Big money wins all battles
By Manohar Malgonkar

GREEN is in the air. More and more Indians are beginning to be concerned about the prospect that within another 50 years, there will not be a single tiger in India in the wild state, not a sambhar or cheetul or bison, leopard, elephant for the simple reason that there will not be any jungle left... that the only trees will be in disciplined plantations, grown by the industrialists to make sure of plentiful supplies of raw material for their factories.

And not a river or pool unpolluted by chemicals.

So people are taking heed. Hey! What’s going on here? In our young days, we used to make jokes about upcountry people who had never seen the sea or travelled in a train. My son’s school-party who had been taken on a riverside picnic were asked to take bottle of water to drink. And they were forbidden even to bathe in it! My parents worshipped that river. I myself learned swimming in it.

They get worked up; then a dozen or so of them get together and form an association. They make impassioned speeches, get letterheads printed, send out circulars, write to the papers.

And what a heartening sign this is? Almost every sizeable town has formed its own "Save the environment" organisation, and some, indeed, have two or more. Offhand I can name half-a-dozen because I seem to be on their circulation lists. The Karnataka Heritage Society, Bangalore; Nature Lovers’ Club, Belgaum; Kalpavriksha, Pune; The National Committee for the Protection of Nature Resources, Dharwad; Samaj Parivartana Samudaya, also of Dharwad; and only yesterday I got a letter asking me to join it: Indian National Green Party.

The Mother of all Green Parties, of course is WWF, a truly international body supported by British Royals and, in India, by our ex-Princes. Alas, like all mothers it tends to look upon wrongdoers with benign tolerance, and also, like all bloated bureaucracies, it sees itself to massive TV and newspaper propaganda but taking care not to soil its hands with street-level issues.

The top champions of the Greens, their commandos are people like Bitu Sehgal who runs a one-man crusade on behalf of the widerness and its denizens, and the prophet and high priest of the Greens, the ma-baap of all animals, wild or domesticated, is Maneka Gandhi. If animals and birds had voting rights, Maneka Gandhi would be their reigning queen-for-life.

Normally, with all these civilised, socially conscious people serving environmental interests there should be no danger to ecologically sensitive areas such as rain forests and wildlife sanctuaries from being invaded by industry. But this is not so. Barren materialism seems unstoppable. It always, always wins.

How and why is baffling. Because even the political leaders who wield the power to block depredations of industry into hitherto protected areas the decision-makers themselves seem to be committed environmentalists.

I offer the example of an actual case.

R.K. Narayan, in his book onKarnataka, has called the North Kannada district, The Emerald Belt. Since he wrote that book, in the early 70s its rich jungle and animal life has been greatly diminished. The wildlife sanctuary of Dandeli has been hacked down to half its original size, and the rain forest severely mauled by ruthless exploitation for timber and manganese ore. Unbelieavable as it might seem, the township of Dandeli itself, which is supposedly the central point of the wildlife sanctuary, is an industrial slum with pollution levels higher than those of Delhi and Mumbai. The Kali river which, supported one of the richest stretches of jungle and wildlife in our country has been made an outlet for the chemical wastes of three factories.

Still, what remains of the forest and the wild life is touted by the Karnataka Government as a tourists’ lure. As late as last year, 1998, our Tourism Minister, Leeladevi R.Prasad, announced that a new tourists’ hotel was to be built in Dandeli.

And now what remains of R.K. Narayan’s Emerald Belt is to be opened up for heavy industry of the most corrosive type. In 1996, I became aware that a private company had been given "clearance" to set up a factory right at the edge of the rain forest, and within 10 km of the wildlife sanctuary as well as of the Supa Lake which is the mainstay of wildlife. The project, estimated to cost Rs 4000 crore, will import coal, burn it at intense levels of heat (ranging up to 1400 celcius), generate electricity, manufacture industrial gas as well as coke for steel factories.

In the process, it will pollute all the river system, kill off the forest and they might as well right off Dandeli as some kind of a sanctuary for wild animals. So I tried to find out how so destructive a project would have been given clearance, and whether there was no way of stopping it at an early stage.

I discovered to my astonishment that virtually every minister who may have had something to do with the decision-making process professed to be a natural-lover, determined to save "our precious forest wealth, our wild animals."

Here is a sampling of their attitudes and assertions.

Ladies first. So we have Karnataka’s Tourism Minister, Leeladevi R.Prasad, going ahead with her plans to lure tourists to Dandeli to live in a jungle lodge and watch wild life. Whether, by the time the lodge comes up, there will be either any wild animals or jungles around remains to be seen.

Then comes the state’s Governor, Khurshed Alam Khan. The Deccan Herald of June 27th, 1997, has a photograph of the Governor presiding over a conference on re-afforestation called by the forest minister. The three-column headline says: Governor Deplores Depletion of Forest Wealth.

The Forest Minister, Gurupadappa Nagaramapalli shares the platform with the Governor. He explains how one re-afforestation programme supported by foreign money "has not been very successful," which is double-speak to say that it was a resounding failure. But he is confident that the re-afforestation plan now to be launched with "foreign assistance worth Rs 565 crore, "will succeed."

Re-afforestation with "foreign assistance" is all very well, but what about the mayhem committed on inherited forests?

The district’s elected MP, Anantkumar Hegde, is equally committed to saving his constituency’s ecology. At the beginning of this year, he told Lt-Gen S.C. Sardehpande who runs Belgaum’s Nature Lovers’ Club, that he and his fellow MPs of the Western Ghats were determined not to allow "industries that posed threats to the environment", anywhere in the Western Ghats.

And lastly the godfather of environment, the Minister for Environment himself, Suresh Prabhu. On a visit to the Karwar district, he exhorted his listeners on the vital need to save our forests and their wild animals. Sharing the platform with Prabhu was the district’s own high-profile political leader, R.V. Deshpande who, ostensibly, shared the former’s sentiments. Deshpande, it should noted, had served a longish term as Karnataka’s Minister for heavy Industries and may even have been involved in the decision-making process which gave "clearance" to the proposed plant.

So with these stalwarts who decide the locations of heavy industrial units themselves so committed to the environment, there should be absolutely no danger of the coke oven plant coming up. The jungle and the wild animals are safe for the forseeable future.

The latest is that the plant’s builders are, surveying the alignment of a pipeline to draw water from the Kali river, 15 km away.

Big money always, always, wins all battles!