A grand plan takes shape as people, NGOs and the government come together to alleviate India's many conservation woes
India, it seems, has a special talent for ecological atrophy. Chief ministers openly mutilate bio hotspots in beautification drives, natural reserves are ritually plundered by authorities and crooks alike, or better still, cabinet bigwigs zealously try to change river courses. Violation, in short, is the norm in what is, on a vast scale, a scramble for control of resources. And eco vigilantes scarcely rise beyond making pious, well-meaning noises.
A new initiative seeks to change all that, bottom up. In a pioneering move, government agencies, citizens' groups, scientists and communities are coming together under the aegis of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (mef) to formulate a micro-level national biodiversity strategy and action plan over the next two years. The agenda: to safeguard our biodiversity - an umbrella term for the degree of nature's variety, including both the numbers and frequency of ecosystems, species or genes in a given assemblage. Pegged as the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), it is meant as a bulwark against desecration of our eco-resources. The plan aims at increasing awareness about sustainable use and also seeks to integrate biodiversity into the process of participatory development planning.
Significantly, an NGO, Kalpavriksh, will be the technical executioner of the plan. This Rs 4 crore venture, funded by the Global Environment Facility (gef) through the UNDP, has evolved a model for national participation and benefit sharing by revising existing models of budget-making. "India has had several national-level action plans for environment. But most plans have been divorced from economic planning and hence ineffective. The NBSAP hopes to not only take a holistic view of all biological diversity, but also to attempt an integration of ecological concerns into the developmental planning process," says Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh.
One of the key features of the plan is mass-scale participation of all major stakeholders, which includes the indigenous communities, who have an intimate relationship with terra resources, and the Centre as well. "But others who deal with these resources also have equal stakes, and must be involved," says Kothari. "Conservation has to become a people's movement, otherwise it's doomed," he says. Hence, one of the central tenets of the plan is inducing a grassroots approach. "The point is to establish the principle of a participatory planning and reach out to as many people as is physically possible," explains Kothari.
National Biodiversity Strategy And Action Plan: Vision 2002
In a bid to achieve maximum sectoral integration, the NBSAP structure is multi-layered. A national steering committee - with representatives from the ministry of agriculture, commerce, tribal affairs, planning commission etc - is working in tandem with the environment ministry, the project director. Much of the conceptualisation and monitoring is taking place at the level of a Technical and Policy Group (TPG), a bunch of around 15 specialists from diverse disciplines like biotechnology, gender and equity to agro-biodiversity, traditional health, forest management and marine issues. Beyond these central coordinators, the onus of formulating different levels of plans lies with the nodal agencies.
Almost half-a-year has been spent in furbishing the plan and in identifying key players. The entire agenda was put forward to the key collaborators at the inaugural national workshop on June 23-24. Subsequently, the exercise of making local, state and inter-state plans will begin and last another 10 months. The next step shall witness exhaustive reviews and their integration into a national charter. "However, if any local plan is ready before that, it can be implemented without even having to wait for its bigger counterpart," points out Kothari. Similarly, if an area plan is rejected, the local residents will have the permission to pursue it independently.
At the end of the day, NBSAP is expected to propose 20 local-level, 30 state-level, nine inter-state eco-regional and 14 national-level strategies. The sheer economics of the whole thing, according to some experts, is the main catalyst. "Biodiversity as a resource has an intrinsic value," says Veena Jha, project coordinator, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and a group member in NBSAP.
Interestingly, it's international commitments like the WTO, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (wipo) and the Convention on Biodiversity (cbd) that provided the spark - all signatories to the cbd are bound to prepare status reports and a biodiversity strategy and action plan. Affirm mef sources, "We'd already made a macro-level national policy, now for a detailed micro picture the NBSAP has been initiated in collaboration with Kalpavriksh and Biotech India Consortium Ltd - the administrative spearhead."
Despite the overwhelming official apparatus, it remains to be seen whether NBSAP can retain any financial viability. "Possible options for funding have to be stated in each plan. Once such action plans are ready, the central government will hopefully assist in implementing them," explains Kothari. The optimism is shared by mef sources, "Within the government, we can ask for sanction of funds or else we can depend on bilateral funding agencies."
Future revisions of the plan shall depend entirely on how the programme proceeds. "We don't know how the ministry will choose to treat and implement it. That's certainly a grey area," says Bansuri Taneja of Kalpavriksh. It's precisely these ambiguities that irk specialists like D. Raghunandan of the Delhi Science Forum or Anil Agarwal, director, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). "We've too many vested interests and a government without sufficient will," says Raghunandan. Echoes Agarwal, "We need a concrete programme and proper legal protection....I'd rather wait and watch." It's also to be seen whether, despite the mass engagement, ministries and their agencies will be willing to allocate some room for the NBSAP. Or will it, as has been the norm, become another grand vision sputtering to an unseemly end?