The seed and the mine

The minister of environment and forestry, Jairam Ramesh, is an interesting man to quarrel about and quarrel with. In many ways, he has become a public figure keen to enact policy as an open drama. Mr Ramesh has taken the domain of policy and opened it to public debate. This makes the decisions vulnerable but one can smell the fresh air of democratic debate. This smell can be very invigorating for politics.
Let us be clear. Mr Ramesh is a shrewd and ambitious man. He began as a technocrat and later learnt the craft and humility that comes with politics. He also realises it as a balancing act where today’s supporters might be tomorrow’s opponents. He realises that environment and politics are about trade-offs. A trade-off is an art form. As Mr Ramesh stated it in his Satish Dhawan Memorial Lecture, there is always a trade-off between growth and environment. “In arriving at decisions to untangle the trade-off, three options present themselves — ‘yes’, ‘yes, but’ and ‘no’. The real problem is that the growth constituency is used to ‘yes’ and can live with ‘yes, but’. It cries foul with ‘no’. The environment constituency exults with a ‘no’, grudgingly accepts the ‘yes, but’, but cries foul with a ‘yes’. Therefore one clear lesson is this — maximise the ‘yes, but’, where this is possible.”
Mr Ramesh has his own reading of environment as politics where he quotes experts like Partha Dasgupta, Sumita Narain and Kanchan Chopra. His literacy has never been in doubt. But sociologically one can read this effort in a different way.
The last decades of the century were the era of social movements. They ranged from Chipko and Appiko to the battle over the Narmada Dam. The Indian battle for environment was a deeply political one where civil society used environment as a site to widen the idea of democracy.
But with liberalisation, the opening of the economy, the rise of a new generation, the idioms of politics were changing. The political idea of movements was seen as labour intensive and yet often futile in building consensus. Movements are precious and they represent the social conscience of the society. But movements can be concealed into method, when the method is more than a set of dry techniques like cost-benefit analysis. A variety of new heuristics, new legal frames, and new concepts could create the new life blood of a sustained environmentalism. Mr Ramesh as a mature technocrat was one of the first to understand the politics of conditionalities. Method could become a mode of arbitration, raising policy to a new level of sensitivity and debate. The drama of method as an open frame of scrutiny and evaluation based on openness, objectivity and method centered around the two great moral sites of the ecological imagination — the seed and the mine.
The rise of the Bt Cotton controversy and the tandem debates on brinjals made seeds the site of the whole debate on agriculture. A seed could not be read as a mechanical artifact to be produced in a laboratory. A seed was the image of the future, a stored heritage, a form of competence, a circus of imaginations. Such a world could not be handed over to the MNC, for to hand over such knowledge was to hand over a way of life. It was to diminish a form of civilisation called agriculture.
Because of his literacy and openness to activists, Mr Ramesh understood this intuitively. He also realised democracy is a composite of imaginations where private science and market interests have major stakes. By creating a framework of debate through his hearings, by simultaneously inviting the six academies of science to evaluate Bt crops, Mr Ramesh created a public space for doubt, debate and a process of resolution. The fact that the academics of science behaved like a collective Pinnochio was not his fault. Like Pinnochio, the academies became toys in the hands of private groups, and like Pinnochio their noses became longer with each denial.
One must be wary of creating a fairytale rendering. Mr Ramesh has employed method as a surrogate for ethics.
To the fate of agriculture, we must add the problem of the mine. The mine in India has been a source of exploitation and corruption. It has often destroyed the tribal way of life spouting the hypocritical litany of development. Anyone interested to know the details should read a recent classic by Felix Padel and Samendra Das on the role of aluminium cartels. I wish media would give Out of this Earth the publicity it reserves for the adolescent outpourings of the diaspora which everyone calls “literature”.
Mr Ramesh realised the pending ethical issues of the mine. A whole nexus of cartels were eating into mineral wealth from iron ore to bauxite, with complete indifference to the local people and their ecology. Mr Ramesh realised that methodology of environmental clearances could introduce these cartels to the rule of law in India. He was quick to emphasise that the goal was not to delay nor was it a romantic pursuit of anti-development. His technocratic past ensured that he was not subject to accusation of sentiment. Method has a way of hiding values. This much he knew and exploited.
He went further. He showed that given an era where the green bench is dormant, where the court insists that the Narmada Dam is a marker of sustainability, one needs to rework sustainability as a methodology, as a framework of law, as a model for justice. One needs methodology for both gross domestic product and Green Domestic Product. One needs a revaluation of wealth in a polluted society. He is quick to remind us that the phrase “sustainable development” was first coined by an Indian economist, Nitin Desai. He is equally quick to remind us that the systems of green accounting are still a patina of good intentions.
But Mr Ramesh has cleared the ground. He has shown we cannot use old fears, like the China syndrome, to create bad defence or development. Yet he intuitively realises that the battle for a green India needs the creativity of our society. His is an invitation to politics, to ethics which is asking us to go beyond his initial framework of methods. He is a harbinger of future but it is upto the society to claim the opportunity. This coming month is the month of the Earth Charter. One hopes India does not reduce it to the banality of empty proclamations.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist