We must fight for a conservation law

A shepherd drinks water on the dry bed of Manjara Dam, which supplies water to Latur in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region. (Photo: AP )

It is proposed that 15,000 km of canals will connect our rivers. How terrifying! Many more billionaires will depart India with money illegally made on ill-finished canals and over-quoted tenders. Whilst the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India will opine on such travesty, nothing will be done, and unplugged leakages will ensure the system remains comfortably porous. Again. And again India will blunder on though, sadly, Latur will continue to beg for water whilst Telangana will rue the fact that it didn’t fight for more before separation. We need not go through any of the above painful processes if we follow a simple formula, one adopted world over by literally every country that values its resources, by giving ourselves a stand alone “conservation law”. If there is political will and the people and officials work together, all conservation issues can be resolved without reverting to such dramatic measures like trying to connect our rivers.

We in India are shamelessly corrupt, grossly underpaid and our forests are dangerously porous. It’s safe to assume that we can never protect our resources but we can most certainly conserve them.

India needs a single law that will bring all its resources under one roof and will share one common vision. A law that will force its politicians and bureaucrats to earn the respect of people, make them feel they belong and work in tandem with them and not against them. Look at the ludicrous situation we are in today. Instead of one comprehensive united law we have numerous contradicting ones. To name a few: Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980; Wildlife Protection Act (WLPA), 1972; Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; Indian Fisheries Act, 1897 and Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. The FRA is in divergence with the WLPA and that’s just the beginning of a confused and ineffective management system where the forest department is in dangerous conflict with the people of India. Old jungle saying, “Without the Laxman rekha Ravan would not have existed.” It’s pretty similar with the line drawn by the WLPA and the effect it had on people. The officials without creating a buffer, sat in air-conditioned rooms and drew lines on maps and told the local populace that anyone who crosses these will be deemed a criminal. The officials put a gun to the head of villagers who take their cattle out to graze in the forest, or bring back dead wood to burn fires at home, something that they have been doing since Adam met Eve. Reaction to such illogically manmade lines has brought out the worse in villagers. These lines till recently were invisible but now have taken the form of elephant trenches and electric fences buzzing and spitting through the night, standing as sentinels of a failed system. The local villagers detest these fences. Add to this the high-handedness of the officials and their exclusionary and dismissive attitude and conflicts between the two soon shot through the roof. Animals that once freely roamed village spaces were now deemed friends of the enemies and viewed as threats and killed either by poisoning or illegal electrification. Instead of understanding the conflicts and making amends, the officials who by now considered themselves to be gods and not public servants drifted far from the very assets that could conserve Indian resources, her people. Villagers were purposely excluded from resource management which led to the villagers detesting officials believing them to be corrupt exclusionists. On their part, many bureaucrats brainwashed by the draconian WLPA came to believe that most locals were poachers and smugglers. Sadly without a change in the existing laws and mindset of such officials, never the twain shall meet. It must be understood here that there is no man-animal conflict. That was just a term devised by some babu to take the focus away from the local man-official conflict — a conflict that was born from his personal failures.

Disillusioned and disconnected from the forests by the lines drawn by the WLPA, without realising the harm they would unleash, and certainly uncaring of any such damage or loss of property, in confused consternation, the villagers, no longer integral cogs of conservation, wanting to get even, resorted to heinous and illegal acts. Forest fires are lit, elephants electrocuted, wild bears and deer snared and tigers poisoned. The fire lit, they disappear making the district forest officers (DFOs) life living hell. If he reports the fire as manmade, he will, in all probability, get suspended. And so he fudges the true reason thereby obscuring the data, the same data that ministry of environment and forests later relies on to fashion India’s wildlife policies. It’s the same with tigers and elephants. Most tigers in India are killed by humans and if the DFO reports that they have been poached, he gets pulled up for dereliction of duty and spends the next few years trying to close the inquiry that is initiated against him and used against him by his detractors to get him transferred. It’s much easier to record the death as natural, data be damned.

Our forest laws are so exclusionary that 80 per cent of our forests are hidden from us. They call it “core zone”. Wildlife thrives in the balance 20 per cent where people are permitted. The animals hunt, procreate and live a merry life, oblivious of noisy humans gawking at them. The fact is that nowhere in Africa are such large tracts of forest kept away from the local people and even in India these core zones would be reduced to around five per cent, if that. NGOs that perform scientific research within these core zones are given permission by the chief wildlife warden. Their goal gets compromised even before they start, for if they reported the truth, their licence would get revoked. Thus whilst one would not see a tiger in the core zone for years, the data would more often than not show a healthy density.

Every Indian must fight to give India a conservation law; a single law, with a common vision that forces the officials to respect us and to be in constant dialogue with the people of India. We need a law that makes the system transparent and the officials answerable. Local people must be included in the administration of our resources. We must drop the barriers and do away with the “core zone” philosophy of keeping people out. Keeping it away from public eyes does more harm than good. We must arm ourselves with a law that stipulates that the people are assets when it comes to management of our resources and not enemies to be driven back from the line. There is no point in coming up with a standalone water conservation law for it’s bound to contradict other laws in place and fail. It’s time that we had one, all encompassing, conservation law that takes care of all our resources under one roof — including air, water, forests, beaches, river systems, mountains, wildlife and the people of India.

Whilst protection pushes people away, conservation embraces them. The truth is that if we don’t start conserving, soon there will be nothing left to protect. A conservation law is the only tool that can help overcome all prevalent conflicts. Without such a law, we are allowing the politicians and their officials to ruin our India, forever.