Environmental Health Activism in India...the beginning


This is my first post under the "Environmental Health Activism in India" category. I've done two interviews since we've been in Delhi, and have two more lined up before we leave. It doesn't seem like much for 16 days in Delhi, but I've already learned a lot.

I should begin by explaining what I am doing here. The easiest way is to paste the research synopsis I've been sending to the people I'm hoping to interview while here in India. It looks like this:

Overview:
This project’s main objective is to develop an understanding of civil society responses to pollution-related health problems in India. In particular, I would like to understand what factors explain when and where activism emerges, the strategies employed, and their ultimate success or failure. Such knowledge will build the capacity of civil society organizations, in turn leading to more effective mobilization during future crises. The research will also be valuable to the American environmental movement, which would stand to gain from an understanding of the ways in which cultural and spiritual traditions inform Indian environmental activism.

The project will also contribute to several important research areas in Indian society: the role of civil society organizations in sustaining and nurturing India’s democratic institutions; the importance of woman in civil society organizations given the emerging role of women in Indian society; and the importance of indigenous systems of medicine as resources for managing environmental health crises.

The project's orienting research questions include:
1. What is the legacy of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal? How has contemporary environmental health activism been shaped by the experience of Bhopal?
2. What obstacles do activists face in linking disease in a population to known pollution (e.g., is there a lack of scientific, governmental, or other types of support)?
3. When multiple organizations or institutions attempt to address the same environmental health crisis, what causes conflicts among them and what prevents the resolution of these conflicts?
4. In what ways do activists work both within and outside of conventional democratic institutions to pursue their goals?
5. Given that many grassroots efforts are headed by women, how does the emerging role of women in Indian society affect the success of their organizing efforts?
6. To what extent do environmental health activists employ indigenous systems of medicine in administering relief to victims of environmental health crises?
7. How have the forces of globalization shaped environmental health organizing, especially in terms of the formation of global networks of social movement actors, and to what extent do these networks actually benefit local stakeholders?

While in Delhi my goal has been to interview a few Indian academics who can offer some guidance and perhaps critical feedback on the nature of the research, and to interview a few people working in environmental organizations based in Delhi.

My first interview was not really an interview, per se. It was a meeting with one of the scholars at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, with which I am formally affiliated while a Fulbright Scholar in India. I've had trouble getting in touch with, and meeting up with, the director of CSDS, but my meeting today was with a social scientist who is studying urban environmental politics in Delhi, so we have some overlapping interests and had a useful conversation.

He explained to me his hypothesis that there is an emerging civil society sector in India that straddles the line between the traditional grassroots activist groups and government. As one example he mentioned the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), where I have an interview on Wednesday. CSE has built its credibility to the extent that the government now looks to its reports, which include some of their own data and testing in areas such as pesticides or drinking water, for sound scientific evidence in making policy. According to my interviewee, the result is that CSE has become more removed from the world of grassroots environmental activism.

I suspect this has to do with the changing nature of the environmental movement in India. In fact, in some ways it is problematic to talk about an Indian environmental movement at all. This was confirmed in an interview I did today with a well-connected toxics activist in Delhi (which I will discuss in another post). From the Chipko movement to the Narmada movement, what one might call the early Indian environmental movement, there was seldom explicit concern with the environment. These movements originated as people's movements, aimed at guaranteeing people (indigenous people in the Chipko case, and to a certain extent the Narmada) their right to a livelihood. And since in both cases people's livelihoods depended on the land, movements formed to oppose state decisions to harvest forest resources and build dams. Smithu Kothari has written nicely about the phases of the Narmada movement, and notes that only in the second phase did environmental issues really get raised (in particular, the ecological impacts of the Sardar Sarovar dam). As I'll try to discuss in another post, scholarly work on the Narmada movement, particularly the role played by international organizations, has been too celebratory. This is the argument made by another Indian scholar who I met with the day before we left Delhi.

But back to my musings on the Indian environmental movement. With Bhopal, I think again the movement that followed the Union Carbide disaster was less about the environment and/or pollution, and more about corporate and government accountability. Interestingly, the movement's recent successes seem to be due to Greenpeace involvement and the growing awareness that groundwater in Bhopal continues to be contaminated by the chemicals leaching from the factory site. In other words, today the issue is more centrally an environmental one than it was in 1984 or the years immediately after. I should also add here that among Bhopal activists there is some tension with respect to the role of Greenpeace. Greenpeace's resources, and the study it did on groundwater, have been valuable, but in other ways the organization has used its muscle to go against the will (and interests, in some ways), of the people it is ostensibly helping.

Whether one wants to talk about an Indian environmental movement or not, the idea that there is this newly emerged sector of civil society organizations like CSE is provocative. I put it into the context of globalization, though my interviewee did not really agree with my line of reasoning. My hypothesis was that earlier forms of activism had as their main objectives awareness raising and the assertion of certain basic rights. Most of the conflicts were straightforward--people had rights that were being denied and needed to be upheld. With the global spread of capital, and its attendant human rights and environmental abuses, issues become much more complex. More sophisticated strategies for challenging the state are needed, and in some instances needed as well is an ability to produce sound scientific evidence that can stand up in national or international courts of law. These needs cannot be met by local grassroots organizations. Some sort of intermediary that can speak the rational-legal/cost-benefit language of the government and of the courts is needed. Perhaps this is how organizations like CSE evolved.

In a way, this line of thinking is bolstered by Weber's classic explanation of capitalism's emergence in Western Europe. For Weber, capitalism emerged in Western Europe and not Asia, for example, because in the West the emergence of the nation-state, and the fact that it is governed not by capricious monarchs or zealots but by the rational rule of law, was a necessary precursor to the accumulation and investment of capital. Capitalists don't want to risk investing their money where there are uncertainties, and in the East, whether because of its religious beliefs, pre-scientific worldview, ethnic or tribal conflcits, or other factors, there were too many uncertainties. Countries like India become appealing to investors only inasmuch as they develop reliable and rational forms of governance and authoritative legal systems. Once these are in place, capital flows in. There are exceptions, of course, but usually only when a government, like the American government, overthrows a purportedly corrupt or despotic regime, thus providing temporary "stability." I should make clear that I am not condoning such policies. I mean instead to point out that these policies are typically driven by the economic interests to which the government is beholden above and beyond its obligation to ordinary citizens.

My larger point is that the presence of these things--a stable government and system of justice--calls for a new civil society sector that is somewhere between the grassroots groups that directly challenge the state and the ineffective government entities that simply maintain the status quo. If the government can be held accountable, as in theory any democratically elected government can, then social change agents can work within formal institutional channels. In an age of science-based decision-making, the institution of science becomes one of these formal channels, and groups like CSE emerge to work within those new channels or spaces.

This idea may not be new at all, and it certainly still needs more development, so I'll move on rather than confusing myself even more.

The other interesting thing I learned from Deepu had to do with panchayats. Panchayats are essentially the equivalent of municipal governments in the U.S. The legacy of the British Raj was the complete absence of any authority whatsoever at the local level. I guess there are a couple items in the Indian Constitution that provide certain powers to panchayats, but with the exception of a few states (Kerala being one), there is still a dismal infrastructure for local-level governance. This would most likely have some sort of effect on the ways in which movements mobilize and who or what they target, though I'll have to do some more investigating to find out.

Posted: Mon - December 12, 2005 at 08:33 AM          

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