What is being called Natural Resource Management today is but a poor imitation of the continuous historical interaction of communities and their environment. To illustrate, environmental protection was the guiding principle behind the institutionalisation of sacred forests (dev van), groves and hills in olden times. The belief that earth is the mother was widespread in Indian society and continues to be so even today. The control by village communities over their immediate environment was a widely acknowledged rule supporting the symbiotic relationship between them and the state in pre-colonial India.
References to water management can also be found in many places in ancient texts, confirming the respect that Indian society had for nature. Tanks have been the most important source of irrigation in India from ancient times. Some tanks date as far back as the Rig Vedic period. The Rig Veda refers to lotus ponds, ponds that give life to frogs and ponds of varying depths for bathing.
Reference to the tanks is also found in the Arthashastra of Kautilya believed to have been written around the 4th century BC. The Arthashastra refers to the ownership and management of the village tanks.
Sale or mortgage of public assets were prohibited in those times. There is evidence of control by communities over common property resources even much later. Stone inscriptions dug up at Uthiramerur and other places in Tamil Nadu have revealed that village communities exercised control over their immediate environment, and made their own laws to regulate the use of natural resources equitably. Even during the Chola empire in South India, ten centuries back, village sabhas controlled the use of nature’s bounties in their neighbourhood, while the state was responsible for undertaking large-scale irrigation projects.
There are references to village bye-laws in Orissa, Karnataka and other places that laid down precise rules for the sharing of common resources such as grazing land and village ponds. These exist as an unwritten code even today, in spite of increasing encroachment of revenue departments on the rights of communities.
The British colonialists made radical changes in this system of communities exercising control over local resources. This resulted in the unsustainable use of natural resources and major conflicts over their sharing. The first Industrial Revolution in Europe was to a large extent supported by the transformation of commons into private property in Asia, which permitted European industries access to the resources in the colonies.
The colonialists classified vast tracts of India’s land as ‘wasteland’. Contrary to ancient Indian thought, they assessed land not as an integral part of the enviornment but by its capacity to yield revenue to the Crown. ‘Wasteland’ was land which did not yield any revenue because it was uncultivated. By this calculation, nearly half of Bengal Presidency was ‘waste’. Such ‘wastelands’ included the forest districts of Chittagong, Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, Chhota Nagpur, Assam and the Sunderbans. These lands were taken over by the British government and leased to cultivators to turn them into revenue generating lands.
As Baden Powell notes in his records, the colonial state did not recognise the value of forests initially, and allowed the occupation of such lands by capitalists and settlers.
It was only after the late nineteenth century, when forests also became a source of revenue, that state forests were no longer called ‘waste’. Village forests and grazing lands however continued to be categorised as wastelands because they were not sources of revenue for the state, even though they were vital fuel and fodder resources for the village communities. While the colonialists categorised ecologically important land as wasteland, they also created a category of ‘wasted lands’ by stripping productive land of their biological productivity by sheer governmental neglect or rapacity, as in the case of large scale deforestation in various areas as part of collecting timber for the new railway projects.
This policy continued even after the British left. The Indian government, in 1985, created the National Wasteland Development Board with the avowed objective of development of these ‘wastelands’. But this generated further conflicts because it threatened the customary rights of villagers over the commons. It allowed large-scale privatization of commons by industries for commercial plantations. These industries exploited the wastelands to meet their cellulosic raw material requirement for pulp and paper and plywood, production of vegetable oil, charcoal for industrial use and so on. Recently the government has been moving towards awarding waste lands to various big industries to produce bio diesel by growing crops like Jatropha.
For centuries before colonial rule in India, vital natural resources such as land, water and forests were controlled and used for collective benefit, by village communities at the local level and by the state at the higher level. This ensured that these limited but renewable resources were not squandered but used in a way that would sustain the society and allow it to flourish.
Ancient texts are replete with references to how forests and other natural resources are to be treated. From ancient times, Indian thought viewed the conservation of nature as an integral part of human development. Indians had developed the wisdom of harmonizing the short term goal of economic productivity with the long term goal of social progress while maintaining ecological balance.
Village bye-laws regulating the use of common resources such as grazing land, ponds and watersheds existed. Robust principles were evolved to comprehend whether or not the intricate web of nature was being preserved. These principles dealt with aspects of conservation, use and regeneration.
Mankind was part of nature and not standing above it only as a consumer. Our ancestors believed that we are a strand in the single fabric whose warp and weft link together all that is of the earth and the water, the air and the sky.
On whom the men of olden days roamed.
On whom the conquering Gods smote the demons,
the home of cattle, horses and of birds.
Her upon whom the trees, lord of forest,
stand firm — unshakable, in every place,
this long-enduring Earth . . .
Atharva Veda, 12-1.3, 27
It was the duty of the state to take measures to humanize nature, so that the elements and forces of nature could be made to yield what was required by all and fulfill the needs of society.
O Earth! Pleasant be thy hills, snow-clad mountains and forests;
O numerous coloured, firm and protected Earth!
On this earth I stand, undefeated, unslain, unhurt.
Atharva Veda (12.1.11)
The hymn conveys the meaning that human beings can sustain themselves only if the earth is protected by mountains and forests, and also that as long as this happens, human beings cannot be vanquished.
Ancient Indian thought treated forests with extreme reverence as expounded in the hymn below.
Early invoked, may Heaven and Earth be friendly,
and Air’s mid-region good for us to look on.
To us may Herbs and Forest-Trees be gracious…
Rigveda, Hymn XXV
Mangrove and other wetlands were preserved in ancient India for their great aesthetic beauty and ecological and socio-economic importance.
Without rain life will not function.
Without rain virtue will cease to exist.
Thirukkural, Section-2, Verse 20
The greed of profiteers overrides social need today. Large-scale aquaculture, tourism, and profit-driven development, far from creating wealth for all, are destroying wetlands and forests, causing havoc in tidal patterns and the monsoon rains.
Rta, the principle of universal order that holds the seasonal movements like the hub of a wheel and sustains the ecological balance of nature, was respected and upheld in ancient times. With nature becoming an object of indiscriminate exploitation and private greed driving human consumption patterns, modern “development” under the capitalist system has created chaos and falsehood — anrta. It is time that we restore rta by putting a stop to the acts of monopolies and industrial houses which have violated this universal order and created anrta.
The principles underlying international agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emission of green house gases are a far cry from the principles that governed environmental protection in ancient India. The Kyoto Protocol talks about rights of communities in the air. There are no mechanisms in it for communities to take charge of their environment and for people to have a say in the environmental policies of their countries. The most important mechanism in the Kyoto Protocol, the Clean Development Mechanism, while specifying obligations for industrialised countries to reduce green house gas emissions in their own countries, allows them to get away with it by funding projects in developing countries to reduce emissions.
The vision of our ancestors, which considers man to be a guardian of resources, who replenishes the bounties of earth rather than plundering it, has to be re-established in modern conditions. Conservation—the state of harmony (rtam) with land, forests, rivers and the rest of nature—has become an urgent necessity today.
What of thee I dig out, O Earth
Let that quickly grow over,
O Pure One, Let me not hit thy vitals,
Or thy heart.
Atharva Veda, 12.1.48