Discuss the various forms of environmental movements started in India. (2016)
Indian environmentalism is not about wilderness or posterity; it is about who gets the forest, the water and the fish now. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martínez-Alier (Varieties of Environmentalism, 1997) call this the environmentalism of the poor, and the contrast is the organising principle for any typology of Indian movements.
Why the Indian forms differ
Ronald Inglehart explained Western environmentalism as a post-materialist value shift: once material security is assured, affluent publics begin to prize quality of life, so their movements defend landscape, species and amenity. Indian movements begin at the opposite end. The resource under threat is the means of subsistence, so ecology is argued in the language of rights, entitlement and justice, not of conservation. Consequently the forms are best classified by the resource at stake and the mode of dispossession — and each form fuses a “green” claim with a “red” one.
Forms by resource and dispossession
| Form | Mode of dispossession | Representative cases | Social base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forest rights | Commercial state forestry displacing subsistence use | Chipko (1973), Appiko (1983), Jungle Bachao Andolan | Hill peasants, adivasis |
| Anti-dam, anti-displacement | Submergence without rehabilitation | Silent Valley (abandoned 1983), Narmada Bachao Andolan (1985), Tehri | Oustees, valley cultivators |
| Anti-mining, land acquisition | Acquisition of common and tribal land | Niyamgiri, Singur and Nandigram | Adivasis, small peasants |
| Anti-pollution and urban | Externalised industrial and vehicular waste | Bhopal survivors (1984), Plachimada, Delhi’s CNG transition | Victims plus urban middle class |
| Anti-nuclear, energy siting | Risk imposed on host communities | Koodankulam | Coastal fishers |
| Fisheries and coasts | Industrial encroachment on marine commons | National Fishworkers’ Forum | Artisanal fishers |
Forms by ideology and strategy
Madhav Gadgil and Guha (This Fissured Land, 1992) cut the same material across ideological lines: a crusading Gandhian current resting on moral critique, sufficiency and non-violent satyagraha (Sunderlal Bahuguna, Tehri); an ecological-Marxist current locating the problem in unequal access and political economy, carried by people’s science movements such as the Kerala campaign that stopped Silent Valley; and an appropriate-technology current that combines struggle with reconstruction — afforestation, watershed and check-dam work.
What the typology reveals
- The recurring structure is one of scale: the losers are local, the gainers national. Gadgil and Guha’s omnivores, ecosystem people and ecological refugees make Indian environmental conflict a distributional fight among social groups, not between humanity and nature.
- The urban anti-pollution form is the partial exception, closest to the post-materialist type, which is why it succeeds fastest through courts rather than mobilisation.
- Their legacy is procedural: gram sabha consent under the Forest Rights Act, 2006, vindicated when twelve village assemblies refused mining at Niyamgiri after the Supreme Court’s 2013 order, and the National Green Tribunal (2010).
Conclusion
The variety of Indian environmental movements mirrors the variety of ways development dispossesses. Their common sociological significance is that they reframe environment as a question of entitlement rather than of aesthetics — a claim now being tested against the 2023 law narrowing the legal meaning of forest, which the Supreme Court restrained in February 2024.