A Biosphere Tragedy All Over Again?

Villagers raise serious questions about the park system in Uttarakhand

Reported by Harish Chandola, special to nandadevi.org
September 9, 2004

People living around the Nanda Devi National Park went looking for a team that had come from the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Geneva, led by Mr. Michael Green, to know the purpose of his visit to this remote but biodiversity-rich region. Hosted by the Divisional Forest Officer (DFO) of Joshimath, Mr. Green was about to leave this region when community representatives caught up with him.

He told them that he had come to recommend the status of a World Heritage Site to The Valley of Flowers in this area, already known the world over after the mountaineer and nature lover, Frank Smyth, wrote a book on it in 1936.

Those that met him asked how this paradise of wild flowers, the animals in it and the villages surrounding it, would benefit by calling it a world heritage site. They also presented him a memorandum stating that the adjacent Nanda Devi biosphere reserve had been given the status of a world heritage site two decades ago, by which the traditional rights of the people who protected its forests and wild life for thousands of years were taken away, and that responsibility was given to a new agency, the government forest department. This had opened the reserve to poachers, as the arrest of teams of them in the last five years has shown.

By giving it the fancy name of a World Heritage Site, the Nanda Devi area was robbed of the protection it had received from the people living around it.

In the memorandum given to Mr. Green, it was stated that Indian Government organizations had conducted studies of the reserve’s environment after separating it from the people, and reported that the families in and around it had not only been robbed of their relationship with the forest and its wildlife, but had actually suffered economically and psychologically as a result.

The memorandum said that forests, animals and people formed a community, which survived by supporting one another. Outside agencies then came in the name of bringing in their “expertise” and separated the three elements of this community, initiating the slow death of all three. The memorandum said starkly: “It was the start of murder.”

This led to an argument, with Mr. Green saying he had been to many countries, obviously to teach new methods of conservation. However those that met him said he seemed to be unaware of the traditional methods of conversation practiced by societies, and wondered without that knowledge, how could he impose his untried “new methods”?

He and another colleague from the IUCN were hosted by the state forest department. He was informed that this department used the “new methods” by giving some families which had to sell thousands of their sheep to butchers because their traditional grazing grounds had been closed to them in the Nandadevi National Park, a few kilograms of wool, in the name of helping them, presenting a few pressure-cooker pots to others so they would not burn much wood in cooking, giving solar-powered lanterns that let alone lasted only a few days, did not light at all, and distributing chicken to encourage poultry-farming so that people would not kill birds for food.

All this was done with public funds by the forest department. The wool it gave to families was not enough to knit even a sweater, the pressure-cookers were too small to cook rice for a whole family, and the chickens it gave were all eaten up and despite thousands of rupees spent on them, there was still not a single poultry-farm anywhere in the region. The skeletons of solar-lanterns were later collected by the donor department.

These charity actions however created several negative results. First of all, when in a village of 30 households, two were given pressure-cookers, the others felt denied, or when some received a few kilograms of wool or a solar-lantern, the rest wanted the know why those were favoured. This caused jealousy and created rivalries to obtain the favour of forest officers who gave these things. This discrimination made many feel inferior. A self-reliant society was taught to beg for things. It was divided and its peace was shattered.

By presenting such things to some, the forest department created elements in villages that would act as its yesmen and yeswomen, which the department then designated as “eco-societies”. These so called eco-societies (there will be hardly a couple in this area), were not elected, but appointed by forest officials.

So when Mr. Green argued that he had met members of eco-societies (he met members of just one, in the Valley of Flowers, for whom, it was said, a good lunch was hosted by the DFO), he was asked who they were, which he did not know.

He was informed that villages here had elected representative bodies, called village panchayats, and if he wished to know the views of the people on the decision to confer a world heritage site on the Valley of Flowers, or the introduction of a “new” environmental management regime here, he should have sought and met panchayat members in addition to persons presented to him as eco-societies by the forest department.

The DFO has been contacting international bodies to publicize his so-called efforts to keep the forests clean. To those he has allotted shops on forest land along the tourist and pilgrimage routes in the Valley of Flowers, he has been advising what brand of bottled water and other edibles they should bring to sell to summer visitors that come here in great numbers. Then when they discard the plastic water bottles and wrappers along the routes, he would ask the village women to go and collect all them for a pittance and pile the rubbish in a heap in a town to show the authorities his efforts. Instead, as he has forest guards everywhere, he could have ordered people to stop taking bottled water with them and informed them of good natural drinking water springs on the way.

Mr. Green was told about the fraudulent activities taking place in the region in the name of conversation and reminded him that it may not do any good to anyone if local knowledge and rights in this regard were ignored and discarded.