Supplement to Wastelands News Vol. IV No 4
DEFORESTATION: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS
madhav gadgil
Centre for Ecological Sciences
and Theoretical Studies
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore 560012
FOUNDATION DAY LECTURE
MAY 12 1989
SOCIETY FOR PROMOTION OF WASTELANDS DEVELOPMENT
NEW DELHI
CONTENTS
Page No
EDICT OF KING SHIVAJI 1, INTRODUCTION
1.1 Of Mangoes and Mahua
1.2 Two Nations
1 3 Of Need and Greed
1 4 Phase Transformation
2 SYSTEMS OF RESOURCE USE
2,1 The Tribal System
22 The Agrarian System
23 Resource Use Diversification
24 Resource Flows in pre - British India
2 5 British Conquest
2.6 Drain of Resources
3 THE COLONIAL PERIOD
3,1 Rampant Profiteering
32 Abolition of Community Control
3.3 Material Flows of British India
3.4 Growing Pressure on Land
3.5 Beginning of Railways
3.6 "Scientific" Forestry
3 7 Banning Shifting Cultivation
38 State Ownership of Land
3 9 Meeting Biomass Needs of Villages 310 Of Rights and Privileges 3.11 Tragedy of the Commons
VI
1
2 2 2
3 4 5 5 5 7
9 9 9
10 10 11 11 12 13 13 13
312 Violating the Sacred Groves 14
3.13 Mining the Timber 14
314 War Demands 14
315 Devaluing Biomass 14
4 AFTER INDEPENDENCE
4.1 Subsidies at Whose Cost? 15
42 What Constitutes Demand 15
43 Vanishing Bamboo Stocks 15
4.4 Sequential Exhaustion 16
45 Dwindling Fuehvood Supplies 18
46 Liquidating Rural Tree Growth 19
47 Encroaching on Forest Land 19
5. THE CURRENT SCENARIO
51 A Land of Weeds 27
5.2 The Eucalyptus Story 27
53 The Manifold Functions 30
54 Subsistence Needs and Commercial Demands 30
55 Underreporting Commercial Harvests 31
5.6 Qualitative Differences 31
57 Influence of Accessibility 31
5.8 The Chipko Movement 33
5.9 T hi ee Perspectives on Forest Use 33
6. THE CHOICE BEFORE US
6.1 Point of Departure : Population Control 34
6 2 Organizing the Disorganized 34
6.3 Employment Generation 34
6.4 Minor Forest Produce 35
65 Nature Conservation 35
iv
66 Biomass Needs of Village Populations 35
67 A National Network of Community Lands 35
68 Tree Farming 38
69 No Biomass Imports 38
6 10 Employment Guarantee Scheme 38
6.11 No Subsidies to the Rich 38
6.12 Earth as a Human Habitat 38
REFERENCES 39
Table 1 : Service offered, value to rural and urban -
industrial sector and fate of the forest cover of
India in relation to that service 43
Table 2 : Alternative policy prescriptions for use of
different categories of land ownership by the three
major schools of thought in India, 43
Table 3 : Alternative policy prescriptions for fulfilling
different service functions of tree produce by three
major schools of thought in India 44
Edict of King Shivaji circa 1670 AD.
There are trees like leak in our kingdom Such of these as are needed may be cut with the permission of His Highness. What is needed over and above this should be purchased from outside The mango and jack trees in our own kingdom arc of value to the Nflin/. But these must never be touched. This is because these trees cannot be grown in a year or two Our people have nurtured them like their own children over long periods If they are cut, their sorrow would know no bounds An end achieved by harming one person can serve only in the short run Rather it would bring ill repute to the ruler who Iiurts the citizenry Furthermore there is grave danger in the toss of this tree cover,
After Rime (1987)
VI
INTRODUCTION
1 am deeply sensible of the honour conferred on me by the Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development in inviting mo to deliver the first foundation day lecture T o me, voluntary effort in ecorestoration is amongst the most w orthwhile of endeavours for citizens of India. The SPWD has been in forefront of such effort within this decade; to be associated with it in today's function is therefore an opportunity I greatly value I hope to take advantage of it to present before you my own understanding of the patterns of deforestation in present day India I have arrived at this synthesis as a result of last sixteen years of field research, of work with Forest Departments and paper industry, of involvement with grass-roots level ecodevelopment organizations, and of investigations on committees that addressed themselves to issues as controversial as the Silent Valley hydel project and the Bastar Pine Plantation project I am grateful to a number of people who have advanced my understanding, though some of them would undoubtedly dispute at least part or perhaps all of the conclusions presented below Nevertheless, I would be failing in my duty if I do not record my debt of gratitude to the most important of them; these are : Anil Agarwal, Sundarlal Bahuguna, Chandiprasad Bhatt, M K Dalvi, Zafar Futehally, K.M Hegde, Nalini Jayal, K.C Malhotra, CT.S. Nair, S Narendra Prasad, N H, Ravindranath, A K.N. Reddy, Cecil J. Saldanha, S. Shyamsunder, M.D Subhash Chandran and MS. Swaminathan I would also like to thank N H. Ravindranath, M D Subhash Chandran, Yesh-want Kanade and Silanjan Bhattacharya for permission to quote their unpublished data and Janardanan Pillai and Vijayagcetha Gadagkar for manifold assistance in preparation of this material.
1.1 Of Mangoes and Mahua
Exactly nine years ago, on just such a warm day in May, Kailash Malhotra, an anthropologist, and I trekked from the hill station of Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh to a Korku village eight kilometres away There was good tree growth ali along the way, and the walk was most enjoyable but for the disturbing sight of many ring - barked and dying trees just as we got out of the town The number of such trees however quickly fell off and our joy was complete on running into;a Korku lady who sold us a basketful of sweet wild mangoes with little pulp and large stones We went on broadcasting the seeds into the forest, as nature had meant us to, and were surprised to realize that while the tree growth was extensive, it was dominated by just two species: mango and mahua. Over centuries the Korku tribals practicing slash - and - burn cultivation had undoubtedly spared them and as the forest came back they had gained the pride of place
Mango and mahua are just two of the many trees that have signified much more than utility to the people of India over the ages, Gathasaptashati, an anthology of romantic folk verses of the first millennium A D from Centra! India, has many references to both these species (Joglekar, 1956). Thus, one verse implores a youngbride not to despair because her husband was about to embark on a long journey; after all when he saw the pot full of young leaves and inflorescence of mango, kept just outside the house to bid him good-bye, he was bound to realize it was spring and return to her! Every summer, all of India looks forward to feasting on mangoes, wild and cultivated, raw and ripe. Not that its timber is no good; on the contrary it is prized for building boats But the seventeenth century Maratha king Shivaji made it a special point to order his officers never to cut mango (Mangifera indica) and jackfruit (Artocarpus heteraphyilus) trees for his shipyards or any other work of the state, for, as he put it, these trees have been treasured and nurtured by the peasants for generations (Ranc, 1987). Our modern Governments have had no such qualms while conceding magnificent old mango trees to the plywood industry Indeed, the highly subsidized forest based industry has often paid for a mango tree less than what its fruit used to fetch for the local people year after year (Gadgil and Subhash Chandran, 1989) But then, as a manager of a plywood factory explained to me, all they were concerned with was multiplying money for their masters, and if mangoes had to be sacrificed to this end, so much the worse for the mangoes !
This total, all pervasive change in the way resources are viewed is also seen in the case of mahua (Madhuca indica) Mahua is vital to tribal economy; as a major source of food energy in the form of sugar and alcohol and for its oil seed It is also valued in the Ayuivedic matcria medico, for treatment of ailments relating to gas and phlegm (Gogate, 1982). Most of our tribal groups venerated mahua, and traditionally used only its usufruct in a regulated fashion It was, therefore, a great blow to them when the British banned their shifting cultivation; but at the same time permitted contractors to cut down sacred mahua trees (Pressler, 1971) There is also the anecdote of one of our senior politicians who after independence ordered all
mahua trees of Bombay presidency to be destroyed to halt tribals brewing liquor from it Apparently he was later persuaded that dali trees need not be cut. Of course he never realized that dali v, as the name for mahua's oil-bearing seeds!
1.2 Two Nations
The major thesis I want to advance today is that the root cause of the on - going disaster of deforestation lies in the radical transformation of the social system of resource use that took place under the British regime, and has become all the more firmfy entrenched after independence. The hallmark of Ib't system is the use of state power to systematically undervalue biomass, and even more so biological diversity and organize its supply to those in power at highly subsidized values The elite also pay unfairly low prices for other natural resources, like grain, water and power Those benefitting from such subsidies, for instance, forest-based industries, or citizens of Bangalore or Delhi; our political masters making policy decisions as to who will be subsidized at whose cost; and the bureaucracy that administers the subsidies have formed an alliance—the iron triangle as the Americans call it - which ensures that this system of resource use is perpetuated (Repetto, 1986; 1988) In this system, those receiving the greatly undervalued biomass from all over the country, indeed all over the world have no motivation to ensure its sustainable use The rural poor, at whose cost this whole system is being operated, form the bulk of our population Depending as they do on the gathering of biomass for fulfilling many of their basic needs, they could be motivated to safeguard and sustainably use the resource capital. They are however thoroughly disorganized and totally raught up in the day-to-day exigencies of survival. Hence, these major victims of deforestation have witiy-nilly become its major agents as well
13 Of Need and Greed
Evidently, the rural poor play a significant role in the process of deforestation today. But does this imply that it is only the quantitative pressure of their demands for fuelwood and fodder, smaii timber and thatch that has brought about the transformation of India from the biomass-rich country of the pre - British times to the plight of today? I would contend that it is not so. For one, their demands are of a qualitatively different nature from those of the affluent sector Our land is productive enough !o meet these subsistence demands, if only it were managed prudently. It is the commercial demands growing without limit that are so much more difficult to fulfil More significantl)., the undervaluing of biomass to ensure its subsidized supply to the commercial sector has been achieved by abolishing the traditional rights of the rural society Under these circumstances, the rural population cannot and will not co-operate in prudent management of our forest resources It is my belief that it is this whole complex of interacting forces, the current social system of resource use, that has triggered the decimation of our natural biomass base; and not merely the quantitative pressure of subsistence demands of rural poor (Repetto and Holmes, 1983)
1.4 Phase Transformation
Here a physical analogy may be apt When water vapour is cooled it condenses into liquid water The properties of vapour, its compressibility, for instance, are quite different from those of liquid water That is why we call this a phase transformation. A large quantitative difference in temperature, say from 201° C to 101° C may still allow water to remain in the gaseous phase and make only a minor difference to its properties But a much smaller difference in temperature, say from 101° C to 99° C may lead to a phase transformation and drastic changes in properties. Interestingly enough, the condensation of water at around 100° C is dependent on nuclei such as dust par tides, without which there can be no clouds The seemingly minor quantitative contribution of the commercial sector is like this small temperature change in presence of dust. It is that which has lead to the formation of black clouds looming over the horizon It is that which has totally transformed the social system of resource use and set it rolling towards its present course
I shall devote much of the remaining talk to documenting the course of this phase transformation If my analysis be valid, it follows that the situation can be changed for the better only through another equally radical phase transformation I would argue that the major components of such a transformation would have to be twofold; firstly, halt to all subsidies, open or concealed, to any segment of the society, except as social welfare measures to those who are genuinely below the poverty line; and secondly, empowering the rural poor to take good care of the biomass resources of their local em, ironment and enabling them to deploy their labours productively towards the task of ecorestoration This is not a prescription to go back to an agrarian society On the contrary, it is a prescription for transformation towards a resource-efficient and an egalitarian society as all modern societies must be. It would also be accompanied by a cultural transformation which would recapture what was good in our traditions, a feeling for nature as a habitat for humanity, not just a warehouse of commodities I would finally like to argue that it is only such a transformation imparting some meaning to the life of our rural people that could motivate them to invest much more in each offspring and control our unbridled population growth.