management and Handling) Rules. 17. An indicative list of the beneficiaries of the concessions proposed include shipping, dredging and port development, building and construction sector, area development projects, special economic zones, mining, petrochemical sector, modernisation of airports, expansion of all sorts of manufacturing industries, etc. 18. Available at http://www.clubs.psu.edu/up/aid/web/activities/talks/michael-readinglist/IPT.pdf. 19. Interview with Rohit Prajapati, head of Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, 26 January, 2008. 20. Available at http://www.ndtv.com/rti/RTI%20Act.in%20English.pdf. 21. See http://archive.greenpeace.org/toxics/html/content/india2info.html. 22. Committee for Environment Protection. 23. See http://www.livemint.com/2007/08/03235940/EC-warns-members-about-raw-mat.html. 24. See http://envfor.nic.in/cpcb/hpcreport/vol2pdf/vol-II%20part%20I.pdf. 25. Interview with MSH Sheikh, Director, Brackish Water Research Center, Surat, May 2008 8 & May 2009 26. District Collectors are officers of the Indian Administrative Service entrusted the task of handling law and order, revenue collection, taxation, the control of planning permission and the handling of natural and man-made emergencies. 27. See note 4 above. 28. See http://www.indiatogether.net/2009/feb/opi-friedman.htm. 29. See http://www.nirmalgujarat.org. 30. See http://www.bg-india.com/media/22feb05-pr.htm.

Chapter 9

1. The thoughts and analyses presented in this chapter correspond to a larger work in progress essentially deployed in my PhD thesis based on the displacement, dislocation and reorganisation of a village of the district of Nagpur in Maharashtra: Cabalion, Joël (forthcoming). 2. The National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy 2007 has been introduced in Indian parliament to be enacted as a bill valid throughout India. Its legitimacy however remains controversial for most social movements. 3. Such recognition officially exists for instance with the Vidarbha Statutory Development Board of the Government of Maharashtra. 4. Vijayjawandhia is a farmers' leader of the Shetkari Sanghathana originating from the village of Waifad in Wardha district. 5. Joël Cabalion, fieldwork, personal interview with Vijayjawandhia, Wardha, 5 November, 2008. 6. Joël Cabalion, fieldwork, personal interview with Rajendra Mulak, Umred, 10 November, 2008. 7. The regional sentiment has not declined but the political enterprise of Mahavidarbha seems to never have crystallised durably. In fact, the issue was never really supported officially by any major political parties although some of their leaders, such as Vilas Muttemwar, have always been readily present to support the cause but never to their own detriment. The political parties whose demand for a separate state was the reason of their existence, have today stopped their activities (namely the Vidarbha Rajya Party and the Vidarbha Rajya Nirman Party). 8. Nagpur as the city of the winter session of the state assembly is still a product of that era when a need was felt to compensate Vidarbha for its loss of political status. 9. According to the 2001 census, the proportion of Scheduled Tribes in the district is roughly 18 per cent. It therefore goes without saying that all the land in the command area is far from belonging only to tribals. 10. It appears that this figure will be at least reduced by a hundred due to the new demands on the dam that implied a revision of this initial optimistic estimate. 11. As Sanjeev Khagram shows, most funds allocated to developing countries by the World Bank, at its foundation, were usually to be used for large dam constructions. Politics of development in India often continue to illustrate a strong functional duplicity inherited from the times of the cold war where development projects would be used as parallel tools to eliminate the revolutionary ferments of countries just emerging out of war or freeing themselves from colonial rule (see Khagram 2004: 6). 12. There is another pending project started in Naghbid by the Maharashtra State Mining Corporation supposed to avail water from Gosikhurd. 13. See Ministry of Forests website www.moef.nic.in 14. The jabran jot movement started in the pre-independence period but crystallised particularly in the 1960s in the district of Chandrapur and extends today not only with the social movements of the area of Vidarbha but also in the rest of Maharashtra (notably through the platform of the jamin adhikar andolan or parishad, land rights' movement forum) where it inspired more recently the struggles for the appropriation of gairan (grazing) land for the benefit of Dalit people in the region of Marathwada, known for its strong casteism and practice of social exclusion (see Pimple and Sethi 2005: 247-49). 15. It is known that dispossessing the landed gentries cannot happen without their conscious participation, if not with their consent. Studies on agrarian reforms have shown the many strategies used for bypassing potential dispossession due to newly defined ceilings, may it be gift, partition, transfer (such as the famous benami practice, etc.) or simply time, as new shares are legally created when minor sons and daughters become legally major (whereas transfer is usually forbidden after notice of official land acquisition as per project's objectives of minimizing bypass). Irrigation projects such as Gosikhurd are full of such land evasion strategies, essentially through the practice of creating household partition and new landholding shares at the level of the talathi (village land record officer). 16. If not because as there is often a direct relation between a certain family system of resources one is endowed with and the plausibility to involve into a certain struggle. 17. Joël Cabalion, fieldwork, interview with the Palandure family, Ambhora Khurd, November 2008. 18. Joël Cabalion, fieldwork, interview with Bhaskar Bhongade, Ambhora Khurd, April 2007.

Chapter 10 1. Data for Figure 10.1 was collected from the Sub Divisional Magistrate Office of Padum and confirmed by the Development Office in Kargil (headquarters of the District). 2. With the army's presence prostitution is growing, as military men do not have access to local women. A new kind of seasonal immigration has too emerged with Indian women from Bihar and Jharkhand arriving in the months of June or July and returning in September or October. Thus new medical risks appear in the valley. During my field work, the hospital team confirmed the absence of Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the Zanskarpa population. One can only wonder how long this fact for the years 2004-5 will remain true, as the state of Jammu & Kashmir state has authorised permanent settlement of a detachment of the Indian army in Zanskar.

3. Data were collected from the Tourist Office of Padum, and confirmed by the police department from Kargil in charge of the supervision of the Zanskar valley, especially the census of touristic flows (Indians and other nationalities).