Turf wars, eco hassles

The opposition to listing Western Ghats in India as a natural World Heritage site should be considered ridiculous.

On July 1, Unesco listed the region comprising 39 spots along the Western Ghats in the Indian peninsula as a natural World Heritage site. This was met with strong state opposition. Politicians in surrounding states fear that the prestigious tag will make activities like mining, tree-felling and exploitation of water difficult.

The opposition should be considered ridiculous. In the past, Unesco has been accused of favouring European and North American sites in granting the World Heritage status, while ignoring the poorer countries. The Unesco tag could socially and economically transform a region that works hard to get recognition. Instead, south Indian politicians are not alone in opposing the World Heritage tag for the worst possible reasons. When the same World Heritage Committee of Unesco named the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem a World Heritage site on the same day, the government of Israel termed the decision “political”, fearing that the move would historicise the region and be seen by Palestinians as a step towards statehood.

The south Indian governments that oppose the tag — who may well be accused of having a nexus with the mining and other unsavoury interests — have been thrown into further confusion by the attitude of the Union government, which first lobbied intensely with the World Heritage Committee to get the status for the Western Ghats. However, now it seems uncertain about its benefits. Although the range has long been recognised as a global biodiversity hotspot, the Indian government’s efforts had become especially necessary since the International Union for the Conservation of Nature had advised Unesco to defer the decision.

But now that the recognition has come, the Indian government is dithering over taking the obvious next steps: to announce policies and plans to protect and conserve the region. All major political parties of India have significant presence in the six states that share the mineral-rich 1,400-kilometre Western Ghats that is home to many major rivers. At the prodding of the World Heritage Committee, the Indian government had mandated a panel of experts in March 2010 to study the status of the range and recommend steps to protect and conserve the ecology of the region.

The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, under leading ecologist Madhav Gadgil, returned with sweeping recommendations in August 2011, which so shocked the Indian government that it promptly buried it without releasing even a summary of the report to the media. A Right to Information activist had to legally compel the government to publish the report on the website of the ministry of environment and forests, which it did with peevish reluctance, with a disclaimer that the recommendations were still under examination.

“It (the Western Ghats) has been torn asunder by the greed of the elite and gnawed at by the poor, striving to eke out subsistence. This is a great tragedy, for this hill range is the backbone of the ecology and economy of south India,” the panel report states. Predictably, the expert panel has asked the Union and state governments to set up a legal authority to manage the Western Ghats and recommended that mining be stopped in sensitive zones. The panel forbids the construction of new dams and wants old dams to be shut down.

Kerala, at the southern tip of the range, has opposed the recommendations: “The Gadgil report ... is impractical to implement in the state. Kerala can protect its environment with the provisions of the existing laws,” its chief minister, Oommen Chandy, has declared. Karnataka, the state just north of it and run by the Bharatiya Janata Party, has openly opposed the Unesco tag itself. “Already, there are effective laws to protect the Western Ghats,” its forest minister said.

Heritage sites ought to be seen as legacies of time and civilisations beyond the reckoning of unstable histories of religion, politics and nationalities. The Western Ghats themselves are a wall rising from Gondwanaland and the birthplace of Jesus is a bigger story than Tel Aviv’s paranoia. For India’s national governments to arrogate to themselves the power to arbitrate on these matters is atrocious.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 6^th, 2012.