Abstract
Madhav Gadgil, A Walk Up the Hill: Living with People and Nature, Penguin Random House, 2023, 424 pp., ₹999, ISBN 9780670097043 (Hardcover).
Madhav Gadgil’s autobiography A Walk Up the Hill is a remarkable story, one that somehow manages to connect the most unlikely of dots—evolutionary biology, mathematical population dynamics, bamboo harvests, community investment in resource management, the caste system, mining, dam building, and deforestation. It is a travelogue that takes the reader through large parts of the country, signposting the physical locations and the social and political contexts of so many debates in conservation, coupled with the environmental disasters, protests, and legislation that have defined India’s environment/development interface. Perhaps most of all, it is the story of a remarkable man who appears to have straddled the worlds of academia, activism, and policymaking with seemingly endless energy, panache, and humour.
Gadgil traces his story from growing up in his bird-watching, economist father’s house (his mother is almost entirely missing from the narrative), where he first fell in love with nature, but also where he first partook of readings and conversations on caste, poverty, and the economic and environmental costs of big development. After an undergraduate degree in zoology, he joined a PhD programme at Harvard, where he spent six formative years as a student and faculty. Undoubtedly, one of the high points of being at Harvard in the 1960s was the opportunity to combine interests in theoretical and computational biology, and he was certainly a pioneer at this.
Perhaps a precursor to the direction his work would take him, Gadgil and his climatologist wife, Sulochana, decided to forsake the excitement and pleasures of an American academic’s life. He was part of a generation of Indian scholars studying abroad who returned in the hope of contributing to the building of a modern India.
Ever since, he has stayed true to his calling and has been involved in both institution-building and participating in India’s developmental journey. After a brief stint in Pune, the couple moved in 1973 to the recently set-up Centre for Theoretical Studies at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru. Gadgil eventually set up and ran IISc’s Centre for Ecological Sciences, one of the foremost centres of ecological study in the country, and much of the ecological work he writes about has taken place in collaboration with a range of students, many now prominent ecologists in their own right.
With the move to Bengaluru, his ecological research moved increasingly from the highly theoretical—mathematical modelling of animal and plant populations—to the highly applied, with work on vegetation mapping, bamboo ecology, biomass studies, wildlife-human conflict, biodiversity monitoring, and others. His interests also extended to anthropology, economics, and history to understand how social structure, cultural practices, and a larger political economy have informed patterns of resource use across the country and how such practices have changed over time.
Gadgil was keenly aware of the distinction between community/household dependence on and consumption of natural resources, and industrial dependence and resource extraction. In the former, there is a clear rationale for using resources sustainably: the very survival of the community is at stake. Industrial extraction, on the other hand, is not similarly constrained. If resources get exhausted in one location, industry can move on or import materials from neighbouring areas. Similarly, industries suffer none of the externalities that local communities do. For example, local communities end up bearing the health costs of industrial effluents that are casually released into a nearby river. Big dams will generate electricity, supposedly for national goods; the community whose lands are submerged will pay the price by virtue of the inevitably shoddy compensatory package that will be offered.
The latter part of Gadgil’s career has focussed largely on this intersection of environment and big development. More and more of our natural resources are exploited to satisfy seemingly limitless global demand. He has been vocal in his opposition to policies and practices that have created ecological refugees; his opposition finds expression in his academic and popular writing, extensive public lectures, and the work of a wide range of government-appointed committees and task forces he has been a part of.
I have enjoyed reading this book, but there has remained a nagging discomfort as I read the second half, which relates to a largely undifferentiated use of the idea of ‘community’. Gadgil’s core lament has been the failure to involve local communities in conservation. But in calling for greater decentralisation, he rarely seems to examine intra- and inter-community divisions that end up informing the terms on which households access natural resources. In other words, not all sections of the community have equal access to resources, and correspondingly, it is unlikely that all sections will be equally committed to conserving these resources.
By way of illustration, sacred groves all over the country are important islands of forest wealth, a direct outcome of community-led conservation. But these are also spaces from which dalits and menstruating women are often excluded. Wealthy farmers are able to enclose and conserve forest lands for their personal use, but in the process, they exclude the landless, dalits, or those from minority communities. Dalits might be denied access to particular water or forest resources, forcing them to walk long distances to procure their drinking water or fuel wood. Decentralised control over resources may result in improved management (or may not, depending on the nature of incentive structures at play), but it is unclear that the most marginal within our communities would approve of or benefit from decentralisation.
Gadgil reports on an experiment in local conservation in the district of Uttara Kannada in Karnataka. A detailed assessment of fodder, fuel, and leafy biomass consumed by wealthy land-owning farmers and poor landless households was undertaken by Gadgil and his students, and highlights, among other things, (a) that forest lands used by these communities are increasingly degraded owing to biomass consumption in excess of that produced by these forests; and (b) that the landless consume a significant, though smaller, fraction of the total biomass consumed by the landowners. Farmers were receptive to these findings and initiated work aimed at improving the condition of the forest. The landless, a central part of those dependent on the forests of Uttara Kannada, are not, however, part of the Hulgol Cooperative Society, the farmers’ collective that decided to restore these forests. As a result, while the magnitude of their dependence comes through in the research, they find only peripheral mention in Gadgil’s account of the conservation work in the area.
As a great deal of research in the social sciences has established, enhanced local control may be a necessary first step in improving resource management; it is unlikely to be a sufficient condition to ensure such improvement. The institutional norms and frameworks that will be necessary ingredients to ensuring more equitable and potentially more sustainable forms of resource extraction have been theorised, but examples founded on both principles remain elusive. If there is a missing dimension in this otherwise remarkable book, it is a more critical engagement with just how decentralised conservation might work. How does equity get factored into conservation efforts by highly divided societies? Even more important, could attempts at involving local communities in conservation serve to further elite control over scarce resources?
On the whole, however, while one might disagree with analyses at various points in the book and find parts repetitive, this is a sweeping, highly readable history of ideas and developments in science and India’s environmental movement, spanning close to six decades. It is also the story of a quite extraordinary man. A must-read for those interested in environment.