Environmentalist Movements in India

The claim this article defends

Indian environmental movements are not, in the first instance, movements about nature. They are movements about development and democracy — about who owns a forest, a river or a hillside, whose growth it is converted into, and who gets to decide. Their protagonists are not naturalists but Adivasis, forest dwellers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists and small peasants. Read them as conservation and they look sentimental; read them as struggles over resource control and they become the sharpest available critique of India’s development model.

Environmentalism in India is what politics looks like when the poor own the argument about growth.

Where the category sits

A compact conceptual recap

• A social movement is sustained collective mobilisation outside routine institutional channels, carrying a shared identity and a challenge to existing authority or distribution.
• Old social movements were class-based, materialist and redistributive; new social movements, theorised by Touraine, Melucci and Offe and read into India by Rajni Kothari, D.L. Sheth and Gail Omvedt, are issue- or identity-based, decentralised, post-materialist and sceptical of the developmental state.
• Kothari’s non-party political process is the standard Indian formulation: groups outside party politics took up questions parties would not touch.

Why India’s environmental movements will not sit still in the category

• Indian environmentalism straddles old and new. As an old movement it is about fuel, fodder, fish, grazing and land; as a new movement it speaks of ecology, sustainability, identity and autonomy.
• Chipko was not a movement to protect forests. It asserted hill villagers’ right to forest produce against contractors licensed by the state. The trees were the site of the conflict, not its subject.
• Niyamgiri is simultaneously a livelihood struggle, a religious claim about a sacred mountain and an ecological argument about bauxite and water tables.
• Any classification that forces Indian environmentalism into one box loses what makes it distinctive. Overlap is the finding, not an untidiness to be corrected.

A third generic form of social conflict

• Social science has long studied two generic forms of conflict; environmental struggle is a third.
  • Conflict over cultivated land and its produce — the agrarian question.
  • Conflict inside the factory — capital against labour.
  • Conflict over nature and natural resources, irreducible to either.
• It is irreducible because the contested asset is a commons whose users hold customary rather than titled claims: they cannot produce a document, and the state’s answer is eminent domain.

	Environmentalism of the North	Environmentalism of the South
Trigger	Amenity, wilderness, pollution as nuisance	Livelihood — loss of the base of subsistence
Protagonists	Scientists, professionals, urban middle class	Peasants, Adivasis, fishers, pastoralists
Idiom	Ecology, rights of nature, post-material values	Customary right, dignity, autonomy
Guha’s shorthand	Full stomach	Empty stomach
Adversary	Industry, sometimes the regulator	Usually the state or a state-backed project
Demand	Regulate, protect, set aside	Restore control; consent before diversion

The vocabulary that makes the field legible

Guha and Gadgil: omnivores, ecosystem people, ecological refugees

Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil describe Indian environmental conflict as a struggle between two populations produced by the same development process.

• Omnivores — industrialists, urban consumers, rich farmers, the salaried middle class — draw resources from the whole country and beyond, and have gained disproportionately from economic development while being insulated from its ecological costs.
• Ecosystem people — small peasants, pastoral nomads, tribals, fishing communities — depend on the resources of their immediate surroundings, and their livelihoods have been undermined by resource flows biased against them and by steady environmental deterioration.
• Ecological refugees are the product of the asymmetry: those pushed out of a degraded or expropriated resource base into urban slums and casual labour. Displacement is not an accident of the model; it is the model’s output.

Environmentalism of the poor

• The term is jointly Ramachandra Guha’s and the Catalan ecological economist Juan Martínez-Alier’s, from their co-edited Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South; Martínez-Alier later gave it a book of its own.
• What it refutes is the post-materialist thesis, associated with Inglehart, that environmental concern is a luxury arriving only after affluence.
  • Environmental conflict in poor societies is a conflict over the material basis of livelihood, not over amenity.
  • The poor are not too poor to be environmentalists; they are environmentalists because they are poor, since the resource is their income.

Deep and shallow ecology, and where India actually sits

• Arne Naess distinguished shallow ecology — fighting pollution and depletion for the health and affluence of the developed world — from deep ecology, which asserts the intrinsic value of non-human life and replaces the “man-in-environment” image with a relational field. The parallel distinction is anthropocentric against ecocentric.
• Indian movements sit in neither camp.
  • They are anthropocentric in the plain sense that their demand is subsistence, but not shallow, since they are not about the amenity of the affluent.
  • They are not ecocentric either: no Chipko villager argued that the tree had rights against her. Where ecocentric language appears it is religious and territorial — Niyam Raja is deity and mountain at once.
• The genuine classical distinction is American.
  • Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian conservationism sought efficient, sustained-yield use for the greatest good over the longest run.
  • John Muir’s preservationism sought to keep wilderness unused.
  • Indian forest policy inherited Pinchot’s logic without his democracy — departmental scientific forestry, villagers as encroachers — and Indian movements take a third position: use, but by the users.

The colonial prehistory: how the forest became state property

The environmental movement’s prologue was written in colonial forest policy. Every later slogan about rights over forest produce answers a nineteenth-century enclosure.

Railways as the turning point

• Lord Dalhousie framed the railway as both an outlet for British capital seeking returns and a means of opening the subcontinent to British goods.
• Tens of thousands of kilometres of track were laid between 1853 and 1910. Sleepers, fuel and construction timber placed India’s forests under sustained assault.
• 1864: the Indian Forest Department was created, with Dietrich Brandis as first Inspector-General. Effective departmental control required the progressive curtailment of the previously untrammelled customary rights exercised by rural communities across South Asia.

The statutory enclosure

• Indian Forest Act 1865 first asserted state proprietorship; the Act of 1878 was the decisive instrument, creating reserved, protected and village forests and converting customary use into revocable “privilege”; the Act of 1927 consolidated it and is still substantially in force.
• The doctrine underneath is eminent domain — the state as ultimate owner, people as licensees. Post-colonial development policy inherited it whole, which is why the movements’ target has so often been an independent Indian state.
• The loss was not only of income: depriving people of traditional rights destroyed the traditional knowledge of conservation and sustainable use those rights carried.

Revolt as environmental conflict

• The great tribal risings read as resource conflicts: the Kol rising, the Santhal hool, the Bhil revolts, the Rampa rebellion and the Munda ulgulan under Birsa Munda, all turning on land alienation and forest access; forest satyagrahas in the 1920s and 1930s carried the pattern into the national movement.
• Mulshi Satyagraha, from 1921, led by Senapati Bapat against the Tata hydroelectric project near Poona, is properly described as India’s first anti-dam movement — submergence, compensation and the priority of urban industrial power over peasant land, three-quarters of a century before Narmada.
• The satyagraha failed and the dam was built. A defeated movement that sets the terms of every later argument is a recurring shape in this history.

The intellectual inheritance

Gandhi

• Gandhi’s often-quoted formulation is that the earth provides enough to satisfy every person’s need, but not every person’s greed — a critique of consumption rather than of technology as such — and his substantive demand was a reversal of state priorities toward rural subsistence, against an industrial-urban model.
• His method survives directly: bhook hartal, padayatra and satyagraha run from Bahuguna’s fasts to Patkar’s jal samarpan to the marches of Hasdeo and Narmada.

J.C. Kumarappa, the Green Gandhian

• J.C. Kumarappa joined Gandhi in the 1920s and built the framework for a village-centred economic order with resource conservation integral to it.
  • Guha calls him “the Green Gandhian” and the founder of modern Indian environmentalism.
  • His Economy of Permanence judged an economy by whether it could be sustained indefinitely, decades before “sustainability” acquired a policy career.
• His analytical device is the contrast between “pack type” and “herd type” societies.
  • Pack-type groups, which he thought Western societies exemplified, form for selfish and aggressive reasons, each member retaining a separate purpose.
  • Herd-type groupings are purely defensive; the motive is also self-interested, but each member has a duty in defending the whole.
  • The point is not romanticism about villages but that an economy of permanence needs association in which self-interest is discharged through obligation to the collective — which is what a commons demands.

Verrier Elwin and the tribal question

• Verrier Elwin wrote extensively on the forest in tribal life and observed that most tribal rebellions had centred on land and forests.
  • He pleaded for greater involvement of tribals in forest management — the demand the Forest Rights Act conceded sixty years later.
  • His argument with G.S. Ghurye, protective isolation against assimilation, set the terms of Indian tribal policy.
• Nehru’s Panchsheel for tribals was the attempted synthesis: develop along their own genius, respect rights in land and forest, train their own people, avoid over-administering, judge by human character rather than statistics.
  • Adivasi environmentalism is largely a demand that this settlement be honoured.

The state’s founding position: Stockholm 1972

The Indian state’s environmental doctrine was stated at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 1972, and has barely changed since.

“We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?” — Indira Gandhi, Stockholm, 1972

• The claim is that the South cannot be asked to conserve at the price of its poor — the ecological standards of the rich cannot be imposed on societies that have not met basic needs.
  • It remains an effective anti-colonial argument in environmental diplomacy, and is the ancestor of common but differentiated responsibilities.
• The critique matters equally. The formulation conflates the poor as polluters with the poor as the people on whose behalf the state acquires land.
  • Domestically it licensed exactly the projects that displaced them, in their own name.

The other 1972-73 triggers

• The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth (1972) put resource exhaustion into elite policy conversation, and the National Committee on Environmental Planning and Coordination was set up the same year.
• B.B. Vohra, a senior official in the Ministry of Agriculture, published an article in the Economic and Political Weekly in 1973 on soil erosion, waterlogging and land degradation — the first official expression of environmental concern from inside the Indian state, and the trigger for the early machinery.
• Project Tiger was launched in 1973, establishing the state’s preferred idiom: protected-area conservation, which excludes people rather than empowering them. In the same year, in a remote Himalayan village, people hugged trees.

Guha’s evolutionary account: four phases

Phase	Period	What defines it
The interloper	1970s	Breaks the developmental consensus; treated as sabotage
Publicity	1980s	Environmental journalism; the first department and ministry
Professionalisation	1990s	Credible data; expertise replaces exhortation
Backlash	Post-liberalisation	Protest recast as anti-development and anti-national

Phase I — the interloper, 1970s

• The post-independence developmental consensus — that industrialisation and large infrastructure were unarguable national goods — was shared across the political spectrum, and environmentalism arrived as an interloper trying to break it.
• Environmental concern was dismissed as a luxury of rich nations, and activists such as Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna were publicly described as CIA agents obstructing India’s rise; Indian Marxists treated ecology as a bourgeois concept, a distraction from class struggle and a brake on productive forces.
• The founding difficulty was that the movement had no allies.

Phase II — publicity, 1980s

• Environmental journalism was invented as a beat by Anil Agarwal, Shekhar Pathak and Nagesh Hegde, and environmental issues won sustained media attention for the first time.
• Institutions followed: a Department of Environment in 1980, upgraded to the Ministry of Environment and Forests in 1985. The decade’s grammar was documentation and exposure.

Phase III — professionalisation, 1990s

• Social and natural scientists began producing credible data, moving the argument from moral protest to demonstrable causation and to the structural roots of conflict.
• The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore established its Centre for Ecological Sciences. The gain was authority; the cost was distance from the villages.

Phase IV — backlash after liberalisation

• Once the state adopted a model built on private capital, protests against mining and SEZs were recast as anti-developmental and anti-national.
  • As left-wing insurgency spread in the same districts, environmentalists and human rights activists were treated as a security problem — the detention of Binayak Sen is the standing illustration.
• The insult tracked the accuser’s ideology: once CIA agents, now old-fashioned socialists obstructing growth. The constant is that the objection is never treated as an argument about resource allocation.

Guha’s three ideological strands

Strand	Diagnosis	Prescription
Crusading Gandhians	A defect of the modern way of life	Return to civilisational values; restraint of wants
Ecological Marxists	Class conflict and power relations	Grassroots empowerment; redistribution of control
Appropriate technology	Bad technique and bad management	Technological and managerial fixes; the small and local

• Each strand has an Indian face.
  • Bahuguna is the crusading Gandhian — the critique is of consumption and of modernity, and the answer is moral.
  • Bhatt sits closer to appropriate technology: small forest-based village industry, better species and methods.
  • The ecological Marxists ask who owns and who is dispossessed, and answer with empowerment at the base.
• Two further strands run alongside.
  • Environmental enthusiasts, who pursue massive documentation to compel remedial action.
  • Scientific conservationists, who accept the managerial frame but argue for more efficient management.
• The typology explains why the movement rarely holds together nationally. A Gandhian wants fewer wants, a Marxist wants transferred ownership, a technologist wants a better turbine — they can agree on stopping a project and almost nothing else.

Guha’s own verdict

• Guha claims no substantial achievement for the movement, and calls India a “basket case” of environmental tragedies.
  • His reference works are the field’s standing bibliography: The Unquiet Woods; This Fissured Land and Ecology and Equity, both with Madhav Gadgil; and Environmentalism: A Global History.

Sunita Narain and the Centre for Science and Environment

Anil Agarwal founded the Centre for Science and Environment, which Sunita Narain has directed since his death; between them they built the most consequential non-movement institution in Indian environmentalism.

• The State of India’s Environment citizens’ reports, from 1982, established the method: independent, data-led, nationally scoped documentation produced outside the state and used to embarrass it into action; Down To Earth carried it into fortnightly journalism.
• CSE’s characteristic technique is the laboratory finding released as a public argument — pesticide residues in bottled water and soft drinks, air quality data, sewage backlogs — with a regulatory demand attached. Narain places excreta management and urban sewage at the centre of river pollution, against the more photogenic industrial-effluent story.

Survival emissions and luxury emissions

• In Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism (1991), Agarwal and Narain attacked the then-standard Western accounting that loaded responsibility for global warming onto developing countries by counting their methane from paddy and livestock alongside industrial carbon.
• Emissions, they argued, must be counted net of natural sinks and allocated per capita, since the atmosphere is a global commons in which every person holds an equal entitlement.
• A tonne of greenhouse gas from a paddy field, a cooking fire or a draught animal is morally distinct from a tonne generated by discretionary consumption in a rich city: the distinction between survival emissions and luxury emissions. Equating them is not science but environmental colonialism.
• This is environmentalism of the poor projected onto the international system, and the source of India’s position on per capita entitlement.

Narain’s critique of the movement

• The firefighting approach: movements stop particular projects but never change the development model, so each victory is site-specific and must be won again at the next site.
• Thin institutional capacity — too little expertise, resource and leadership to convert a local win into a national policy demand. The movement is better at refusal than at proposal, which is why the state can absorb its wins.

Her “new environmentalism”

• In a poor country economic development cannot be refused, and an environmentalism that demands refusal will be defeated and deserve to be.
  • Environmentalism is therefore not against growth: it asks that people be recognised as the owners and custodians of natural resources.
  • Her most political formulation: environmentalism is not about planting trees or protecting tigers — environment is about democracy.
• What the movements resist is a usable five-part definition of the field.
  • The commodification and monopolisation of natural resources.
  • Their inequitable distribution and their unsustainable use.
  • Exploitative power relations built on resource control, and the disempowerment of communities that follows.

The Indian argument is not conservation against development. It is ownership against expropriation, dressed as conservation against development.

Forests

Forests, dams, water bodies and mines are the four material sites of Indian environmental conflict. Forests came first, and set the movement’s vocabulary.

Chipko

• April 1973, Mandal village, Chamoli district, Garhwal Himalaya. The Forest Department refused the local labour cooperative a small allotment of ash trees for agricultural implements, then allotted ash to a sporting-goods manufacturer from the plains for tennis rackets. Villagers threatened to hug the trees — chipko — and the felling was abandoned.
• The base was the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh, the village-industry cooperative Chandi Prasad Bhatt had built through the 1960s.
  • Chipko was not spontaneous; it was an existing cooperative’s escalation when its raw material was given to an outsider.
  • Behind it lay an accumulated grievance: forest policy had consistently served outside commercial interests against the hill peasantry’s need for fuel, fodder and small timber.
• 26 March 1974, Reni village, near the Alaknanda, is the episode that made Chipko famous.
  • With the men decoyed to Chamoli town over compensation payments, Gaura Devi led the village women to the forest and stood between the labourers and the trees through the night.
  • Ghanshyam “Shailani” Raturi, the movement’s poet, supplied the songs that carried it village to village; its medium was folk performance as much as protest.

What the women’s participation did and did not signify

• Women were central because the burden fell on them — fuelwood, fodder and water collection are women’s work, and deforestation lengthens the walk.
  • It was a structural rather than ideological feminism, an interest position rather than a doctrine; reading Chipko as ecofeminist from the outset projects later theory backwards.
  • What it did establish is that rural women could hold a front line against the state and its contractors — a template from anti-arrack to Narmada.

The Bhatt–Bahuguna divergence

	Chandi Prasad Bhatt	Sunderlal Bahuguna
Core demand	Local use rights; forest-based village industry	Conservation of the Himalayan slope
Ideological family	Appropriate technology	Crusading Gandhian
Method	Cooperatives, afforestation, local employment	Padayatra and fast; national moral appeal
Slogan	Trees for the village economy	Forests bear soil, water and pure air
Consequence	Closer to what villagers wanted	Won the national argument and the felling ban

• Bahuguna’s formulation — that a forest’s true produce is soil, water and pure air, not resin and timber — was a brilliant public argument and an awkward one for hill villagers, since it cut against their own commercial use.
  • The divergence is Indian environmentalism in miniature: a livelihood movement and a conservation movement inside one campaign, agreeing on the contractor and disagreeing on everything after him.

Outcome and afterlife

• In 1980 the Indira Gandhi government ordered a ban on green felling above 1,000 metres in the Uttarakhand Himalaya.
  • Accounts of its duration differ, but it held for well over a decade and was reinforced by later judicial restrictions.
  • The movement fed into the Forest (Conservation) Act 1980 and into Uttarakhand statehood, which grew from the same organisational soil.
• The critique of Chipko’s afterlife is substantial.
  • Haripriya Rangan, in Of Myths and Movements, argues it was converted into a timeless morality tale of simple peasants defending pristine nature, obscuring a long regional history of struggle over resources, livelihoods and autonomy.
  • Hill activists including Shamsher Singh Bisht argued the felling ban hurt the villagers it was meant to protect; Shekhar Pathak notes the failure to build political organisation.
• The honest summary: Chipko won a national prohibition and lost the local rights argument.

Appiko

• 1983, Salkani, Sirsi taluk, Uttara Kannada, Karnataka. Appiko is Kannada for “to hug”; it was the deliberate southern counterpart of Chipko, led by Panduranga Hegde, against the felling of Western Ghats evergreen forest for plywood, paper and polyfibre and its replacement by monoculture plantations.
• Its programme was threefold — save existing forest, grow trees on common land, use resources with restraint through improved cookstoves and biogas.
  • Appiko is the clearest case of a movement pairing refusal with a positive resource programme, precisely what Narain says the movement usually fails to do.

The eucalyptus controversy and the Kusnur satyagraha

• Social forestry from the late 1970s promoted fast-growing eucalyptus on common and village land, suiting pulp, rayon and polyfibre industry and departmental targets.
  • The objection was precise, not romantic: eucalyptus yields no fodder, no fruit, no leaf manure and little fuel, draws heavily on groundwater, and converts a multi-use commons into a single-use industrial input.
  • Farm forestry for industry was being counted as afforestation for villages.
• 14 November 1987, Kusnur, Karnataka: protesting the allotment of village pasture land to a polyfibre company, peasants staged a “Pluck-and-Plant” satyagraha.
  • They uprooted a hundred eucalyptus saplings and replanted useful local species in their place — not against trees, but against the wrong trees planted for someone else on the village’s own land.

Seeds, agriculture and the ecofeminist strand

• Beej Bachao Andolan, from 1982 in Garhwal, revived indigenous crops and cropping systems displaced by the HYV seed package.
  • Vijay Jardhari and his colleagues walked the hills collecting landraces and restored baranaja, the twelve-grain intercrop.
  • The argument is that the Green Revolution traded diversity, drought resilience and nutritional range for yield — a bad bargain in rain-fed hill agriculture.
• Navdanya, founded by Vandana Shiva, extended the case nationally against monocropping and corporate control of seed.
  • Her ecofeminism traces the subordination of women and the degradation of nature to the same reductive, extractive rationality, and treats women’s agricultural knowledge as an alternative epistemology.
  • The critique — that it essentialises women as natural conservers and idealises subsistence — is taken up in the feminist literature.

Forests, autonomy and the Jharkhand belt

• Jharkhand’s Jangal Bachao Andolan arose in the 1980s against the conversion of natural sal forest into teak plantations.
  • The region’s forest politics has always been about land, forest and self-rule together, which is why it produced a state.
• Pathalgadi, from 2017-18, is the contemporary assertion of that claim.
  • Villages erect stone plaques inscribing the Fifth Schedule and PESA and declaring the gram sabha sovereign within village boundaries.
  • The response — sedition cases against thousands, and dispute over whether the plaques declared autonomy or merely recited the Constitution — shows how quickly a claim of customary self-rule is read as a claim against the state.

The institutional answers

• Joint Forest Management, from the 1990 circular and the National Forest Policy 1988, created village committees sharing protection duties and usufruct with the department.
  • It ended the fiction that villagers were only encroachers, but rested on executive circulars, not rights — the department remained owner, and could withdraw.
• The Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act 2006 answered Chipko’s question.
  • It recognises individual, community and community forest resource rights, and requires gram sabha consent for diversion of forest land.
  • Its preamble calls this the correction of a “historical injustice”.
• Implementation is the weak point.
  • Ministry of Tribal Affairs reporting through 2025-26 shows roughly 2.4 million individual titles but only about 1.2 lakh community forest rights titles, against a potential of some 1.77 lakh forest villages.
  • About 1.87 million claims have been rejected — close to one rejection per title granted.
  • Community forest resource rights, the provision that would actually transfer control, are the least implemented part of the Act.

Dams and displacement

Large dams occupied the space that trees had held. From Tehri in the north to Silent Valley in the south, Koel Karo in the east to Sardar Sarovar in the west, river valley projects were the ferocious disputes of the 1980s and after.

Silent Valley, 1978-83

• The Kerala State Electricity Board proposed a 120 MW hydel project at Sairandhri on the Kunthipuzha, costing about ₹17 crore.
  • The site was identified in 1928-29 and the project proposed in 1958.
  • The submergence area was one of the last undisturbed tracts of tropical evergreen rainforest in peninsular India, holding a significant population of the endangered lion-tailed macaque.
• The Kerala Sasthra Sahithya Parishad, a mass people’s science organisation, led the opposition and turned a technical objection into a popular campaign; the poet Sugathakumari and Kerala’s literary establishment gave it public voice.
• No human community faced displacement. That single fact makes Silent Valley the one major Indian case closer to classical conservation than to environmentalism of the poor — the easiest Indian victory to explain and the hardest to generalise from.
• The project was abandoned and the area declared a national park on 15 November 1984, inaugurated 7 September 1985.
  • The instructive part is the coalition — scientists, writers, a science movement and a sympathetic central government against a state electricity board.

Tehri

• A high earth-and-rockfill dam on the Bhagirathi in Garhwal, fought for over three decades by the Tehri Bandh Virodhi Sangharsh Samiti, founded by Virendra Datt Saklani.
  • Sunderlal Bahuguna brought national attention through repeated fasts at the dam site.
• The objections were four.
  • Seismic sensitivity of a fragile young mountain chain, and the consequences of dam failure.
  • Submergence of forest and farmland, and the drowning of the historic town of Tehri.
  • Siltation from a deforested catchment, shortening the reservoir’s life and undermining the project’s own economics.
• The dam was completed, the reservoir filled, the town is under water.
  • Tehri shows that sustained mobilisation, an iconic leader and a genuine scientific objection are together insufficient against a project the state has decided to build.

Narmada Bachao Andolan

The Narmada Valley Development Plan is the largest river valley scheme attempted in India and the most contested development project in the country’s history.

• Scale: 30 major dams, 135 medium and roughly 3,000 small dams on the Narmada and its tributaries.
• The Sardar Sarovar Project became the focus, and its defining feature is an inter-state asymmetry: the command area lies overwhelmingly in Gujarat, while 193 of the 243 villages to be submerged are in Madhya Pradesh. Benefits and costs are separated by a state boundary, which is why the politics never resolved.
• Medha Patkar built the movement from village organising in the submergence zone; Baba Amte moved to the valley and gave it Gandhian moral authority; Arundhati Roy gave it global literary reach and drew a contempt notice for her trouble.
• The strategic shift is the most instructive thing about the NBA. It began in the mid-1980s demanding proper resettlement; by 1988-89 it opposed the dam itself, arguing that rehabilitation at that scale was not merely unperformed but impossible and that the cost-benefit case did not survive scrutiny.
• The Morse Commission of June 1992 was the World Bank’s first-ever independent review of one of its own projects.
  • It found resettlement and environmental appraisal fundamentally inadequate and told the Bank to “step back”; the Bank withdrew in 1993 and India built the dam alone.
  • The Commission led directly to the World Bank Inspection Panel.
• Supreme Court, 18 October 2000, Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India, decided 2:1.
  • CJI A.S. Anand and B.N. Kirpal J permitted construction to the sanctioned height subject to phased rehabilitation clearance, holding that the Court should not sit in appeal over a long-deliberated policy decision.
  • S.P. Bharucha J dissented, holding that the project lacked valid environmental clearance.
• The height was raised and the dam inaugurated on 17 September 2017, with rehabilitation still unresolved and submergence-season protests continuing.
• The NBA lost the dam and changed the law. Its durable legacy is having made resettlement and rehabilitation a policy question — the National Rehabilitation Policies of 2003 and 2007, and eventually LARR 2013.

Chipko and the Narmada Bachao Andolan compared

	Chipko	Narmada Bachao Andolan
Origin	1973, Mandal, Chamoli, Garhwal	Mid-1980s, Narmada valley, three states
Issue	Use rights over forest produce against contractors	Displacement and submergence by a large dam
Character	Against removal of a resource in place	Against removal of the people from the place
Leadership	Bhatt, Bahuguna, Gaura Devi; village cooperatives	Medha Patkar, Baba Amte; a valley-wide body
Method	Tree-hugging, folk song, padayatra; largely local	Satyagraha, jal samarpan, fasts, litigation, global advocacy
Scale	Localised, then a national symbol	National and international from the start
Target	Forest Department and timber contractors	The state, the courts and the World Bank
Outcome	Won: felling ban above 1,000 m, 1980	Lost: dam built, inaugurated 2017
Legacy	Grassroots ecology; feeds into FCA 1980, FRA 2006	R&R as policy; Morse Commission; LARR 2013

• What they share matters as much as what divides them: Gandhian non-violence, prominent women participants, and leadership by outsiders-turned-insiders who could translate a village grievance into a national argument.

The other valleys

• Koel Karo, Bihar and later Jharkhand: a hydroelectric scheme threatening Munda and Oraon villages, sacred groves and burial stones.
  • Resistance was coordinated by the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and the Communist Party of India alongside the Koel Karo Jan Sangathan, through demonstrations, work stoppages and village road blockades sustained over decades.
  • Police firing at Tapkara in February 2001 killed eight Adivasi protesters; the project was shelved — a rare outright win for a dam-affected population.
• Bhopalpatnam–Inchampalli, on the Maharashtra–Madhya Pradesh border, threatened large tracts of forest and tribal settlement in the Godavari basin.
  • Opposition was initiated by unaffiliated voluntary organisations and inspired by Baba Amte — the same figure as at Koel Karo, a very different organisational form.
• Bodhghat on the Indravati in Bastar was shelved in the 1990s after Adivasi and environmental objection, and has been repeatedly revived.
• Polavaram on the Godavari is the live contemporary case: a national project submerging Adivasi villages in the Scheduled Areas of three states, with unresolved rehabilitation, contested submergence estimates and objections from Odisha and Telangana. It is the standing test of whether LARR 2013 and PESA bind a project the Union has designated national.
• Subansiri Lower and the wider North-East hydropower push carry the argument into the eastern Himalaya, where downstream Assamese and upstream Arunachali interests diverge, seismicity is high, and cumulative basin impact has never been properly assessed.

The displacement arithmetic

• Walter Fernandes is the authority on the numbers: development projects displaced or deprived of livelihood roughly 60 million people between 1947 and 2000.
• The composition is the point. Adivasis, about 8 per cent of the population, are estimated at over 40 per cent of the displaced, with Dalits also heavily over-represented, and only about a third of the displaced were resettled in any planned way.
• Omnivores and ecosystem people is not a metaphor; it is a description of who moves and who gets the water.

Water bodies and fisheries

The third family of conflicts involves artisanal fisherfolk — distinct endogamous communities along the coast and the rivers whose dependence on a living resource was undermined within a generation.

The Kerala trawler conflict

• Mechanised trawlers, introduced from the 1950s and expanded for the export market, transformed the ecology and economy of Kerala’s fishery.
  • The sequence is textbook common-pool collapse: landings rose rapidly, then stagnated and fell relatively, as trawling damaged the seabed and took juveniles.
  • A minority of artisanal fishers moved to capital-intensive methods; the majority were competed out by boats they could not match.
• The response was a full movement — strikes, processions and violent confrontations with trawler owners — organised by the Kerala Swatantra Matsya Thozhilali Federation and, nationally, the National Fishworkers’ Forum.
• The central demand was a monsoon trawling ban during the breeding season.
  • A partial ban in 1988 and 1989 produced a demonstrable increase in the post-monsoon harvest — a movement’s ecological claim tested and vindicated within two seasons.
  • A livelihood movement generated a conservation measure the fisheries department had not: environmentalism of the poor in operational form.

Ganga Mukti Andolan

• In Bhagalpur, Bihar, two lineages claimed inherited panidari — water-lordship — over a stretch of the Ganga, said to date to Mughal times, and levied fees on some 40,000 fishermen for the right to fish a public river.
• Young socialists, notably Anil Prakash and Jagannath Sarkar, organised the fishers from the early 1980s into the Ganga Mukti Andolan, which fought on two fronts at once — against industrial effluent destroying the catch, and against a monopoly right over water. Pollution and property were the same problem to the people affected.
• January 1991: the contract system and zamindari over rivers were abolished in Bihar and traditional fishers obtained unrestricted access to all its rivers, including a 500-kilometre stretch of the Ganga. It is the clearest case of an environmental movement abolishing a property right.

Chilika, rivers and water as a commons

• Chilika Bachao Andolan resisted the conversion of India’s largest brackish-water lagoon into commercial prawn culture, including a large Tata aquaculture project; agitation, litigation and the Coastal Regulation Zone framework restrained it. The argument that export aquaculture privatises a commons and salinises the land behind it recurs from Chilika to the Sundarbans.
• Ganga cleaning has run since the Ganga Action Plan 1985, replaced by Namami Gange in 2014, with heavy expenditure and modest results.
  • Narain’s insistence that the binding constraint is sewage, not only industrial effluent, has been repeatedly borne out.
  • G.D. Agarwal, an engineer turned monk as Swami Sanand, died on the 111th day of a fast, in October 2018, against hydropower on the upper Ganga.
• In 2017 the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and Yamuna legal persons with guardians appointed for them; the Supreme Court stayed the order months later as unworkable. The idea survives as jurisprudence even though the order did not.
• Plachimada, Kerala: a Coca-Cola bottling plant opened in 2000, drawing several lakh litres of groundwater daily.
  • Adivasi women held a continuous roadside dharna from 2002, the Perumatty panchayat cancelled the licence in 2003, and the plant closed in 2004.
  • A high-power committee in 2010 assessed damages at about ₹216 crore; Kerala’s 2011 compensation tribunal Bill never received assent. A parallel campaign ran at Mehdiganj.
  • It is the clearest Indian articulation of water as a commons: groundwater is not an unlimited appurtenance of the landowner above it, and a panchayat may say no.

Mining

Doon Valley: two environmentalisms in one place

• Limestone quarrying expanded steadily in the Doon Valley after 1947, producing deforestation, drying springs, gully erosion and debris flows across cultivated land. Opposition came from two socially opposite constituencies.
• Friends of the Doon and Save Mussoorie were founded by retired officials and executives, and joined by Mussoorie hoteliers worried about a scarred landscape’s effect on tourism.
  • They are fairly characterised as NIMBY environmentalists, concerned above all to protect a privileged landscape from defacement.
  • Villagers of the affected valleys fought the same quarries because their springs, fields and grazing land were being destroyed.
• The same valley produced elite conservation and subaltern livelihood protest simultaneously, on the same object, for different reasons — the North–South distinction inside one Indian district.
• Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra v. State of Uttar Pradesh (principal orders 1985) is treated as India’s first environmental public interest litigation.
  • The Supreme Court ordered the closure of most limestone quarries, holding permanent ecological damage to outweigh lost mining revenue.
  • It established that a court could shut down lawful economic activity on environmental grounds.

Gandhamardan

• The public sector Bharat Aluminium Company (BALCO) was permitted to mine roughly 900 acres of densely forested hill in the Gandhamardan range of Sambalpur district, Odisha; the foundation stone was laid in May 1983 and mining began about two years later.
• Objections were concrete: erosion, deforestation and pollution of water sources; the hills feed two significant tributaries of the Mahanadi and support over a million people; and blasting threatened the historic temples that draw substantial pilgrimage.
• After a persistent five-year campaign by local communities, students and Sarvodaya activists, BALCO’s operations ended by the close of 1986, leaving a very large bauxite deposit unmined. It is the first major Indian instance of a community stopping a public-sector mine outright, and it prefigures Niyamgiri by a quarter of a century.

Niyamgiri

• The Dongria Kondh, a particularly vulnerable tribal group, opposed bauxite mining on the Niyamgiri hills, allocated by the Odisha Mining Corporation to feed Vedanta’s alumina refinery at Lanjigarh. Niyam Raja, the presiding deity, is the hill itself.
• The Niyamgiri Suraksha Samiti organised the resistance, combining hill-top assemblies, human chains and sustained national and international advocacy against a listed multinational. The Saxena Committee (2010) found violations of the Forest Rights Act and PESA, and forest clearance was withdrawn.
• Supreme Court, 2013: the gram sabhas were to decide whether the project affected the community’s religious and cultural rights under the FRA. All twelve rejected it — properly described as the first referendum on a development project, and still the strongest working demonstration of the FRA’s consent provision.
• Sijimali, in the same bauxite belt across Rayagada and Kalahandi, is the current front, and it shows what the state learned.
  • Vedanta won the 1,548-hectare deposit at auction in 2023.
  • Villagers allege the December 2023 gram sabhas were fabricated, with signatures of the dead and simultaneous meetings in different places, and held fresh assemblies in 2024 unanimously rejecting it.
  • Stage-I forest clearance was recommended in December 2025 and final diversion clearance granted by May 2026, amid police action and arrests in April 2026 and the withdrawal of villagers’ lawyers after raids.
• A consent provision is only as strong as the record of the meeting. The FRA’s most powerful clause has been answered not by repeal but by procedural capture.

The rest of the extractive frontier

• Anti-POSCO, Jagatsinghpur, Odisha: the POSCO Pratirodh Sangram Samiti resisted a 12-million-tonne steel plant and captive port from 2005 through betel-vine cultivators’ blockades and village encampments, with FRA claims as the legal hook. POSCO withdrew in 2017 — a rare case of foreign capital abandoning an Indian project under village resistance.
• Kudankulam is the anti-nuclear case: fasts and sea blockades by fishing communities from 2011 under the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy, led by S.P. Udayakumar.
  • The state answered with sedition and waging-war charges against thousands; the plant was commissioned and the cases became a civil liberties scandal. Jaitapur saw parallel resistance.
  • At Mahan in Madhya Pradesh, gram sabha resolutions and the Mahan Sangharsh Samiti kept coal blocks in dense sal forest from being mined.
• Hasdeo Aranya, Chhattisgarh, is the largest live forest conflict: Adivasi villages have resisted coal blocks in a 170,000-hectare contiguous forest for over a decade through the Hasdeo Aranya Bachao Sangharsh Samiti.
  • Ghatbarra’s recognised community forest rights were cancelled by the state, and the cancellation was upheld by the High Court in 2025 on the reasoning that they had been granted “by mistake”.
  • A 2025 proposal to divert a further 1,742 hectares for the Kente Extension block would fell several lakh trees.
  • A right that can be cancelled once mining has begun is not a right.

Industry, pollution and the urban turn

Bhopal

• The gas leak from the Union Carbide plant on the night of 2-3 December 1984 killed thousands within days and injured several hundred thousand. What followed was a survivors’ movement, led substantially by working-class women’s organisations, on three demands: compensation, long-term medical care and monitoring, and criminal accountability.
• The Union of India settled all civil claims in 1989 for $470 million, without survivor consent.
  • A curative petition for enhancement was dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2023.
  • Criminal liability produced convictions in 2010 under a section carrying a maximum of two years — twenty-six years of litigation for a two-year sentence.
  • Site remediation was never completed.
• Its governance consequence was immediate: Bhopal produced the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 and the Public Liability Insurance Act 1991. India’s strongest environmental law is a monument to its worst environmental failure.

Sterlite, Tuticorin

• Vedanta’s Sterlite Copper smelter at Thoothukudi, commissioned in the mid-1990s after being refused sites elsewhere, had a long record of sulphur dioxide emissions, arsenic and slag disposal, groundwater contamination and repeated closure orders — including a Supreme Court order in 2013 imposing a ₹100 crore penalty while allowing operations to continue.
• Local resistance — the anti-Sterlite people’s movement and allied fisher, farmer and residents’ associations — ran for two decades through public hearings, litigation, hunger strikes and periodic mass agitation, latterly against a proposed doubling of capacity.
• On the hundredth day of continuous protest, 22 May 2018, police fired on a march to the district collectorate. Thirteen people were killed and many wounded; video showed shooters positioned on vehicles and victims shot from behind.
• The Justice Aruna Jagadeesan Commission found the firing unjustified, identified failures of preventive policing and administrative response, and recommended action against named officials.
• The Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board ordered permanent closure at the end of May 2018 and the plant was sealed; the Madras High Court upheld the closure on 18 August 2020; the Supreme Court dismissed Vedanta’s appeal on 29 February 2024, citing serious and repeated violations, and rejected its review petition later that year.
• What the episode demonstrates falls under three heads.
  • State-capital alignment: a plant repeatedly found in violation ran for twenty years because regulatory findings were not enforcement.
  • The policing of protest: a locally rooted movement was answered with lethal force.
  • The limits of regulatory institutions: the board acted only when the political cost of inaction exceeded the cost of closure. Regulation followed the deaths; it did not prevent them.
• The critical reading has to include the movement itself.
  • It was episodic rather than continuous, resting on periodic mass mobilisation rather than sustained legal and technical capacity.
  • It never built an alternative employment argument in a town where the plant was a large employer.
  • It won finally through courts and a state government facing an election. It stopped one smelter; the copper came from imports and other plants.

The urban turn

• Aarey, Mumbai, October 2019: roughly 2,141 trees were felled overnight for a Metro car shed, about twenty-nine protesters arrested and Section 144 imposed.
  • A Supreme Court special sitting ordered their release and halted further felling.
  • The car shed moved to Kanjurmarg in 2020 and back to Aarey in 2022 — the case that best shows how far an environmental win depends on which government is in office.
• Aravalli: the Aravalli Bachao Citizens Movement has campaigned against illegal mining, encroachment and Haryana’s 10,000-acre jungle safari park proposal of April 2022.
  • The argument is that it would fragment habitat in Delhi-NCR’s ecological buffer.
  • The Supreme Court accepted a formal definition of the “Aravalli Hills and Ranges” in November 2025.
  • On 29 December 2025 it stayed its own order and constituted a fresh High-Powered Expert Committee, after environmentalists argued the accepted definition left much of the range unprotected.
• Delhi’s air is the genuinely post-material Indian environmentalism.
  • M.C. Mehta’s litigation produced the court-mandated conversion of public transport to CNG from 1998, and later orders on fuel standards and industrial relocation.
  • Then came the odd-even experiments, the Graded Response Action Plan and the statutory Commission for Air Quality Management from 2021.
  • Stubble burning remains the unsolved seasonal component, and its solution is an agricultural-economics problem rather than an air-quality one.
• Urban environmentalism is beneficiary-led rather than victim-led, and sometimes runs against environmentalism of the poor — as when air-quality orders shut small units and displace informal workers.

The Himalayan and Ghats carrying-capacity question

• Three recent failures have put carrying capacity back into argument.
  • Joshimath, January 2023: land subsidence, cracked houses and mass evacuation in a town built on old landslide debris, with hydropower tunnelling and highway widening implicated.
  • Silkyara, November 2023: forty-one workers trapped for seventeen days — the same infrastructure push, a different failure mode.
  • Wayanad, 30 July 2024: landslides in Kerala’s Western Ghats killed several hundred people, and the refusal to classify it a national disaster reopened an old argument about quarrying and slope construction.
• The Gadgil and Kasturirangan reports on the Western Ghats are the most instructive failure in Indian environmental policy.
  • The Gadgil report (2011) proposed treating the entire Ghats as ecologically sensitive with three graded zones, a statutory Western Ghats Ecology Authority, and bottom-up decisions through gram sabhas.
  • The Kasturirangan High Level Working Group (2013) cut the sensitive area to about 37 per cent, excluding cultivated and settled land.
  • Both were resisted, most fiercely in Kerala, where church-backed planter and smallholder mobilisation, hartals and cross-party opposition made Gadgil electorally untouchable.
  • The draft Ecologically Sensitive Area notification has been reissued repeatedly — most recently covering about 56,825 sq km across six states — without ever being finalised.
  • This is environmentalism defeated by a popular counter-mobilisation, and it cannot be dismissed as manufactured.
  • Those who defeated Gadgil were smallholders who believed, with reason, that a conservation regime designed elsewhere would criminalise their land use. Any account of environmentalism of the poor has to explain a case in which the poor were on the other side.

The current frontier

• Ken-Betwa, the first river-link to be built: foundation stone laid at Khajuraho on 25 December 2024, cost above ₹44,000 crore, the Daudhan dam submerging a substantial part of the Panna Tiger Reserve and displacing over 7,000 families across 22 villages. Adivasi marches and hunger strikes over rehabilitation continued through 2026.
• Par-Tapi-Narmada, which would have moved water from the Western Ghats to Saurashtra and Kutch, was shelved in 2022 after Adivasi mobilisation in south Gujarat — a rare pre-emptive win, delivered by an approaching state election; Bedti-Varada in Karnataka drew thousands on 14 June 2022.
• The India-based Neutrino Observatory in Theni stalled after Poovulagin Nanbargal petitioned on its effect on the Mathikettan–Periyar tiger corridor; the Paradip PCPIR drew protest at Mahakalapada, Kendrapara, in August 2022, over mangroves and fishing livelihoods.
• Great Nicobar: an ₹81,000 crore port, township, airport and power project diverting roughly 130 sq km of tribal reserve and comparable rainforest, and felling about a million trees.
  • The Nicobarese Tribal Council withdrew its no-objection; in January 2026 its chairman alleged pressure to sign land-surrender certificates and said no forest rights have been recognised at all.
  • Consent for the largely uncontacted Shompen was obtained through officials rather than from them. The project proceeds.
• The Sundarbans after Cyclone Amphan, May 2020, produced the #SavetheSundarbans campaign — an internet-and-diaspora mobilisation for a mangrove system facing sea-level rise faster than most coasts.

The impact on environmental governance

Almost every significant piece of Indian environmental law is a response to a movement, a disaster or an international commitment — usually to all three. The chain is causal, not chronological.

Instrument	What triggered it	What movements got
42nd Amendment 1976 — Art. 48A, Art. 51A(g)	Stockholm 1972	Constitutional text for later litigation
Water Act 1974, Air Act 1981	Stockholm; industrial pollution	Statutory pollution control boards
Forest (Conservation) Act 1980	Chipko and Himalayan deforestation	Central clearance for diverting forest land
Environment (Protection) Act 1986	Bhopal 1984	Umbrella powers, standards, citizen suit provision
PESA 1996	Adivasi self-rule demands	Gram sabha primacy in Scheduled Areas
EIA notified 1994, recast 2006	Anti-dam and anti-mining campaigns	Public hearing and appraisal before clearance
Biological Diversity Act 2002	Biopiracy campaigns, seed movements	Access-and-benefit-sharing, biodiversity committees
Forest Rights Act 2006	Forest movements; Chipko’s unanswered demand	IFR, CFR and gram sabha consent
NGT Act 2010	Overloaded courts; specialised claims	A dedicated environmental tribunal
LARR 2013	Narmada and the displacement record	Consent thresholds and social impact assessment

The judicial channel

Movements that could not win in the legislature won in court, using Article 21 as the hook.

• Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (1985) — the first environmental PIL and the first judicial mine closures.
• M.C. Mehta v. Union of India (Oleum gas leak, 1987) — absolute liability for hazardous industry, without the exceptions of Rylands v. Fletcher.
• Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991) — a right to pollution-free water and air within Article 21.
• Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum (1996) — the precautionary principle and polluter pays read into Indian law, with sustainable development as a balancing standard.
• T.N. Godavarman Thirumulpad (1996) — “forest” given its dictionary meaning, so protection follows the land’s character rather than its record; a continuing mandamus running three decades.
• M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath (1997) — the public trust doctrine: rivers, forests and air are held by the state in trust and cannot be converted to private ownership.
• M.K. Ranjitsinh v. Union of India, 21 March 2024 — the Great Indian Bustard case, recognising a right against the adverse effects of climate change under Articles 14 and 21, the first explicit Indian constitutional climate right.
  • The same judgment replaced the 2021 blanket prohibition on overhead transmission lines across roughly 99,000 sq km with an expert committee on feasibility, and a later 2024 order refined the directions — expanding the right and narrowing the remedy in the same breath.
• The channel’s limits are structural: courts act case by case, cannot supervise implementation, and depend on someone bringing the case.

The counter-current, stated honestly

The statutory chain is only half the story. Since about 2020 the direction of travel has reversed.

Development	Effect
Draft EIA notification 2020	Would have allowed post-facto clearance and shrunk public-hearing time; dropped after one of the largest public-objection campaigns in Indian environmental history
Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act 2023 — Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam	Narrows the 1980 Act to recorded forest land and exempts strips near roads, rail and security infrastructure, stripping “deemed forests” of protection
Supreme Court interim order, 19 February 2024	States must keep applying the broad Godavarman test, freezing the narrowing pending final adjudication
Vanashakti (16 May 2025)	Barred ex-post-facto environmental clearances outright
Review recalled, 18 November 2025 (CREDAI v. Vanashakti)	2:1 — CJI B.R. Gavai and K. Vinod Chandran J permit retrospective clearance on payment of penalty; Ujjal Bhuyan J dissents, calling it “a step in retrogression”. The May 2025 position is no longer the law.
Green Credit Programme 2023	Tradeable plantation credits usable toward compensatory afforestation — criticised for treating plantation as equivalent to forest
ISFR 2023 (released 21 December 2024)	Forest and tree cover reported at 8,27,357 sq km, 25.17% — forest cover alone 21.76% — the objection being that plantations and orchards are counted as forest cover
NGT’s weakening	Chronic vacancies of judicial and expert members, bench thinning, and an appellate route straight to the Supreme Court
FRA implementation	Community forest resource rights barely recognised; Ghatbarra’s CFR cancelled and the cancellation judicially upheld

• FCRA has become the instrument of choice against organised environmental advocacy: Greenpeace India’s registration was cancelled and its accounts frozen, and the “anti-development” and “foreign-funded” framing does the political work prosecution would do more visibly.
• The pattern is not deregulation but reallocation of discretion. Clearance moves from process to executive judgment, and the movements’ hard-won procedural rights — hearing, consent, prior appraisal — are the first casualties.

Assessment

Did post-liberalisation concentration cause the movements to fail?

The proposition has real force and is not simply to be rejected.

• The case for it. After 1991 the adversary changed scale — private and foreign capital, sovereign-backed projects, and a state whose growth targets depend on clearing them.
  • Sedition, UAPA and FCRA became instruments of environmental policy.
  • Narmada, Polavaram, Sterlite’s twenty-year run, Hasdeo, Sijimali and Great Nicobar are the ledger.
• The case against it. Movements after 1991 won what they had never won before.
  • Niyamgiri’s twelve gram sabhas (2013), POSCO’s withdrawal (2017), Sterlite’s closure upheld to the Supreme Court (2024), Par-Tapi-Narmada shelved (2022), Mahan, Aarey’s stay, and the collapse of the 2020 draft EIA notification.
  • Liberalisation also produced the statutory machinery they now litigate through, and a climate and urban environmentalism that did not exist in 1991.
• The position worth taking: post-liberalisation concentration has not caused the movements to fail; it has changed the terms on which they can win.
  • They win procedurally and locally — a clearance quashed, a gram sabha upheld, a plant closed.
  • They lose structurally, because the model generating the next project is untouched.
  • Liberalisation raised the number of fires without disabling the fire brigade.

What separates the wins from the losses

Won	Lost	Why
Silent Valley, Gandhamardan, Niyamgiri, POSCO, Sterlite, Par-Tapi-Narmada	Narmada, Tehri, Polavaram, Ken-Betwa, Great Nicobar, Hasdeo
Small or single-site project	Flagship national project with sunk political capital	Reversal cost
A statutory consent hook (FRA, PESA, gram sabha)	No consent mechanism, or one procedurally captured	Legal purchase
Judicial entry point available	Court defers to policy as in NBA (2000)	Forum
Scientific constituency and media attention	Technical case contested or invisible	Legitimacy
No large beneficiary constituency on the other side	Command-area or urban beneficiaries organised and voting	Counter-mobilisation

• The generalisation: movements win where they can make a project legally defective and politically cheap to abandon. Where the project is a flagship, they lose regardless of the merits.

Risk society, and what it explains

Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens describe modern society as a risk society, in which social structures become unstable and permeable.

“Risk may be defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself.” — Ulrich Beck

• The hazards come from the growth in productive forces, not from scarcity, and risk is democratic in distribution in a way that class is not: smog does not check an address.
• The frame fits Indian urban and climate environmentalism well and fits Chipko badly. Beck describes hazards modernisation manufactures for everyone; Chipko described a resource taken from some and given to others. Delhi’s air is a risk-society problem; Niyamgiri is a property problem.

The millennial and climate turn

• Fridays for Future India grew from the global school-strike movement; in 2020 its convenor was served notice under the UAPA over an email campaign against the draft EIA notification — later called an error by police, but a revealing one.
• Extinction Rebellion has roughly twenty chapters in India; Licypriya Kangujam is its best-known child campaigner; Disha Ravi was arrested in the toolkit case in 2021 for editing a protest document, and the bail order’s insistence that citizens are not “in the doghouse” for disagreeing with state policy is the episode’s lasting text.
• The honest critique is that this stratum imitates its Western counterparts in vocabulary, visual grammar and demands, and is disconnected from the livelihood movements that are the actual Indian tradition.
• The reconciliation is available and has not happened: India’s climate argument is Agarwal and Narain’s equity argument, and this movement’s natural allies are the fishers of Thoothukudi and the Adivasis of Hasdeo.

The internal debate the field has not settled

• Sustainable development is a serious policy frame for bureaucrats and urbanists, who criticise reflexive opposition to development and ask for realism. For many activists it is a joke — a phrase that lets a project proceed with a mitigation annexure attached.
• Forest officials still assert exclusive “scientific expertise”, rejecting villagers’ proposals on species selection, spacing and harvesting. The dispute is not about silviculture but about whose knowledge counts as knowledge, and so about who administers the forest.
• The way out runs from a politics of blame through a politics of negotiation to a politics of collaboration — but collaboration needs parties of comparable standing, which is what the consent provisions were meant to create and what Sijimali shows can be manufactured away.

The balance

Guha is right about outcomes: polluted skies, dead rivers, disappearing forests, displaced peasants and tribes. He is too harsh on institutions, because the whole architecture of Indian environmental governance exists only because movements forced it into being. The movements failed to change the model of development and succeeded in changing the law that model has to obey. Both halves of that sentence are the answer.

India’s environmental movements have not stopped the machine. They have made it explain itself, and occasionally made it stop.