Grassroots Greenie

HE is India's foremost greenie jetsetter. The national news coordinator of environment bytes. He has possibly employed every so-called green journalist in the magazine he edits, Down to Earth. He's also got a reputation of being a tough taskmaster which hasn't endeared him to a lot of his employees. He has a seemingly unending source of foreign funds for the NGO he heads. He works out of a swank four-storey office in Tughlaqabad. He's India's answer to Lester C. Brown. But for all his detractors, no one can deny Anil Agarwal's status as the man who more than any other brought environmental issues on the national agenda. Says fellow-greenie Van-dana Shiva: "In India's environmental spectrum he's the best organiser we have of environment data, news, movements and concerns. He's the best."

 He looks diminutive, weak now from a three-year scrap with a rare form of cancer. But get this mechanical engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur talking on his favourite topic and you'll have to contend with a booming, unnerving voice. Unnerving because he seems all audio. A voice on some kind of ultra glucose. With convictions you cannot dispute intellectually.

Yet Agarwal is more than just another scribe with a vision. "He is a pioneer. He has single-handedly done more for the environment than anybody else in India," says R.K. Pachauri, director at the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), New Delhi. Adds Ashok Khosla, director, Development Alternatives: "He has done a valiant job of environmental communication. Much of today's environment awareness is because of his efforts."

That's a lot of praise. But scrutinise Agarwal's track record and you know he deserves it. In 1982, he brought out the first citizen's report on the state of India's environment—a landmark exercise that had never been done by NGOS even in a developed economy. Says Agarwal: "We got a list of contributors for that project writing on areas of their specialisation. Many of them wrote without a fee." The second report which Agarwal's Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) published in 1984 was even more of a success. "What came out loud and clear in our reports was that if the environment gets damaged the poor suffer the most. Any development which does that is retrogression. The purpose of development is to create wealth and more jobs. The second report clearly showed how deeply women were involved with environment," says he. At a time when the social rationale that poverty was related to environment was little understood, Agarwal's own contribution lay in busting—at least at the intellectual level—the argument that development was important even at the cost of the environment.

Importantly, the money flowing in from the sale of the reports and other publications helped CSE survive till 1986. Around that time, Agarwal decided to concentrate more on environment than science because of it "becoming a critical issue that no one was picking up". He also felt there was no space in the Indian media to discuss these issues. "Indian newspapers are more interested in what Mayawati is doing," he says.

It was this 'pain' of seeing environment concerns being given the short shrift that made him launch Down to Earth in the early '90s. Says Agarwal: "I wanted to give Indians an idea of what their future was going to be." Though unhappy with the magazine's circulation—10,000 currently—he treats it as an exercise in mass education. It does not sell in metros or even in the so-called 'aware' cities, but, says Agarwal: "It sells well in places like Aizawl, Imphal, Gangtok, Kathmandu and Tejpur. And we hardly ever touch the North-east in our coverage. Even at the height of insurgency every copy sent to Srinagar sold. It does not sell where the middle class is predominant."

Soon the message reached other media as well. Says Niret Alva, producer of the environment serial Living on the Edge: "We started by pinching a lot of ideas from Down to Earth. They have a fabulous database and there's no way you can ignore it as a source of ideas. What was amazing was the way they kept it up

WHILE CSE's role as an NGO is unique since it reaches people directly, Agarwal's impatient involvement with grassroots realities does not allow him to be content with simply promoting awareness. Says Kamala Chowdhary, trustee of the National Foundation for India and Agarwal's associate for 20 years: "He does not know how to slow down. He has no other interest in life. He sees things from a uniquely Indian perspective and likes nothing better than a fight with the authorities." Adds Pachauri: "In bringing issues to the public he dramatises the issue."

Concentrating now on campaigning for policy-related issues, Chowdhary thinks CSE's reports were the main catalyst behind the Delhi Government's active concern for the environment, specially air pollution. Says Agarwal: "If you raise valid fears in middle-class minds, you net in more minds. The flip side is that you can't take up too many rural issues. Then even the media does not respond. Some time back we had a press conference involving the World Bank president and tribals like the Maldharis. Not one mediaperson showed up."

Agarwal's activism has not been a late development. In 1969 he organised the first-ever student strike in IIT Kanpur on the issue of a staff member slapping a student. The director wanted to expel Agarwal but the faculty defended him because he was a "good student". Agarwal began his eco-journey in the early '70s when he joined The Hindustan Times as an environment writer. His first exposure at the grassroots level was the Chipko movement which formalised his early thinking about how crucial the local environment is for the poor.

But though he believes green issues can only percolate if the man in India's top job is environmentally sensitive, Agarwal's own tryst with Indian prime ministers is revealing. Indira Gandhi, according to him, had a "save the national heritage" approach to the issue. Yet Agarwal was present at the 1972 Stockholm Conference where she made the famous remark—"Poverty is the biggest polluter". Rajiv Gandhi, says Agarwal, was the only prime minister who understood the importance of sustainable development. "His early years of prime ministership saw him travelling a lot in drought-prone areas. He brought the Panchayati Raj soon after this," he says. V.P. Singh, sadly, was totally disinterested. Narasimha Rao did show some interest but it was tempered by his tremendous dislike for the bureaucracy. "I remember one conversation with Rao on certain policy changes in forestry laws. Rao said, 'Anil, you are preaching to the converted. But I totally disagree to changing systems. Your file is going to get lost in one of these Delhi buildings'," he recalls. "I had access to prime ministers, yet things weren't changing. I inferred that if we maintained our strength of producing good knowledge we can work with the political system because parties and politicians are still under a pressure to perform unlike bureaucrats who do the worst possible job, yet get promoted."

 Agarwal's personal moments of satisfaction are drawn from incidents like the one at village Khuloma in Nagaland. On a visit there in 1987, he encountered a band of village youth felling trees on the village ridge. Agarwal had a session with the village elders explaining why they shouldn't be doing so. The elders argued that the youth needed money as they were unemployed. A month later Agarwal got a letter from them saying they had had second thoughts and banned the felling of trees. "I realised this was the way India would change. That if there were a million of these decisions it would make an impact. The crucial thing was the people were in charge and they listened," he says.

But in spite of his unchallenged commitment to the green cause, Agarwal is often criticised for his 'narrow focus'. Says Pachauri: "He would have been better if he had been able to articulate choices better. Anil specialises in analysing situations, finding flaws and giving single solutions. But one needs more than one solution." According to Chowdhary once "Anil has a strong point of view he can't see another". Shiva says Agarwal could have done better in organising a reverse flow of information for grassroots activists. "He could have been of tremendous service to movements if he'd supplied activists with the information they needed to fight entrenched interests. He has the infrastructure to do it," she says. He's also criticised for the funding CSE receives from European countries. Counters he: "If I take money from the Indian Government, I'll have to toe their line. Europeans don't expect me to do that. They're more enlightened."

But if Agarwal wasn't so headstrong, much of what he typifies and fights for wouldn't have come through. Says he: "The crux is to change before crises. Look at Singapore. They are not a Gandhian society yet they had the foresight to invest in public transport systems. As a result it's the only city in the world to have grown in wealth but not in air pollution." With 'naive science' smokescreens still clouding Indian minds, diminutive Agarwal perhaps remains the best device we have yet to clear the air.