Of the people? Oh, really?

Over the past month or two, the Ministry of Environment and Forests has been carefully trying to prevent itself from being at the centre of a storm brewing slowly but steadily. The storm is over the official suppression of India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), which is a national plan for environmental conservation in India. India is obliged to produce an NBSAP under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

During 2000-03, a unique decentralised planning process was sanctioned by the ministry. Village communities, NGOs, government officials, academics and scientists across the country participated in a range of meetings and activities to prepare action plans for their own states. Activities to invite people’s participation in each state ranged from village-level meetings and state workshops to innovations like biodiversity festivals, interactive radio drama, school biodiversity registers and boat races. The state-level plans that emerged were then collated into a single national plan by a 15-member core group of activists, scientists, academics and government officials appointed by the ministry and headed by the NGO, Kalpavriksh.

The idea was to produce a people’s plan emerging from the bottom up, rather than the usual top-down, centralised, consultant-driven plan. The NBSAP approach was based on the premise that biodiversity has ecological, cultural, spiritual as well as economic value, and impinges on every citizen; and that planning for its conservation should, therefore, be shaped by as many individuals as possible in an equitable process that allowed the most marginalised voices to be heard, especially those whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. The ultimate aim was to achieve biodiversity conservation as well as livelihood security.

Yet, at the end of this process, the ministry has chosen to suppress the plan. It was reportedly displeased with parts of the plan, including the statement that India’s current development paradigm is environmentally unsustainable. In Parliament, the ministry stated that the plan contained inaccuracies and would embarrass India internationally. But neither did it list out these inaccuracies to the core group, nor did it want to negotiate any changes. It appointed a separate committee to review the plan, but did not allow the core group to access the findings of the committee. It also instructed the core group not to make the plan public — which is ironic, to say the least, since it was prepared based on the inputs of a national, public process.

As far as international embarrassment is concerned, it is more likely that the ministry has brought embarrassment on itself by disowning the plan, because while the decentralised planning process was on, it was internationally promoted as a feather in the ministry’s cap. A promotional film produced by the NBSAP, funded by UNDP, even shows officials extolling the virtues of the process.

Having waited almost two years for the ministry to release the plan, Kalpavriksh and the core group have independently printed and released their version of the plan in several cities, starting with Delhi in October. In response, the ministry issued a press statement saying that the report was scientifically inaccurate, that it was starting a fresh process to make a new plan and that it was unfortunate that Rs 3 crore given to Kalpavriksh as consultancy fees had been wasted.

This was a knee-jerk response which the ministry is probably regretting — first, because several earlier drafts of the plan had been approved by the ministry without any objections as to their scientific validity; second, since the ministry itself channeled the Rs 3 crore to dozens of state-level organisations to conduct the decentralised process, the allegation emerges as a crude attempt to discredit Kalpavriksh; and finally, because the intention to start a fresh plan-making process challenges the credentials of nationally renowned scientists, development professionals and research institutes who were specifically appointed by the ministry, not to mention the involvement of natural resource managers at the grassroots.

While the ministry is under no obligation to accept the exact plan, it has an obligation to make the findings of the process public, and to finalise a mutually acceptable plan which respects the fact that the recommendations have emerged from the inputs of experts and grassroots communities across the country. Not doing so makes a mockery of a four-year decentralised process that was designed to produce a ‘people’s plan’.

There are two larger issues at stake here, which go beyond the release of this plan. First is the issue of accountability of the government to the public. The position taken by the ministry in this case is indicative of a larger malaise of non-accountability and non-transparency, which, for example, allows it to grant environmental clearances to industries in a non-transparent manner, allows it to issue orders that independent experts on official committees will not be allowed to voice their dissenting opinions outside the committee and allows it to allege financial irregularities by Kalpavriksh but without making the accounts public.

The second issue is the pretence of a government that, on the one hand, calls for civil society participation and decentralised governance in the spirit of the 73rd and 74th amendments of the Constitution  and, on the other, allows the Environment Ministry to suppress a plan that emerged out of the most decentralised environmental planning process ever conducted in this country. It is easy to conclude that as far as government transparency and civil society participation is concerned, the rhetoric of the government is quite different from the reality.