Conservation Outside Protected Areas

A notable feature of the debate on conserving India’s wild biodiversity is the focus on national parks and wildlife sanctuaries (commonly referred to as protected areas – PAs). Virtually all participants – whatever their ideological positions and opinions on policy matters - discuss issues in the context of PAs.

Even among PAs it is a few that dominate. Virtually all studies and references come from a list comprising Gir, Bharatpur, Sariska, Ranthambore, Rajaji, Great Himalayan National Park, Kanha, Nagarhole-Bandipur, and a few others. PAs attract researchers due to their glamour value but also due to the availability of information, baseline data and superior logistics.

This concentration is reflected in the published work (among books see, for example, 1, 2, and 3). Virtually all analysis, criticisms and prescriptions come from a few sites.

Why are PAs so important? To one set of wildlife protagonists they (potentially) provide inviolate spaces where human beings or their activities can be excluded. To another set there is no contradiction between conservation imperatives and human activities and in fact, many argue, that human activities may promote biodiversity. This is not the occasion to visit the debate but ask a different question. Is the exclusive focus on PAs healthy? Desirable? Are we missing something?

Collectively the PAs make up a little less than 5% (16 million hectares) of India’s geographical area. The total forest area in the country is about 77 million hectares or 24% of the total land area. So approximately 19% or a massive 60 million hectares are other forests (OFs) which are not PAs. This is reason enough to look at more than just protected areas.

There may be another reason too. As Vasant Saberwal states in a slightly different but related context

“Human disturbances may increase floral and faunal diversity in a number of ways.” (pg. 55).

Fire, grazing, logging and extraction of NTFPs are examples of such human disturbances. Now it is a reasonable assumption that most of the OFs have “considerably greater” human activities than PAs. To the extent disturbance (albeit, up to a certain degree) promotes diversity, OFs are huge reservoirs of floral and small-faunal diversity. Thus OFs are extremely important conservation areas not only for their sheer aggregate area but also for the fact that they may harbour significant biodiversity which may match or exceed those in PAs.

But do we need to study the OFs or can we carry our insights from PAs to them. The OFs’ very different legal status and consequent ecological and social history probably implies very different patterns of resource availability and extraction.

Hence biodiversity studies in OFs and their inclusion in debates about conservation ought to be of utmost importance.

Leading researchers had in an essay, rightly argued, among other things, for greater encouragement, opportunities and access for doing research in wildlife areas. But they limit their case to PAs. It may well be time to look beyond parks and sanctuaries.

Floods in India: 2007

Re. an earlier post discussing floods here are some pictures and some more.

Earlier Post as a Letter

An earlier post on Sariska now appears as a slightly edited letter in the EPW.

Essays, essays, everywhere, not one to read

Waterscapes
The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource
Edited by Amita Baviskar

The book comes in the midst of the flood season in India. The floods have, as usual, taken their toll of human and animal life and property. So I quickly flipped the pages to see what this book may have to say on the important subject and found a solitary article.

Rohan D’Souza’s piece is about flood control in deltaic Orissa alongside comparisons with similar schemes in the USA and China. The author points out the conflicting views on controlling floods by constructing embankments and dams and how the views swung from seeing flood waters as a calamity to seeing it as a nutrient-rich resource. The history is not quite up-do date as it stops with the 1950s. What lessons does it have for contemporary matters relating to flood control?

Precious little, one would think. Whatever may have the situation earlier matters have changed since the 1850s, from when the author traces the history. Two major changes can be pointed out. One, that nutrients to enrich soils are now increasingly supplied by artificial means and with greater effectiveness and control.

The second and the major change, however, is in the impact of floods. Urban areas and populations (both absolute and in relation to rural areas) have increased dramatically. Now urban areas don’t derive any benefits from floods but bear huge costs. Even in rural areas population densities have increased. What earlier may have been a relatively simple expedient of moving away when waters flooded homes is these days nothing short of a nightmare (even if it were simple to shift in the past it must have been a terrible experience though the author doesn’t discuss this aspect).

In contemporary India we are quite familiar with what happens when floods strike and images of people marooned and forced to spend days and nights on tree-tops under rain with scarcely any food or amenities are grim reminders of the heavy costs that people face. Even the army needs to be called in at many places to rescue people. Unfortunately, waters don’t confine themselves to farm land but enter houses and offices destroying life and damaging possessions. Not only is life at risk but even in rural areas large scale inundation is extremely disruptive of economic, social and educational activities. These days there is more infrastructure (roads, banks, schools), more material possessions (household durable goods, for example) and more equipment (tractors, pumps, engines) whose submergence is hardly an inconsequential matter.

In other words India can’t afford to have large tracts of land inundated with water every year. The author quotes a source that 12-20% of the land area of the country may be flood-prone. If true, it would imply a population at risk in such areas of 100-200 million.

So the notion of floods as a resource is now merely an academic curiosity. This, however, doesn’t and shouldn’t be construed as a plea or a case for building dams or embankments. There are other important aspects to inundation and hydrology that the author doesn’t discuss - the most prominent omission is drainage – and which are critical to understanding, regulating and preventing floods and the terrible consequences they bring.

Most of the papers in the book are not about surfeit but scarcity of water. On groundwater there are two articles – both about Gujarat and oddly enough David Hardiman’s paper relies a lot on the work of the other contributor - Navroz Dubash. Not only does it make the essays repetitive but one also misses perspectives from other states. For example, even communist-ruled West Bengal has fairly extensive groundwater markets.

Both Hardiman and Dubash are critical of and reject work claiming competitive water markets. They don’t, however, demonstrate that prices deviate from competitive outcomes but merely assert that this is so. This is clearly not sufficient.

On the other hand they do claim roles for institutional factors and historical development in water markets. Dubash makes the case that kinship and caste-based understandings play an important role in determining outcomes. Hardiman also claims that in one village (of the 2 studied by Dubash) a price cartel has been at work.

In that particular village the dominant community makes up 64% of the households and owns 97% of the land and 100% of the wells. Hence the thesis that kinship and caste play an important role is a trivial conclusion and not particularly insightful. After all given the ownership pattern is it a surprise that all decisions and outcomes will be internalised within the particular community? And if as Hardiman says they have formed a price cartel it is not clear who the cartel is exploiting or targeting. After all, the cartel is itself the market!!!!

The second village is more diverse and market forces play a greater role and caste and kinship forces seem to be weaker. The thesis thus propounded by these two authors suffers from lack of evidence and seems quite tenuous.

Overall, in the book, several important areas such as pollution, urban water scarcities, waterlogging and salinity of irrigated land are missing and while no book can be expected to be comprehensive this one has a lot of articles of questionable relevance if not questionable scholarship.

Take the editor’s own article. It reads like a diary – a travel diary – of her journey through Jhabua evaluating its watershed programme. With little else apart from her own impressions and of those she met how seriously can one consider it? And one searches in vain for something on water, and then finally the last paragraph of the paper begins “Finally, water………..”

Other essays, for example in the section entitled “Imagining Communities” are not that neglectful of water. However, and in spite of what the editor says in the introduction there is no ecological specificity about these essays. They are not water-distinctive at all, they could have been about any resource, indeed about anything. For example substitute school for the tank in Arun De Souza’s piece and it would still read right. Or if in R Brara’s it were electricity instead of water it would still ‘enlighten”. So whatever be the other merits of these essays they don’t deepen our understanding of water issues.

The redeeming feature of the book is the essay on south Indian tank irrigation by David Mosse. It questions the idea of a pre-colonial ‘ideal’ water and irrigation regime and associated conceptions and roles of the state and the community. But it doesn’t stop there. Instead it also draws implications relevant for our times and can be read as a critique of attempt to recover or recreate the past. One does miss, however, what could have been a dialogue with another contributor with different views on the subject.

The book’s jacket has a colourful water painting titled “Small Pond, Many Fish”. I wonder if the artist is alluding to the billions of humans on planet Earth. Interesting all the fish are of the same size - no small fish, no big fish - and no fish is eating other fish!!! The rest of the landscape is verdant with trees and birds and women around a handpump giving plentiful water. Has the artist not read the book or is she making a point of her own?

Don’t Go by the Title

Making Conservation Work
Securing Biodiversity in this New Century
Ghazala Shahabuddin & Mahesh Rangarajan (editors)

Reading the book’s title and sub-title made me expect papers and discussion on urgent biodiversity concerns and priorities, an analysis of existing and required changes in laws and policies, some recommendations and prescriptions, and even a few success stories pointing the way forward. And the impression was heightened when in the introduction the editors said that that most of the papers in the book were presented at a workshop looking at solutions to biodiversity loss in India.

Alas, it was not to be. The book is not about solutions or about making conservation work or securing biodiversity. Perhaps one and a half papers would qualify. Expectations of readers based on the title may well be belied.

What the book has is plenty (5 of the 8 papers) of description and analysis of what has transpired. These review papers in the volume are not even posing the problem except in a very peripheral way. Though all 8 papers are case–studies, they are not used to pose larger questions and move towards solutions even if they were to be provisional or tentative. There is no looking at the future and in particular to relate biodiversity imperatives to the rapid changes in society and the economy.

One paper that does attempt to deal with solutions is the one by Nitin Rai (readers without access to the book may read this article) on extraction of NTFPs in a Western Ghats village. He shows that secure tenure is associated with prudent harvesting while premature harvesting and other destructive practices are seen in open access areas. On the critical matter of solutions he mentions several things such as collective control and distribution based on customary rules, addressing issues of equity, role and space for local forest-dependent communities, and active role of government and non-governmental organizations.

These measures are mentioned without detailing how they would come about and be sustained. Unfortunately, the paper stops – by listing these measures - where it should have begun.

To begin with it is not clear why communities or groups are not able to organise and prevent premature harvesting which as he notes they have done at other places. What is it about the structure of society that causes this? The village has 81 households of which the dominant community is 54% (who don’t participate in collection from open-access areas) and the next two groups comprise 15% each of the total households. The average income in the village is much higher than the state and national averages and even the relatively “poor” don’t seem destitute. The district is aware, literate and no stranger to movements. Is the effort involved in modifying extraction regime not worth the reward? Or does the community need time to sort out matters?

From the paper it is not clear if collection of other products including wood and fodder in open access areas is prudent or destructive. Is it only fruit extraction, which the author studied, which is destructive of the environment?

The author leans towards providing security of tenure as a possible solution. But such security can take various forms. Which one will work? Another pertinent question not raised or addressed is that a regime change may bring about a change in behaviour. For example, secure long term access may lead people to suppress the growth of some species and promote that of others. Vegetation composition may change.

My point is that a more detailed discussion is required to take the matter forward.

For me the most fascinating paper in the book is about the pioneering restoration work on small fragmented rainforests, being done in the Anamalais, Western Ghats by the NCF. This is a real solution, albeit on a micro scale and involves working with several partners including the forest department, local people and the corporate sector. As the authors point out restoration is a neglected sphere of work. It is also quite demanding and one significant challenge would be to scale it up. There are literally thousands of such fragments in various parts of the country. It would be beyond the capacity of individual or even several NGOs to do so. So who can run the programme and how can it expand to other parts of the country? There are also large tracts of land (semi-abandoned coffee estates, for example), which exist as enclaves in the middle of forests and protected areas. They too could be restored.

Individuals and corporate houses in India have come to great riches, of late, but most of their philanthropic effort is directed at programmes on education, health and general welfare. Perhaps the time has come to start considering and debating initiatives such as purchases of conservation-important areas presently in private hands. As an example see the work of The Nature Conservancy.

While the book may not be about what the title purports nevertheless one may ask are the articles useful? Yes, several of them are and the book is not a waste of an effort but it is not what one expected.

The Crisis that Wasn't: Fuelwood

For an excellent exposition on old vs. new wisdom on the subject see this.

Biomass Crises in India: The Case of Fuelwood

Even though many continue to hold on to the notion of a fuelwood crisis in India (try a search on it) it is quite apparent that the crisis hasn’t materialised as feared. For a useful summary see this RFF paper on the subject.

What happened? Briefly, in rural India people responded by substituting fuels and augmenting production. The RFF paper cited above provides one such illuminating case study from Madhya Pradesh.

To know what is happening with bio-fuels on all-India basis is extremely hard as data is not available but we do know a few things. Biomass increases have come from agricultural residues (agricultural production has grown 2.5% CAGR for the past 55 years); dung (livestock population up 1% CAGR along with increased fodder availability); and woody biomass from trees grown on private, community and government lands. Of course all incremental production is not available as fuel and woody biomass has reduced in many areas.

I wish to focus, however, on a potentially far-reaching development that may be underway - increasing use of LPG in rural areas. According to the NSSO “The proportion of households using LPG increased six-fold in rural India from about 2% in 1993-94 to 11.7% in 2004-05. See also this note by the NSSO for primary energy use. Since kerosene is not used in rural areas for cooking it may be safely inferred that such use is replacing bio-fuels.

In urban areas too LPG use has grown rapidly. The proportion of households using LPG doubled in urban India from 29.5% in 1993-94 to 59% in 2004-05. See the two sources cited above. But LPG in urban India may be replacing SKO (Superior Kerosene Oil) rather than bio-fuels, the latter still continue to the primary cooking fuel for about 20% of the households.

It is instructive to see what is happening with LPG. The tables below give some data:

Annual average compound growth rate %

Period	LPG	SKO
1974-79	8.7	3.7
1980-85	18.4	9
1985-90	18.9	6.7
1992-97	10	3.9
1997-02	12.6	0.5
2002-07	8.2	0

Source: Extracted from table 17 of petstats.

LPG customers and Sales of LPG and SKO

Year	LPG Customers Millions	LPG Sales Million Tonnes	SKO Sales Million Tonnes
1990-91	17	2.4
1997-98		4.8	11.1
1998-99		5.4	12.2
1999-00		6.4	11.9
2000-01		7	11.3
2001-02	64	7.7	10.4
2002-03	70	8.4	10.4
2003-04	77	9.3	10.2
2004-05	85	10.2	9.4
2005-06	89	10.3	9.4

Source: Extracted from Tables 16 and 24 of petstats.


Both tables reflect the stupendous rates of the growth in number of LPG customers and use. SKO has stagnated as it gets phased out as cooking fuel and also but less so for lighting. The high rates of LPG use, far in excess of per capita income growth, in certain periods, suggest latent demand not met due to supply constraints.

These constraints have now largely disappeared due to increases in domestic refining capacities and import facilities at ports in the past 10-20 years. In addition, huge gas discoveries in KG basin and ample foreign exchange reserves will make supplies a non-issue within a couple of years. Supplies have not yet been fully eased in rural areas as affordability is much more than indicated by the 11% households presently using LPG.

The constraint of the initial high capital cost has been eased in several states by providing subsidies on the purchase of stoves, smaller cylinders are provided in hilly areas but perhaps the largest factor may be growing incomes of households and a desire for clean and convenient fuel.

Use of LPG is still quite low, especially in rural India but is growing rapidly. It seems such rates may be sustained. If so, for the vast numbers of women living in abysmal conditions in the country, this development may turn out to be more meaningful and have a more durable positive impact than having a woman president.