Natural Regress

To die for This was the heaven of plenty that our progenitors and species such as the tiger came to colonise millennia ago. Unique, mysterious and forever fascinating, the Indian subcontinent's natural history remains largely unstudied, its natural wealth barely appreciated. But to our utter good fortune, whale sharks, saltwater crocodiles and green turtles still swim the coastal waters off the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. And in the legendary, snow-capped Himalayas that were thrust so sensationally skyward 25 million years ago, the snow leopard still pads dominance over musk deer, Tibetan antelope, ibex, marmots and voles. Even the apparently lifeless Thar throbs with life. And to the east, bordering Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, mists swirl permanently through forests that shelter remarkable life forms ranging from tigers, elephants, rhinos to gibbons. The world's largest moth, the Atlas, together with a myriad of butterflies, flit through this Himalayan wonderland, sucking the nectar from 4,000 flowering plants, including some of the rarest orchids on earth.

Riverine grasslands in protected forests like Manas in Assam still offer refuge to endangered species like the Bengal Florican, pygmy hog and the hispid hare. And the great floodplains of the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra, though radically altered by man's agricultural lifestyle, are among the most generative in the world. In the Western Ghats, giant squirrels travel miles in the canopy without once descending to the forest floor. And along the narrow strip of peninsular India, 50 million Indians thrive on the productivity of a mosaic of corals, sandbars, mangroves and beaches.

On the cusp of a new millennium, India is clearly still a land to die for. Its bounty wounded but unmatched. The question must, however, be asked: "Are we managing our assets well?"

A history of protection In 1271, a Venetian adventurer related incredible stories in his Book of Marvels of a land filled with curious animals - elephants, rhinos and great striped cats. That land was India. The man was Marco Polo. Fifteen hundred years before him, Emperor Ashoka had promulgated laws banning the felling of several species of trees and the establishment of sanctuaries where wild animals were protected. Nature conservation was never a novel concept to India. The Vedas listed the virtues of sacred groves thousands of years ago and Gautama Buddha preached non-violence to all life forms.

In the 3rd century BC, Chandragupta Maurya had segregated forests into two types, one for commercial use, the other for worship. Only restricted hunting was allowed and the punishment for breaking the law was death. Timber was exceedingly valuable even then. Many of Alexander the Great's ships were built using hardwoods from India. But in those distant days, technology was elementary and transport slow. The scars were quickly healed by climax forests that regenerated in much the way the liver might in a human body.

The big slide But the Mughals and their shikar made a deep dent in the populations of carnivores like the lion, tiger, leopard and cheetah. But even this had a relatively limited effect on most species as the forests were still vast and animals recolonised vacated niches.

But the East India Company changed the rules of the game forever. Their colonial attitude was not merely directed at India but nature itself. So brutal was the extraction of timber that they themselves had to prohibit the cutting of teak forests near the Malabar Coast in 1803. These were the forests that supplied ships to Nelson's awesome naval fleets.

But even this damage was to pale before the utter ruin ushered in after World War II. Desperate to recoup war losses, the pace of timber extraction was accelerated. And on a subcontinent awash in guns and explosives, all wild animals became fair game as Britishers and Indian royalty began to bag tigers with an urgency that brought the species to the edge of the extinction precipice.

Brown Colonisers When the British left Indian shores, they left behind their colonial tools. The jackboots now belonged to the brown sahebs of urban India who set about colonising the rural hinterland. This is how the proverbial rich got richer and the poor poorer.

The Pinkheaded Duck and Mountain Quail had succumbed years earlier. But the cheetah finally gave up the ghost soon after independence when its habitat was ruthlessly converted to human use. The lion too had retreated to a tiny patch after ruling supreme across vast scrub habitats east of the Thar. No one has any idea how many lesser known species we have lost post-independence under the combined offensive of shikaris, timber merchants and the millions whom Jawaharlal Nehru had exhorted to clear forests to grow food. The tiger's home has been irreversibly fragmented. A legion of species - Kanha's hardground barasingha, the hangul deer of Kashmir, the blackbuck, the great Indian bustard - await their calls to oblivion. All are testament to India's drift from its once widespread philosophy of live and let live.

Tea and coffee estates rapidly began to replace pristine forests in the Nilgiris and the northeast. Terai grasslands and forests gave way to sugarcane watered by dams that had wreaked their own destruction elsewhere. Coal mines opened up a wide swathe in central India. The sandalwood forests of peninsular India drew woodcutters like flies to a feast. Indians were not to be denied thus-far-denied riches.

Many Indian forest officers trained in the British Forest School in Dehra Dun passed on their eco-lethal learning to the next generation, continuing the train of carnage. The World Bank, which sees Indian timber as safe collateral for future debt repayment, finances much of this destruction. More trees are being felled in India today at the hands of dam, road and mine contractors than ever before. Predictably, this resulted in a slide for the tiger, its prey base and the millions of plant and animals that had evolved to perfection on the subcontinent.

Development or destruction? Nehru was actually sympathetic to the cause of nature protection. But he condoned the destruction of forests to enable Indians to claim the development rewards denied them by the British. For all his sensitivity, then, he became the architect of the destruction of natural India and its simple people.

Though Indira Gandhi did provide the political support that enabled Parliament to enact virtually all the legislation that protects our forests and wildlife today, her concerns did not extend to the protection of our rivers, soils and air from industry. So dirty factories fouled sacred rivers and pure lakes, wells and streams that serve as sewers to dump lethal toxins even now. "A poor country like India cannot afford the luxury of environmental concerns," was the typical response of politicians and planners in response to citizens' alarms.

Water wars As Indians prepare to face the new millennium, they must confront a stark fact. Each of us has only half the water available to our parents in '47 and supplies are plummeting. What's worse, even the precious little we have is being polluted by industry, chemical agriculture and careless municipalities. According to experts, the internal security of India in the next decade is more likely to be threatened by water riots and unrest than wars or terrorism. In places like Kutchh, water tables have fallen by hundreds of metres. Streams and rivers are running dry because of deforestation. A vicious corollary of this tragedy is the death of our soils. Long fed on chemical fertilisers and pesticides, crop yields across vast areas of Punjab, Haryana and west UP are plummeting.

It should become the purpose of all development in India to restore health to our ravaged land, restore quality to the water we drink and productivity to our soils before we are forced by nature to take such protective action. With our water and food security on the verge of collapse, we will ultimately be forced to look away from present industrial growth models. We will be forced to improve generation and transmission capacities of existing power infrastructures, rather than build new projects. We will have to resurface roads, repair culverts and strengthen shoulders rather than build new highways. We will have to reline canals, improve the condition of catchment areas of existing dams before building new ones.

Good ecology is good long-term economics. Saving the tiger and its home amounts to defending the water security of the subcontinent. Protecting wetlands for migratory birds would probably prove to be our best flood and drought-proofing investments. Such options make solid development sense. The sooner we start the long climb back to environmental sanity, therefore, the better.