“The environmental movements have challenged the policy and pattern of economic development in post – independent India.” Analyse with examples. (2009)
Post-independence planning rested on a consensus: state-led, capital-intensive industrialisation, with dams as Jawaharlal Nehru’s “temples of modern India” (Bhakra, 1954) and forests, rivers and minerals as state-owned inputs. From the 1970s environmental movements contested both the policy (what the state decided, and how) and the pattern (who paid and who gained).
What they challenged
- Ownership. The colonial Forest Acts of 1878 and 1927 made the state owner and villagers encroachers, and independent India kept the doctrine of eminent domain. Chipko (1973–74) and Jharkhand’s Jangal Bachao Andolan demanded use rights over forests.
- Scale. Big dams were the flagship. Silent Valley (1978–83) saved a rainforest; the Narmada Bachao Andolan made the World Bank withdraw from Sardar Sarovar (1993); Tehri was fought for three decades; Koel Karo was shelved after police killed eight protesters at Tapkara (2001). Nehru himself had warned against a disease of gigantism in 1958.
- Distribution. Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha (This Fissured Land, 1992; Ecology and Equity, 1995) showed development transferring resources from ecosystem people to omnivores, leaving ecological refugees. Walter Fernandes estimates some 60 million people displaced or deprived by projects since 1947, over two-fifths of them Adivasis.
- Commercialisation of commons. Kerala’s artisanal fishers, organised nationally in the National Fishworkers’ Forum, fought export-oriented mechanised trawling and won a monsoon trawling ban (from 1988); Karnataka villagers uprooted industrial eucalyptus (Kusnur, 1987); Gandhamardan’s villagers drove BALCO’s bauxite mine out in the 1980s.
The ideas behind the challenge
Guha distinguishes three strands:
- Crusading Gandhians, heirs of J. C. Kumarappa’s economy of permanence: Sunderlal Bahuguna’s ecology is permanent economy.
- Ecological Marxists, asking who owns and who is dispossessed.
- Appropriate technologists, seeking small, local alternatives, like Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s forest cooperatives.
- Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive (1988) added the ecofeminist charge that Western-style maldevelopment destroyed subsistence economies run by women.
How the components interact
State ownership made resources available cheaply; gigantic projects needed them in bulk; benefits flowed to cities, industry and command areas while costs fell on hill, forest and coastal communities. Each movement began as a local livelihood grievance and became a critique of the model once displacement and scale were linked. Liberalisation after 1991 added private capital (POSCO, from 2005) and the charge that protest was “anti-development”.
Limits of the challenge
- Procedure, not pattern. The Forest (Conservation) Act 1980, the Environment (Protection) Act 1986 and EIA clearance (1994; public hearings from 1997) regulated growth without changing its direction; Sunita Narain calls this firefighting, one site at a time.
- Flagship defeats. Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India (2000) let Sardar Sarovar proceed; Tehri was built.
- Division. Bhatt and Bahuguna disagreed on ends; beneficiaries in Gujarat counter-mobilised; the old Left dismissed ecology as bourgeois.
Since 2009 the challenge gained legal teeth (Niyamgiri’s gram sabha veto, 2013; the 2013 land-acquisition law) and met reversals (the 2023 forest-law amendment); in 2026 Great Nicobar and Hasdeo remain live fronts.
Conclusion
The movements challenged the policy more successfully than the pattern: they forced rehabilitation, clearance and consent into law, but growth through extraction continues. Their lasting achievement was to make development for whom? a political question.