Comme Ci, Comme Ca (Anatomy of a decade)

In actual fact the decade of the 1950s did not set a very good platform for protecting the environment. It is, of course, true the environmental problems associated with industrialisation and rapid growth of several sectors had not appeared on the scene in that period, but political and other compulsions at the time led to large-scale deforestation for instance, the cost of which we are still paying. Besides, our dependence on the former Soviet Union for heavy industry resulted in some technologies that were largely energy intensive and polluting in nature.

If we take the case of the forestry sector, there was no doubt a huge political and social urgency for settling hundreds of thousands of refugees who have been displaced from West Punjab, and this was achieved by cutting down large-scale forests in the Terai region of parts which now fall in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

If one was to have looked at options at that stage perhaps these were limited, but it would have been possible to find other locations in the country where the cost in terms of deforestation would not have been too high. It is also true that in the initial stages of development, the consumption of wood in India was substantial not only for construction activities but also as a fuel. Institutional arrangements for protection of forests were particularly weak at that stage as a result of which a nexus between forest contractors and politicians developed very quickly, whereby large areas of forests were devastated with a few people making large sums of money.

The serious problem that we face today of low forest cover or low forest density are largely the result of over-exploitation, which took place during the period of the ‘50s and the ‘60s. This was also a period when fuelwood was the largest source of cooking. The country’s entire demand for cooking energy had to be met between coal and fuelwood and essentially the rural population did not face strong restrictions in cutting trees for meeting their own fuelwood demand. Trees around a village area, therefore, were not treated as a source of wealth to be preserved and protected.

The basic institutional flaw that brought this about actually goes back in time to over 200 years ago. Prior to the British colonial period in Indias’ forest resources were generally protected by local communities and were regarded as their property with clearly defined rights and responsibilities. The colonial government of the time decided to nationalise forests on the pretext that villagers and tribals could not be trusted to maintain forest resources on a sustainable basis. As a matter of fact, timber in India was a valuable resource for Britain for a large range of applications such as furniture making, building construction, ship building etc. Timber export from India to Britain was a large activity, which was facilitated by nationalisation of forests.

Indoor air pollution has traditionally been a serious problem, because of the use of coal and fuelwood with very poor designs of cookstoves. That this represented a health hazard on account of indoor air pollution was really not seen as a problem. Consequently, no efforts were made to either evolve cleaner fuels or better designed cookstoves and indoor air pollution continued unabated.

In the case of industry, as it happened small scale units that came up did not have the necessary technical know-how to ensure higher levels of energy efficiency than were practiced at the time. With scarcity of fuelwood as it developed and stronger restrictions on felling trees rural populations had no choice but to make do with poor quality of twigs and inferior biomass material for cooking. Unfortunately, indoor air pollution remains a massive killer in this country, but we have still not found cooking solutions involving the supply of clean fuels or the construction of proper cookstoves by which this problem could be contained.

Outdoor air pollution was not a problem in the 1950s, because automobile transportation and urban industrialisation had not led to the levels of emissions that were generated in subsequent decades. The heavy industrial complexes that were established around steel plants, and heavy engineering plants were generally afflicted with large-scale air pollution, but the air around most cities in the country was clean and relatively pure. This situation, of course, has gone rapidly downhill because of the growth of industry as well as motorisation and expansion of road transport. The motor car fleet in the 1950s was extremely small and roads had generally environment friendly transport including horse drawn carriages in the cities, bullock carts in rural areas and buses for inter-city travel. Bicycles were also used extensively both in urban as well as in rural areas and motor cars were the privilege of a very small section of society. Consequently, most roads were devoid of congestion and air pollution.

In general the environment and its degradation were not foreseen as an area of focus during the 1950s. In this respect, India was not alone, because even the developed countries paid no attention to this issue. It was only in the 1960s when Rachel Carson mounted her campaign and wrote her famous book Silent Spring that consciousness for protecting the environment increased rapidly. In the case of India what is particularly sad in retrospect is the progressive neglect of our forest resources. As a result there was also a decline in scientific expertise within the forest department, which to give due credit was something that had been developed and nurtured very successfully by India’s British rulers.

The Forest Research Institute in Dehradun for instance was clearly one of the premier institutions of its kind in the world. I am not sure whether such a statement could be made about that institution today. Equally sad was the over-exploitation of standing forests which were depleted and exploited quite recklessly in several parts of the country. The 1950s can, therefore, be identified as a period when the environmental degradation of this country began at a rapid rate, and in a manner that we have not been able to reverse throughout the decades subsequently.

In essence, therefore, India has to make up for lost time, largely because we did not visualise the environmental problems that we face today and we did not estimate the consequences of the damage that we permitted in the 1950s soon after Independence.