The years of struggle

'Fifty years ago there was dense forest around our village. Binjhagiri was full of wild animals. Tigers used to reside in this forest ... By 1960–62 the forest was completely degraded. The trouble was that after Independence in 1947, people became careless and destroyed the forest.'

(Bankanidhi Mohanty, a member of the General Body of Friends of Trees, interviewed for this book)

The context: Orissa

Orissa, the Indian State where this story is located, lies on the eastern side of the country, facing the Bay of Bengal. Compared with some of its giant neighbours, it is of modest size. Its area is a little larger than that of England and Wales, comprising 4.7 per cent of India's land-mass. In 1998 its population was estimated to be a little over 35 million, just 3.7 per cent of India's total.

In a country of much poverty, Orissa is one of India's poorest States. Wherever the poverty-line is drawn – high or low – Orissa has the dubious distinction of having a greater proportion of people living below the line than any other major Indian State. Its per capita income is not only much lower than the national average, but the gap is widening. Nearly two-thirds of Orissa's workers are engaged in agriculture, either as farmers or as farm labourers. For most of them, living off the land is a precarious occupation, since more than three-quarters of their holdings are so small as to be considered marginal and uneconomic.

In June 1998, using figures from 1995, the Population Foundation of India published a compound Human Development Index which placed Orissa fourth from the bottom in a list of 16 major Indian States. The Foundation's tables show that in that year Orissa had the highest infant-mortality rate of any major Indian State (103 per thousand live births). It also came second from bottom in a Gender Health Index table, which measures the differences between males and females in terms of educational attainment, infant mortality, and life expectancy at birth.

Among the reasons often cited for Orissa's poor showing in these and other tables – as if this were somehow an excuse – is the fact that it has large proportions of its population from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (above 16 per cent and more than 22 per cent respectively). Scheduled Castes are the former 'Untouchables', those whom Gandhi called harijans or 'children of God', but who call themselves dalits, meaning 'the oppressed'. Their numbers nationally are about 150 million (16 per cent of the population). Scheduled Tribes are the descendants of the original inhabitants of the country. They call themselves adivasi, meaning the 'original people'. Nationally they number more than 70 million (7.5 per cent of the population). Over the centuries both groups have suffered at the hands of the more powerful castes, and their suffering continues today. In Orissa, as elsewhere, they, more than any other groups, have suffered great exploitation, which has left most of them socially and economically more disadvantaged and much weaker than they were even at Independence in 1947. In the early 1980s, for example, it was reckoned that no fewer than 96 per cent of 3.5 million bonded labourers in Orissa were from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, living in virtual slavery.

While the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes are both vulnerable groups, in Orissa it is the situation of the Scheduled Tribe communities that is particularly precarious. One reason for this is that their homelands contain immense natural resources, needed by the modern Indian economy for wealth creation – that is wealth creation for India, not for tribal communities. Their ground has been dug up for its minerals, their rivers dammed for power and irrigation, their soils ploughed for commercial agriculture, and their forests felled for their timber.

Commenting on the worsening plight of Orissa's tribal peoples in the context of the liberalisation of the Indian economy, Oxfam Bhubaneswar's Strategic Plan, 1996–2000, describes them as increasingly 'helpless victims', subject to aggressive 'looting of ... their habitats and environment'. One stark statistic above all others reveals the extent of that habitat destruction. In 1971-72, forests covered 43.5 per cent of Orissa. By 1993–94, coverage had declined to 36.5 per cent. In absolute terms, that is a loss in little more than 20 years of 10,900 sq km of forest, equivalent to just over half the area of Wales. By any measure this is an astounding rate of destruction. While most of this forest was occupied by tribal peoples, as we shall see in the section which follows, it was not exclusively so. Other communities have also lost their forests at the hands of outside interests, and at their own hands too.

Kesharpur

Around the village

Kesharpur, the little village where the remarkable movement of Bruksha O' Jeevar Bandhu Parishad (Friends of Trees and Living Beings, BOJBP) was born, lies outside the tribal belt of Orissa, some 95 km west of Bhubaneswar, the State capital, and some 65 km inland from the coast. The nearest town is Nayagarh, the District headquarters, to which it is connected by a 13-km single-lane, tarmac road laid on the red earth. Arriving in Kesharpur from Nayagarh, one would find nothing obvious about the village to explain why such a remarkable movement should have started here. To get a clue to it all, you would have to cast your eyes to the hill, Binjhagiri, which rises behind the village like a whale from the sea. Measuring just under 3 km long, just over 1 km wide, and 280 m high, Binjhagiri covers about 360 ha. Immediately to the north lies a small hill, Malatigiri, covering about n o ha. Both are part of the broken ranges of the Eastern Ghats, which lie on this side of peninsular India. Thirty years ago both hills, like so many others in these ranges, were bare. Now they are clothed with rich forests. In the middle distance lie other whale-backed hills, rising from the plain, some much bigger than Binjhagiri. They too are clothed with forests, evidence of the remarkable work of BOJBP.

Botanists describe the forests here as 'dry mixed deciduous', which means that most trees shed their leaves in the dry season. And although in India people often refer to forests like this as 'jungle' (jangala), these are not at all what people in the northern hemisphere would think of as jungles. In density they are more like temperate deciduous woodlands, although they are quite different in terms of the variety and type of trees and shrubs within them. Whereas a patch of temperate woodland would typically have at the most one dozen tree species, these have well over one hundred.

According to Indian forest law, the forests on Binjhagiri and Malatigiri are designated 'Undemarcated Protected Forests', locally called Khesra. (See Chapter 2 for a full explanation of the categorisation of India's forests.) This designation means that local villagers, while they do not own the forests (even though they may regenerate and protect them), have bonafide rights to their products. The map (Figure 2) shows that around Binjhagiri, within one kilometre of its foot, are nine villages, of which Kesharpur is one. Farther out lie another 13. In the past, to some degree, all 22 villages regarded the forests on these hills as 'theirs', in the sense that they saw their products – timber, fuelwood, fruits, fodder, medicinal herbs, and so on – as theirs to harvest and use. But the nine villages nearest to the hills have always been most dependent on them.

Flowing gently past Kesharpur is the Kusumi river, fed by small streams that rise in springs on the flanks of the hill. To reach the villages south of Kesharpur, one crosses the river by a ford, but in the dry season the water recedes. Recently a bridge has been built to take the road on a by-pass around the village, but the connecting road itself has yet to be completed. 'And that won't happen for ten years!', according to Purna Mohapatra, one of BOJBP's committee members.

The village and the villagers

As the sketch map (Figure 3) and the photograph (Figure 4) show, the village is compact, with houses and a few shops tightly packed on either side of the main street. Living here are some 125 families – about 650 people. Most of their homes are made of earth, earthen bricks, timber, and thatch. A few are made of concrete and stone and others of laterite blocks. Each house has a small verandah at the front and a vegetable patch at the rear, beyond which are the harvesting yards where crops are brought for threshing. The richer households have electricity, which was brought to the village in 1962. In the centre of the village is a platform, around which people gather for meetings and on which in the daytime they dry their crops in the sun. Around the platform, carts are often parked, and cows and water buffaloes stand quietly chewing the cud. At each end of the street lies a small temple. Halfway down there is a post office, and there are also two lock-up, kiosk-type shops, selling basic commodities like soap and matches. The street is always busy – not with cars, but with people doing their daily chores, coming and going from the fields, the wells, and the temples.

Just beyond the main part of the village are the two schools, primary and middle, whose children have played such a crucial role in the BOJBP movement. All round the village, hemmed in by the hill to the west and the river to the south and east, are fields growing mainly paddy (rice) and black gram (a pulse) for subsistence, and sugar cane for cash. The soils of these fields are mainly ancient laterites – the red earth that covers so much of peninsular India. But here and there are patches of black cotton soil, which turns to a glutinous mud in the monsoons. These rains, which fall mainly from June to October, average 1500 mm but vary enormously from year to year, and there are frequent droughts. In the 1960s there were six successive drought years. As the sketch map shows, among the fields are tanks – artificial reservoirs or ponds – which are fed from the streams flowing off the hill. In these, fish are kept, to be shared out among the villagers. The tanks are also used for small-scale irrigation and for watering livestock. They are a common-property resource, overseen by the elected village council.

The village is relatively homogeneous in terms of occupations and does not have wide social divisions. Most people are small farmers, and the dominant caste is Khandait, which comes relatively low down in the caste hierarchy. There are ten Scheduled Caste families, who live in a small settlement outside the village centre (see Figure 3), and who are landless. Land holdings for the rest vary between 0.1 ha and 4.0 ha. The average size is about 0.4 ha, which means that most farmers are 'sub-marginal'. (Just over one hectare would provide a family with sufficient subsistence and cash income to be considered secure.) To supplement their food and income from their fields, most people keep a few cows and goats, and grow vegetables in their back gardens. A typical family with land works less than one hectare of fields, has two cows, between two and four goats, and a few chickens. They also depend on the forest for small timber, fuelwood, fodder, and herbs. Some of the poorest families, who live mainly by labouring, are forced to seek work outside the village as seasonal migrant labourers on distant sugar plantations.

Although the village is now very cohesive, it was not always so. Dr Narayan Hazari, who grew up in Nayagarh and Kesharpur, describes Kesharpur in the 1950s and 1960s as being 'bedevilled by factionalism':

There was a lack of collective ethics and an organised civil sense. Ignorance, suspicion, and fear ruled the village. There was violence in the air. There was no love. Factions ran to the police and the court to settle scores against the enemy. All the time, the energy and the money of the people was spent to destroy the opponent. There was economic drain from the village. The poor became poorer.

The state of the forests

As late as the 1950s, the forests on Binjhagiri hill were virtually undisturbed, with, according to Banchhanidhi Pradhan of Gamein, 'trees of six or seven feet girth'. There was also an abundance of large and small game, including bears and tigers. But after Independence people started to feel that they could do what they liked, since the land was now 'theirs'. Sudarshan Malla of Beguniapatana told us, 'People perceived Independence as liberty, without any commitment or responsibility.' As a result, the destruction of the forest rapidly gathered pace. By the late 1960s, Binjhagiri was completely denuded, gullies gashed its sides, and rock waste was smeared over the fields below, making them infertile. It was the same for Malatigiri. As a result, the people of Kesharpur and neighbouring villages, such as Gamein and Beguniapatana, faced extreme hardships, since much of their non-agricultural subsistence needs, for fuelwood in particular, were met by the forests. These shortages led some to desperate measures. An incident in 1978 is described vividly by Narayan and Subas Hazari:

We had in our joint family a man named Balia who used to help us with our domestic chores. When the joint family broke up, Balia, a bachelor who had worked for us throughout his life, was thrown out of employment. It was like throwing him to the wolves. Balia, in his late forties, found shelter with his younger brother. He had no source of sustenance. He became prematurely old and suddenly died. His brother could not arrange wood for the funeral [because of the deforestation). Balia was thrown on the sands of the river Kusumi which flows beside our village. Next morning it was found that Balia had been eaten up by jackals and his limbs were strewn everywhere.

Before this shocking event there had been some attempts, particularly by young people in Kesharpur (and in one or two other villages near the hill), to re-afforest and protect Binjhagiri. But the Hazari brothers describe this as having been done 'half-heartedly', in that it did not have wide community commitment and involvement. This was hardly surprising, given the factionalism that had so bedevilled Kesharpur. The fundamental problem was that, since Independence in 1947, people's relationship with the forests had completely changed from one which was sustainable and constructive to one which was exploitative and destructive, a transformation which is considered more fully in Chapter 3. The Hazaris attribute this to a number of factors, and they describe the wider consequences:

People's fear of the government lessened. Population grew. The government saw the forest as a source of commercial profit. People did not understand the utility of maintaining ecological balance. There was an attack on the environment. Trees were felled and forests were denuded. Hunters had a free day to play with the life of the fauna. The green Buddhagiri hill on which our eyes feasted slowly and steadily became bald and brown. Our hearts filled with anguish to see scars on the body of Mother earth. There was fast soil erosion, and deep ravines came up. Agricultural fields were covered with soil and pebbles from the hill. There was a shortage of fuel. Within hardly a generation had come a sea-change for the worse.

That change for the worse also included a decrease in rainfall, an increase in droughts, and what many described to us as 'excessive hot air in the summer months', blowing off the desiccated hill sides. Such was the damage to agricultural productivity that many people had to migrate considerable distances in search of work. According to Dambarudhara Majhi of Binjhagiri village, some even went as far as Burma, never to return. It was in this context that Narayan Hazari started writing letters to 'my villagers' from his place of work (Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, where he was Reader in Public Administration), about the state of the environment and the importance of environmental preservation. He also went back to the village in his vacations. There, with members of his family and other local people, notably Joginath Sahoo, the headmaster of the local Middle Education School, and Udayanath Khatei, a much-respected Kesharpur farmer and village leader, he campaigned with the villagers to work on environmental protection. 'But', he writes sadly, 'everything fell on deaf ears. It did not dick.'

The village Is stirred to action

Following the dreadful fate of the body of Balia, a breakthrough came in 1978 when the National Service Scheme (NSS – a student movement established to do community-service work) held a summer camp for afforestation in Kesharpur. Working with people from the village, the NSS volunteers planted saplings on the hill. On the final day of the camp, there was a meeting attended by Pratap Patnaik, the local Divisional Forestry Officer (DFO), who urged the villagers to preserve, protect, and regenerate their forest. He also pointed out to them the incompatibility of planting and protecting young trees and keeping goats. (Patnaik was to become a valued friend of the movement in its early years, a rare example of a Forestry Officer who was on the side of the people.) Narayan Hazari writes of this event: 'It clicked. What I could not do for several years, this meeting miraculously achieved.'