Implosion (19 page)

There is big money to be made by poaching tigers and smuggling their body parts out of India. Wildlife trafficking is the third or fourth largest illegal trade in the world after arms and narcotics, and is worth billions of dollars. ‘India has a vast array of wildlife species that are highly valued in the illegal trade – from the spiny-tailed lizard of the desert to the musk deer of the Himalayan foothills to sea cucumbers from our coral reefs. And, of course, tigers. Unfortunately tigers are valued more than most other species because of their beauty, strength and power,’ says Belinda Wright, one of India’s leading wildlife conservationists, who runs the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI).
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‘Every part of the tiger – be it whiskers, eyeballs, penis or bones – has a use in traditional Chinese medicine,’ she says. WPSI’s wildlife crime database illustrates the scale of the trade – it has information on over 19,000 wildlife criminals and more than 22,000 wildlife cases involving some 400 species.
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The Indian poacher makes an increasingly large profit and, on the international market, an animal can account for tens of thousands of dollars. Lowly officials grow rich on the kickbacks that they are paid to facilitate – or at least ignore – the poachers and traders as the parts travel by land across India, into and across Nepal, and then into China.

Sadly, the wild tiger does not attract the sort of widespread public admiration in India that it does abroad, even though it has a place in the Hindu religion with the goddess Durga being worshipped riding a tiger. So it is easy for the government to issue reports and then do little, and for senior bureaucrats in charge of protecting wildlife to be lauded internationally for what look like, but often are not, sound initiatives. What the government should be doing is revamping its grossly understaffed and unmotivated forest protection service – the state forest departments – and strengthening enforcement and prosecution of poachers and traders.

The problem however will never be solved just by tackling the supply in India’s wildlife parks because this is a demand-driven trade. The only really effective way to protect tigers and other wildlife is to persuade China – the largest consumer of wildlife parts, such as tiger skin and bones, elephant ivory, bear bile and pangolin scales – to improve and implement their own wildlife protection laws, including a 1993 ban on the use of tiger bones in traditional Chinese medicine. ‘If India wants to secure a future for wild tigers, it not only has to improve enforcement but stem the demand by talking forcefully to China to persuade it to ban all trade in tiger parts from all sources,’ says Wright. India, however, seems scared of tackling China on this issue, as on so much else. Tiger farms in China have 7,000 or more captive breeding tigers which supply bone for traditional medicine, some allegedly with permits, despite the ban. The sad twist to the tale is that Chinese consumers want bones from wild, not captive, tigers.

The ‘J Factor’

Much of the debate in recent years has centred on Jairam Ramesh, a highly intelligent, hard-working and extrovert economic-policy-adviser-turned-politician, who enjoys controversy and was a high- profile minister for environment and forests from May 2009 to July 2011. He then became minister of rural development. Though he has more critics than supporters stemming from his time handling the environment ministry, his ministerial journey illustrates the pressures and vested interests in the environment-versus-growth debate.

Ramesh, who qualified as a mechanical engineer and then studied public policy, has been at or near the centre of the government’s economic policy-making since the 1980s. (I first met him around 1985–86 at the Planning Commission, then being run by Manmohan Singh). He has always been a committed reformer, and was India’s first non-corrupt, policy-oriented and knowledgeable environment minister for at least a decade. When he was appointed, I wrote on my blog
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that he was determined to clean up a ministry that had been allowing India’s environment and wildlife to be plundered and to decay during the ten years that it had been headed by ministerial nominees from a regional Tamil Nadu-based party, the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK). Ramesh was backed by Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh and he said then that Singh had also asked him to moderate India’s negative stance on climate change, saying, ‘India has not caused the problem of global warming. But try and make sure that India is part of the solution. Be constructive; be proactive.’
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On the environment, Ramesh took on powerful corporate interests who fought back (with the help of parts of the media, especially
The Indian Express
) and accused him of being anti-growth and of blocking so many projects that investment was being driven abroad. The attacks sharpened after he halted construction for a year at Lavasa, a 25,000-acre rural city project in the undeveloped rolling hills of Maharashtra where there were allegations of illegal land acquisition and violation of environmental regulations. Built by Hindustan Construction, this project had backers with strong political links, including the family of Sharad Pawar, the state’s most powerful politician and minister of agriculture in India’s 2004–14 UPA governments.
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A few months after being appointed, Ramesh said he would not allow two coal mines linked to power projects planned by the Gujarat-based Adani Group near Maharashtra’s Tadoba Andhari tiger reserve. Run by Gautam Adani, the group rivals Reliance’s Ambani family for political punch in its chosen areas that include coal imports, which it dominates, as well as infrastructure projects. The government was split over what Ramesh was doing and his opponents included Praful Patel, a suave business-oriented politician close to Pawar and (at the time) a controversial aviation minister. The project was in Patel’s hometown of Gondia. ‘We are not going to compromise ecological security in the name of development.. The ministry of environment and forests is going to be quite fundamentalist on these issues,’ said Ramesh,
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knowing that he had the backing of Sonia Gandhi, who had earlier opposed the mines.
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He gradually lost Manmohan Singh’s support however, when he blocked other important developments including a $12bn steel project planned in Orissa by Posco of South Korea, which the prime minister was personally favouring. He halted more coal mines by introducing a ‘no go’ concept for just under half of the 600 areas involved, based on the density of their forest locations – 21 per cent of India’s total land mass is covered by forests, including 2 per cent dense forest (which is thick with trees and a closed overhead canopy) and 10 per cent moderately dense. This sharpened an existing crisis in India’s power sector by curbing the growth of urgently needed coal supplies. Also on Ramesh’s list was an internationally controversial bauxite mining and alumina project being developed in a tribal-dominated area in Odisha by Vedanta, a London-based Indian metals and mining company. Others hit included a politically infl uential branch of the Jindal steel and mining family (later investigated for coal mining bribes) which was accused of ignoring environmental requirements on another Odisha steelworks.

Probably his most popular move was to ban the introduction of a genetically modified version of a popular vegetable, known as BT brinjal, which had been developed by Mahyco, a subsidiary of the multinational company Monsanto. Mass production of the modified aubergine had been approved by an environment ministry committee in October 2009, but Ramesh responded to an intensive campaign, partly led by Greenpeace, the environmental organization. He held public consultations in seven cities that were attended by about 8,000 people including farmers, scientists and activists, and in February 2010 announced an indefinite moratorium till studies established BT brinjal’s safety and long-term impact on human health and the environment. He cited a lack of scientific consensus on its safety along with opposition from ten state governments and the lack of an independent biotechnology regulatory authority.

All this led to immense pressure from opponents who included, to varying degrees, the prime minister, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and other government ministers. Ramesh gradually had to give way on many of the coal mining ‘no go’ areas and other projects, though he usually often claimed – for example, on Lavasa – that he had ensured that regulations were followed or environmentally improved. He compromised with Patel on a new airport for Mumbai, claiming he had achieved 80 per cent of what he wanted. But he also admitted that he felt ‘guilty’ for succumbing to pressure to breach regulations in some cases. ‘Unfortunately, many times I am forced to regularise. Because I have no option, because one refinery has been built... a steel plant has been built. So I am guilty in some cases of having actually condoned many environmental violations,’ he said at a management conference in May 2011.
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Around the same time, despite knowing about inadequate relief and rehabilitation work, he gave conditional clearance to a 400MW hydroelectric project in Madhya Pradesh, at Maheshwar, which was part of a highly controversial engineering scheme on the Narmada, one of India’s largest rivers. This followed intervention by the prime minister’s office, which led Ramesh to say he had ‘no option but to agree to lifting the stop-work order on the construction of the last five spillway gates’. He told the media that, even though he knew that regulations had been violated, he had to refuse to reverse clearances on various power projects and on a port being built by Tata Steel at Dhamra in Odisha.
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Greenpeace and other environmental groups had earlier accused Tata, which was in a 50–50 joint venture with Larsen & Toubro (L&T), a large Indian construction company, of starting construction without obtaining adequate environmental clearances and without honouring commitments made by Ratan Tata, the company’s chairman.
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Two months after making the remarks about being forced to approve projects, Ramesh was transferred in a ministerial reshuffle.
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He left behind a very mixed reputation. There were the angry businessmen whose projects had been hit and who were not used to dealing with an environment minister who could not be bought. Experts had become bewildered and there was despair among environmentalists about his style and lack of consistency.
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‘He was like the curate’s egg,’ says Bittu Sahgal, editor of
Sanctuary Asia
, India’s leading wildlife magazine, using an English expression that means, depending on one’s interpretation, ‘bad, but I won’t say so’, or ‘bad and good in parts’.
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Initially, the environmentalists had welcomed Ramesh, saying he was the most active and well-informed minister that India had ever had, and that he brought a positive focus to wildlife and other issues that had not been seen since Indira Gandhi was prime minister. Some felt let down because he had not honoured commitments, and many regarded his actions as capricious, publicity-seeking and sometimes politically motivated – for example, doing what he knew would be supported by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi for socially conscious vote-getting reasons on projects like Posco and Vedanta, while ignoring other, less sensationalist breaches of regulations. Ramesh denied this and said he divided projects into ‘yes’, ‘yes but’ and ‘no’ categories. That led to 95 per cent of applications being approved, ‘down from 99.99 per cent earlier’. Perhaps his one-time environmental supporters were right to become disillusioned with such a small improvement after all the noise.

But Ramesh had put the environment firmly on India’s political agenda and had begun to clean up a highly corrupt ministry, setting up new environmental and conservation regulations and institutions including coastal development guidelines and a National Green Tribunal to adjudicate on environmental issues. He also changed India’s role in international climate change negotiations. In a speech to businesspeople three months before he was transferred, Ramesh appealed to them to ‘take the environment far more seriously and not see it as a problem’, adding: ‘See the environment not as a cost or obligation or favour to someone else, but as something intrinsic to the growth process.’

His actions made it easier for his successor, Jayanthi Natarajan, to resist pressures from elsewhere in the government. She had previously been an able and sometimes tough Congress party spokesperson and was expected to be far less confrontational and more pragmatic than Ramesh. She scrapped the ‘no go’ coal mining areas and allowed some controversial power projects but, probably with Sonia Gandhi’s backing, she challenged the prime minister’s office and other government departments on various other issues. She successfully forced Singh to water down plans for a new National Investment Board that would reduce the impact of environmental and other regulations on new projects.
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As a result, she pleased neither camp and was increasingly bracketed along with Ramesh by business interests and their supporters in the media. This was illustrated by an
India Today
article headlined ‘Green Terror’, which talked about the ‘J factor’ – Jairam Ramesh and Jayanthi Natarajan. It said they had made the ministry ‘the single biggest stumbling block to India’s growth story’, which was scarcely fair.
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Yet environmentalists complained that, between 2004 and 2013, the ministry had approved the destruction of 600,000 hectares of forestland, of which 250,000 hectares were for mining, and had rejected proposals to do with only 14,000 hectares.
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