Universalist Agendas and Contingent Realities: Politics of Participatory Conservation and Development

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Universalist Agendas and Contingent Realities:

Politics of Participatory Conservation and Development

Ashwini Chhatre

Affiliation

Department of Political Science

Duke University

Durham NC 27708-0204 USA

Mailing Address

326 Perkins

Box 90204, Duke University

Durham NC 27708-0204 USA

Email: [email protected]

December 2005

Under review at Contributions to Indian Sociology

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Abstract

The current paradigm of participatory development is premised on two principal

assumptions: the dominance of a distant and unresponsive state, and divergence between

local and state priorities. While these may be true for a majority of cases in the present,

the paradigm is being implemented all over the world without regard for the diversity of

local experiences. We wish to question the universality of these assumptions through a

discussion of the Ecodevelopment Project in Himachal Pradesh, India. The local history

of state-society relationships in the region has generated a consensus around particular

meanings of participation and development where caste, kinship, and political networks

are prioritized over any notion of a localized community. This consensus also

encompasses the externalization of ecological costs, subsidized in large measure by state

interventions in social welfare and economic development. The process is mediated by

democratic politics and elected representatives at a level much higher than the local

community. The success of these networks in accessing development, along with state

subsidies for short-term ecological costs, has ensured that the state retains a high degree

of legitimacy as the prime interlocutor of development. In this situation, the assumptions

of the model of participatory development and its inflexibility regarding local histories

and context contributed to the failure of the Ecodevelopment Project. This article points

to the limitations of the participatory model, and argues for a better appreciation of

social and political contexts in designing participatory development projects.

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Universalist Agendas and Contingent Realities:

Politics of Participatory Conservation and Development

I. Introduction

It has become almost customary for popular critiques of development to bemoan

the lack of participation of local communities. Equally ubiquitous in contemporary

academic discourse is the descant on catastrophic impacts of centrally orchestrated

policies on local culture, ecology, and environment (Fisher 1995, Thukral 1992). Our

account does not in any way discount the evidence produced towards that end. We wish

to point, however, that instances of predatory states and mute peoples that populate this

discourse have encouraged an uncritical understanding of local processes in terms of

conflictual dichotomies. Such accounts usually portray the state as a distant entity,

intruding in the lives of local people, sometimes with the active collaboration of local

elites. Politicians, if they figure in this scheme at all, are caricatured as unctuous villains,

and the politician-bureaucrat-contractor nexus is invariably pitted against ineffectual local

communities (CSE 1999). And where local resistance to such destructive development is

organized, it is again portrayed in stark opposition to the state and its representatives.

Such an understanding has been essentialized and then deployed in the planning and

design of new development programs, in response to the criticism of an unresponsive

state trampling over powerless communities (Chambers 1994). We seek to demonstrate

that there is room to question the universality of the master narrative of antagonistic

state-society relationships. The assumptions that underlie the new, "participatory",

development programs are just as universalist as their antecedents that arrogated

supernatural powers to state agencies for social engineering. And the outcomes could be

just as perverse and destructive.

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Two assumptions undergird the contemporary participatory discourse. In the first

instance, as mentioned above, the state is presumed to be distant and unresponsive, if

not downright rapacious, and unable and/or unwilling to address local priorities and

aspirations. Secondly, it is assumed that the state's priorities are not only dissimilar to

local priorities, but often contradictory and incompatible as well. The universal panacea

offered in response to these assumptions has been ‘community institutions’ and ‘local

planning’. This solution is ubiquitous not only in the development literature but

increasingly in conservation as well (Brandon et al. 1998, Wells and Brandon 1992). Calls

for ‘community’ or ‘joint’ conservation programs have escalated in recent years, in almost

complete disregard for the experience of these concepts in development practice. The

most glaring oversight in extending these assumptions to conservation programs lies in

the level and variety of interests, intent, and agency attributed to ‘community’. Just as the

‘state’ is conflated with predation and apathy, the ‘community’ becomes infused with

harmony and reciprocity (Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2001). Thus, to redress the

excesses of interventions in the past, the state is expected to pull out of the ‘local’, to be

replaced by ‘community’. The reversal, universally, is expected to lead to better

husbandry of nature or natural resources merely on the strength of the assumptions.

Most importantly, the universalist tendency of this new participatory discourse results in

gross inattention to prior local histories and experiences of interactions between state

and society, and more specifically, of development. The practice of development is

contingent upon local histories that may make a mockery of such universal assumptions.

What happens when pedantic notions of 'participation' and 'microplanning' are

thrust upon a society with an acute and advanced appreciation of the role of kinship ties

and political networks in accessing development resources? Or rather, what is likely to be

the outcome of development projects that are designed and implemented in ignorance

of, and completely innocent of, discursive practices and local processes that characterize

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'development'? The experience of the World Bank-funded Ecodevelopment Project, in

the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in Himachal Pradesh, India, provides an

ideal location for exploring the answers to these questions. The particular history and

experience of development in Kullu, the role of state and the politics of accessing

development, the World Bank driven universalist agendas for development, and

conservationists' universalist agendas for nature protection, have all interacted in GHNP

to produce a wealth of experience that illuminates the interrelationships between

universalist assumptions and local practice, as well as current practices and local histories.

In the next section, we begin by laying out the larger context, both historical and

political, within which the process unfolds. Of particular relevance to our discussion is

the stellar role of the developmental and welfare state and the construction of a

consensus around the development paradigm and world view – a mirage, so to speak – as

a process that helps in delineating the role of the state and separating the state from

society at the same time. This discussion includes an account of the important role that

market institutions have historically played in the region, especially in shaping the process

of development and its economic profile, followed by a description of unequal

distribution of the fruits of development and the historical reasons for the

institutionalization of such inequity. Having laid the groundwork on the social, political,

and ecological context of development in the region, the third section explores the

dynamics of statemaking in Kullu, especially in the postcolonial period, through a closer

look at the practices that constitute the ‘state’ as an arena separate from ‘society’. This

section also locates the position of various social and political actors vis-à-vis this

ephemeral state and their role in the reproduction of the state-society duality. The fourth

section analyzes the Ecodevelopment Project in Great Himalayan National Park. The

project is evaluated on its own terms as well as in the context of the politics of

development at the local and higher levels on economic and ecological axes. The

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concluding section traces the limitations of participatory conservation and development

programs to their universalist assumptions based on the experiences in the Great

Himalayan National Park.

II. The Mirage : A Contingency called Development

The developmental state : Kullu district, where the National Park is located,

epitomizes the sterling development performance of the state of Himachal Pradesh in

general. For a district that has villages in an altitudinal range of 3,000 to 10,000 feet

above mean sea level, only a few villages are not yet electrified. Virtually the same can be

said of primary schools and drinking water. Roads pass through 40% of the villages and

75% are within three kilometers of a servicable road. All this development is post-

independence. The first motorable road into Kullu was blasted through the Mandi-Larji

gorge in 1950. Ever since, the curve of development, along established parameters like

basic services mentioned above or others like girl enrollment in schools, has been steadily

rising, in striking contrast to other mountainous states in India, and even the mountains

of Nepal (GOHP 1985, 1993, 1997).

Development in Kullu, narrowly understood as growing public infrastructure and

rising personal disposable incomes, has proceeded along two main vectors. From the late

1960s, after the establishment of Himachal Pradesh as a full state of the Indian Union in

1966, the state has actively promoted horticulture, especially apple cultivation, and

supported its growth through the 1970s and 1980s in policy and practice (Sharma 1996).

State support for horticulture has taken the form of subsidized supply of inputs such as

fertilizers, pesticides, equipment, and timber for packing cases. In addition, the

government constitutes a floor price for different fruits on an annual basis – the

minimum support price – at which state agencies buy the produce. In 1978, the state

government set up the semi-autonomous HPMC (Himachal Pradesh Horticultural

Produce Processing and Marketing Corporation) with the specific objective of processing

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local fruit for value addition into high-value food products. Growers themselves have

organized into several associations for accessing markets and inputs. Known in state

politics as the 'apple lobby', horticulturists, acting through their organizations and

representatives, emerged as a powerful political interest group in the 1980s and continue

to be a force to reckon with. In large parts of the state, particularly in Kullu and Shimla

districts, the growth of horticulture has enabled large inflows of incomes into the local

economy over the last two decades.

The growth curve of the other vector of development, tourism, has been no less

dramatic in Kullu. The Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation, another

state-owned subsidiary, has played a crucial role in developing infrastructure and putting

the region on the tourist map of India and the world. Tourism infrastructure received a

boost in the mid-1980s after the state government declared tourism as an industry for

policy purposes and, subsequently, constituted attractive subsidies for entrepreneurs who

wanted to set up tourism-related enterprises. These took the form of tax holidays, waiver

of land ownership restrictions for hotels and labour laws for employees. But most

important of all the factors responsible for the growth of tourism was the unflinching

state-support to road construction and maintenance throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

The massive investments seem to have paid off when tourist inflows into Himachal

Pradesh and Kullu district more than doubled in a few years in the early 1990s, in large

measure owing to dislocation of the regular traffic to Kashmir due to rising insurgency

and violence targeted at foreign tourists. The numbers have been steadily growing since

and though townships of Manali and Kullu are still the cynosure of all attention, the

frontiers have extended to include new areas such as the Parbati, Naggar and Solang

valleys. The last decade has also witnessed an exponential increase in nature tourism,

entailing far lower infrastructure costs and greater distributive benefits to local people

working as guides and porters. Trekking trails now cover several valleys leading to the

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Great Himalayan range and the activity, though restricted seasonally to six months, has

become a significant source of local employment (Coward 2001).

The Welfare State : State interventions in development in Kullu district and its

contribution to the changing economic profile of Kullu district over the last three

decades has been accompanied by investments in social development at the same time.

As mentioned earlier, delivery of basic services such as electricity, primary education,

drinking water, and primary health care is assured for an overwhelming majority of the

people at an absurdly low price and state systems responsible for the delivery seem to

work. Several of these systems are characterized by minor innovations in delivery systems

that have had a dramatic impact on the quality of service. For example, the teachers for

primary schools have been recruited from within the district into a district cadre, thus

allowing for the teachers to be close to their own villages while at the same time ensuring

that children are not burdened with a teacher who is ignorant of their general context. In

another case, drinking water supply schemes have been implemented in a decentralized

manner, with every scheme situated on a local stream and catering to a few villages at the

most, allowing the vast network of small tributaries to be tapped at source or not far

from it. In other words, in its welfare incarnation, the state has been decidedly closer to

the people and its functioning has been slightly more transparent than is usually the case

in the rest of India. Along another dimension, the state has also emerged as the leading

provider of sustained and secure employment all over the state. Kullu is no exception,

with almost every village boasting of at least a few government employees. Along with

the apple lobby, state employees have also emerged as a major political force in Himachal

Pradesh and have succeeded in wresting major concessions in the form of pay raises and

other benefits. Most of the employees, particularly for Kullu district, come from rural

backgrounds and retain an active interest in production from their private lands. This is

the class of people that has become the model for emulation in the race for development

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in Kullu. Combining incomes from state employment and private lands (usually diverted

to horticulture), they can support a rural lifestyle that is only partly rural. Living in

concrete structures brandishing dish antennas for cable television, they symbolise the

ideal of development as promoted by the state and internalised by the people. This two-

fold description – state-controlled and sponsored delivery of basic services (including

employment) and urban-oriented 'modern' lifestyles – encapsulates the dominant

paradigm of development and worldview in Kullu and represents an overall consensus

between the state and the people, in their various guises and versions, on the general

direction of development.

The Invisible Hand : While the state has actively encouraged the diffusion of a

particular version of development in Himachal Pradesh, the contribution of the market

has by no means been inferior in the trajectory of development. Livelihoods at the

household level have traditionally comprised of a basket of strategies, mainly agriculture,

pastoralism and wage labour. Historically, cash inflows from sale of labour as forest

workers and pastoral products such as wool and meat have been important components

of the household kitty. However, participation in local or distant markets as a livelihood

strategy was a very small component of the overall basket and did not represent a critical

dependence on fluctuating demand and supply equations. It was not until the growth of

horticulture as a major source of cash incomes that markets began to enter livelihood

strategies as a major factor (Singh 1998).

In Himachal Pradesh, the state has maintained a policy of encouraging

participation in markets as an income and employment generation strategy. It has

supported the horticulturists by intervening directly in markets and through subsidies.

The state has also helped market penetration in rural areas and pursued a strategy of

shifting land-use towards harnessing what may best be described as comparative

advantage. Just as horticulture was promoted as a niche advantage for mountain

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peasants, so is now vegetable cultivation being promoted for its seasonal advantage

(Coward 2001). The resultant gap in food grain availability is expected to be filled by the

market, which provides a steady supply. The state has, once again, undertaken to

underwrite the food supply equation by providing for the same through the Public

Distribution System, implemented through Agricultural Co-operative Societies at the

village level. Through the 1980s, the assured supply of food, subsidized inputs, and

market support contributed heavily towards establishing horticulture as the most visible

aspect of Kullu’s economy.

While the process of state-sponsored market penetration was dramatically evident

in the case of horticulture and Kullu, the process was insidiously at work even in areas

outside the spotlight of state charity. In distant Sainj valley in the same district, in the

present ecodevelopment zone of GHNP, the modern market entered in the late 1960s in

the guise of the state. The valley was connected to the National Highway in 1960. High-

yielding hybrid seeds of wheat were introduced in Raila and Shainshar panchayats by the

agriculture department in 1968, and witnessed the introduction of chemical fertilizers,

again supplied by state agencies to 'progressive farmers' for free, by the late 1970s. In

1991, irrigation reached Shainshar and transformed agriculture. Area under food crops

fell drastically as land was almost overnight diverted to vegetable cropping, especially for

seed production. The logic of comparative advantage was again at work – it was risky to

transport perishable vegetables to distant markets; seed production provided better

returns and assured demand. The process was followed almost similarly in Raila in 1996

with the introduction of garlic. Throughout the period, dependence on the market kept

growing. Inputs into agriculture, initially provided by state agencies, were subsequently

bought by farmers in the open market as incomes grew and more options became

available. Import of food grains increased equally dramatically in almost all the villages in

the Sainj valley through the 1990s.

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Another activity that accompanied the penetration of the market in agriculture in

the Sainj valley – representative of trends in Himachal Pradesh – was the collection and

sale of medicinal plants. Based on a survey of medicinal plant collection conducted by

the Palampur-based NGO Navrachna in 1998, figures from three villages in the vicinity

of GHNP, Pashi (Jiwanal valley), Nahin (Tirthan valley) and Tosh (Parbati valley)

illustrate the magnitude of medicinal plant collection and inflow of incomes. Eighty four

percent of the households reported regular collection activity for the last eight years. On

an average, 125 days were spent per household in herb collection. These were in turn

divided almost equally between collecting species in local forests (such as guchhi and

mushkbala) and alpine species at high altitudes found inside the National Park (such as

dhoop, patish, panja and kadu). Women and children outnumbered the men in the search

for local species, while the alpine species were collected exclusively by adult men. The

average income for all households for 1998 was Rs.21,000, with the top quarter netting

more than 30,000.1 It is not easy to visualize such figures as compatible with everyday

perceptions of rural backwardness.2 It is this kind of development that has generated an

overarching consensus on externalizing ecological costs and internalizing market

demand. However, the process has not been without its economic, ecological and

political costs.

Fruits of Development : The money that has come into the household has been

spent largely on consumer goods and services. Kullu has also witnessed a spurt in higher

education in the last decade. More than 600 students from various villages all over the

district are staying in Kullu town at any one time, studying at the District College. Many

more have entered new occupations in the tourism and horticulture sectors. The district

has also witnessed a dramatic increase in house construction, most of which has taken

place along the roads-as-vectors-of-development. Curiously, many of these houses also

provide for a small shop facing the road, demonstrating the increasing inclination of

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people to shift to trade and commerce as a livelihood strategy. With higher disposable

incomes, village shops now cater to a variety of tastes, ranging from everyday items like

tea and milk powder to durables like torches and electric heaters. There is now, almost

universally, a greater capacity for absorbing the costs of health care; as a result, more and

more people now subscribe to the costlier modern allopathic medicines. School

enrollment in Kullu is close to ninety percent, with girls matching the boys in numbers at

the primary level. Literacy rates are higher than the state average where the state average

is one of the highest in India; newspapers are avidly read and local news followed with

great interest in the villages (GOHP 1993, 1997).

Behind the veneer of averages and aggregates, there is a class of people that

remains in the bottom quartile in partaking of the fruits of development. Who are these?

Very few households in Kullu, even less in the GHNP area, are absolutely landless; the

state guarantees a minimum of five bighas (0.4 hectares or one acre) to all households

listed in the local register at the Panchayat level. Very few landholdings in the GHNP

area are greater than 4 hectares. More than sixty percent of the landholdings in Himachal

are less than two hectares; the distribution of land is fairly egalitarian (GOHP 1993,

1997). However, on closer analysis, it turns out to be the lower castes, the groups

traditionally landless or occupationally less dependent on agriculture that appear to

populate the bottom quartiles on all dimensions of the development spectrum.

For a better understanding of the underlying causes for the prevailing social

inequality of access and opportunities, of interest here is the relationship to land. Two

factors are of particular relevance. First, owing to the mountainous terrain, agricultural

land is a mere ten percent of the landscape and livelihoods are critically dependent on

inputs from forests. Second, this is a society stratified and organized hierarchically

around caste, much like in the Indo-Gangetic plains. In such a situation, differential

relationships to forests and property rights therein make a significant difference to

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opportunities available for economic gain. In the first regular land settlement undertaken

in the middle of the 19th century, the British appended forest rights to land ownership

(Chhatre 2003). As territorial control of the state over forests increased in the next 50

years, the property rights in forests in Kullu were further refined. The overarching logic

of this process – forest rights appended to revenue-paying private land – proscribed the

non-agricultural castes from a rightholder status. These were precisely those castes that

were at the bottom of the social ladder and traditionally performed services

complimentary to agriculture. The Anderson's Forest Settlement of 1897 allowed the

land-revenue paying landholders and their tenants to exercise their rights in the better

quality Demarcated Protected Forests but condemned the lower castes to using the

Undemarcated and Third Class forests on sufferance (Chhatre 2003). They were not

accorded rights in these forests; the use was merely a privilege that was extended on

humanitarian grounds.

Three interrelated processes in the post-colonial period exacerbated this

institutionalized inequity. First, landless castes, even where they were not agriculturists

and depended on artisinal occupations through unequal but reciprocal exchanges with

upper caste landowners, were provided land under the state-driven land reforms

programme. As there was no surplus agricultural land available for redistribution, there

being no large landholders in Kullu or Seraj, these grants of land came from the

Undemarcated forests. Ignoring the fact that the recipients had no experience,

knowledge, or capital to convert this highly sloping and often uncultivable forestland into

productive fields, the grants also reduced the total forests available for use by these

castes. Second, pastoralism, the other major livelihood strategy in the region, was

critically dependent on landholding size; crop residues and leaf fodder from trees on

private land comprise a majority of fodder supplies in the crucial snow-laden winter

months, thus limiting opportunities for the traditionally landless lower castes. Underlying

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these two processes was the prevailing moral economy that prevented these castes from

withdrawing from unremunerative occupational tasks such as blacksmithy and basket

weaving; they were obliged to provide these services to the upper caste agriculturists by

custom. Arguably, significant development benefits have trickled down to these groups

as well, but the disparity in their share of resources and opportunities continues to be

glaring.

III. Statemaking as development practice

State and society : The ‘state’ and its separation from ‘society’ are critical

analytical constructs in understanding politics. We have been referring to the ‘state’ in the

foregoing discussion as if it was an independent entity with an autonomous agency.

Much ink has been spilt regarding the autonomy of the ‘state’ and its embeddedness in

society. Sivaramakrishnan has used the term ‘statemaking’ to describe the

‘…ways in which institutions of government and ideas of

governance are negotiated in specific contexts by local actors and agents

of central design or bearers of official ideologies. Statemaking refers also

to the powers of central government to penetrate rural society, exact

compliance, and invoke commitment’ (Sivaramakrishnan 2000:433).

There has been a vigorous debate regarding the validity of the separation and the extent

to which it is a product of discursive practices. We do not intend to take issue with the

different positions in this exciting and productive debate in the present exercise. We seek

to argue, however, that such a separation does not take place only in the mind. It rides on

the constitution of new social practices that are predicated on such a separation. It is in

looking at practices that we might be able to gauge the everyday process by which the

state is perceived to be separate from the social realm, and the various uses to which such

a separation is deployed. Recent literature has engaged with the problematic by focusing

attention on individuals who are or can be located in either domain but belong to the

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other (Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan 2001, Springer 2001). Therefore, analysis of

agricultural extension workers or forest guards who belong to the community but work

on state agendas has illustrated the blurred nature of the separation (Springer 2001,

Vasan 2002). However, an attention to individuals and the quest for their exact location

obfuscates the ideological function of practices associated with the location of these

individuals for facilitating the state-society separation.

Statemaking proceeds through the steady extension of arenas that require

‘government’ through new practices located outside the ‘society’ and based on new

knowledges, expertise and organization (Ferguson 1994). Thus, the supply of drinking

water, with the corollary of sanitation and public health concerns, becomes a ‘state’

responsibility. Notwithstanding the fact that the fitter at the village level is both a ‘state’

employee and a ‘community’ member, the act of taking the organization of drinking

water supply out of the domain of society or village community constitutes the state and

separates it from the society at the same time. If governance lies in regulating conduct,

then acts of government cannot be visualized without such a conceptual and operational

separation of state and society. Such actions of government expand the arena of

regulatory authority outside the community or society, and the practices associated with

these actions reproduce the effect of a separation of state and society on a regular basis.

It is in an analysis of these everyday practices that invest the state with authority at the

expense of society that we can understand the production of discursive practices such as

development and the role of various social actors in its reproduction.

Accessing development: Within development practice in Kullu, the state takes

the form of sarkar. Over the last three decades, the sarkar has rapidly expanded the social

arenas that require regulation and government. Some of this usurpation of traditional

authority has been resisted, but much has taken place with the consent of those who

matter at the community level – upper caste men. Also, many of the new arenas of

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government, such as development, have been constructed as modern, something that

was lacking in the traditional, thus requiring outside expertise and knowledge. Such a

construction has been accompanied by a growing dependence on the sarkar and

increasing calls for its intervention in new arenas. Be it subsidized inputs or maintenance

of physical infrastructure, a lot is expected of the sarkar. It is expected to provide

employment to educated youth and provide market support to horticulture. It is called

upon to upgrade schools, health care and veterinary facilities, and other social services.

But most important of all, it is expected to build roads and more roads.

In documentation of the deforestation crisis, roads have been characterized as

vehicles of destruction. In Kullu, large-scale logging preceded and/or bypassed roads –

water-flow proved to be a more convenient and economical mode of transport in the

Himalayan region. On the other hand, roads have facilitated speed of transit for

perishable fruits and vegetables to distant markets and ensured timely supply of inputs

and food grains at the doorstep. Roads have indeed been instrumental in engineering the

kind of development that the state promised it would deliver (Coward 2001).

Consequently, roads have acquired a fetish status in Kullu, a statement that may also be

generalized to the whole state. In popular opinion, partly borne out by facts, a road to

the village generally ensures that other goods and services that the state or sarkar is called

upon to provide will follow.

The pyramid of development aspirations and ultimate decisions is glued together

by a network of relationships that are only partly political in nature. Characterized by an

eclectic blend of caste-kinship ties, socio-cultural bonds, and religious obligations, these

relationships are frequently harnessed for development projects at the village level. To

illustrate, the villagers of Shainshar, falling in the ecodevelopment zone, have been

demanding a link road to the panchayat head quarters for a long time. The National Park

authorities, under the logic that roads are bad for conservation, have steadfastly refused

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to support any such project. To their discredit, the authorities have been seen to be

partial and allowed the construction of a link road to Shangarh village on the opposite

bank of the river Sainj. Notionally being in territorial control, Park authorities have also

been successful in dissuading the Public Works Department from building the road to

Shainshar. However, in 1996, the Member of Parliament, Maheshwar Singh, responded

to his constitutents’ demands and diverted a part of the MP Local Area Development

Fund towards the construction of a link road to Shainshar.

The existing road-head is at Neuli, also in Shainshar panchayat but on the left

bank of the Sainj River. The new road being constructed is on the right bank, starting

from the edge of the river and going on towards the farther hamlets. It is an apt

illustration of the politics of road construction in Himachal, where the villagers are

content with the road, even if it is only good enough for jeeps and that too in fair

weather. Moreover, there is absolutely no proposal for the construction of a bridge

across the river connecting the Shainshar road to the road-head at Neuli, rendering it

quite useless for motorized transport. It will be simplistic to think of the people as naïve

and characterize the road merely a fetish. In fact, the Shainshar villagers are acting on a

political strategy with visible success, of petitioning their political leadership. The people

are confident that the bridge will also be sanctioned one day, relying on the same strategy

that got them the road. Maheshwar Singh, the MP, belongs to the Bharatiya Janata Party,

in opposition in the state at the time, and used the funds at his discretion towards

increasing his political capital at the expense of the Congress Party. Secondly, he was also

responding to lobbying from his constituents for the emblematic representation of

development – a road. Generally speaking, access to state resources for development

follows almost the same logic – petitioning the politicians.

The people, individually and collectively, lobby politicians at all levels, without

fear or favor, although they would start with the village or panchayat. The instruments of

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petition are bits of paper that pass for applications. These could be for timber for house

construction, college admission, water supply connection, electricity connection, or any

other individual item. The piece of paper – arji – is instrumental; it will ultimately be

signed and marked by a high enough political figure for the relevant bureaucrat to honor

it and what is written on it. The lobbying goes on until the necessary paperwork –

signature on the arji – is complete. For collective largesse, like a school building or an

extra room, an electric transformer for a panchayat, a new drinking water scheme for a

village, or metalling a link road, the methods employed are slightly different. Now, only

higher politicians are lobbied, ministers are preferred, while other lower politicians are

recruited for the cause. Typically, the local MLA or MP is either invited for a social

function – which might involve something completely different from what he is going to

be petitioned about – and is presented with a charter of demands, always making sure

that a large number of voters are present. Therefore, if attended by a minister, an annual

prize distribution function in a village school is never an innocent civic event; invariably,

it will be inflected with the politics of development. Alternately, the leader is intercepted

on the road during a visit and presented with the demand charter. Again, a large group of

people is assembled to impress the leader, not only to demonstrate how important the

demand is but often equally to display the number of votes that his generosity might help

swing in the next election.

The system of petitioning politicians for development largesse works both ways.

It also helps political leaders keep tabs on local processes and work on electoral

equations. It is quite common, all over Himachal Pradesh, to witness a senior cabinet

minister presiding over the opening ceremony of a restaurant or a large group of women,

with flowers and brilliantly colored garlands, waiting on the roadside for hours for a

visiting leader. It is not enough to view this politics as 'exchange' of votes for largesse.

The system has echoes from the moral economy of the peasant, where the peasants

19

impose a set of moral responsibilities – as duties – on the landlords in exchange for a

superior status. The analogy is only inapplicable insofar as the lords in this case are

interchangeable; there is a spattering of leaders to choose from. Caste and kinship ties are

extremely important in this process; they are the main conduits of approach. It is not a

clinical equation; far from it, the people bring social and cultural relationships to bear

upon these political processes. The weight of this network of relationships, a hybrid

moral economy, is brought to bear as much upon politics and resistance to state

intervention as on participation in the allocation of state largesse as development funds.

These practices of development – of petitioning the politicians, for example, or

of using kinship ties to access state resources – function to reinforce the separation of

state and society, irrespective of the location of different actors with respect to this

separation. Individual or group identities are shifting constantly as political resources are

maneuvered for maximum leverage. It is these daily practices that produce the effect of

both state and society, in this case by representations of benefactor and appellant

respectively. Even as social and political actors move across the entities of sarkar and

society without apparent struggle or discord, this very movement produces the effect of a

state-society separation. Individuals on one side are always in a position of power, able to

hand out largesse. But it is neither a distant nor an unresponsive state. It is ever ready to

assume new responsibilities when called upon by society and expand the arenas of

regulation and government. On the other hand, society is inevitably involved in the

production of a consensus around the meanings of development.

IV. The Scapegoat : GHNP Ecodevelopment Project

Ecodevelopment was designed, at least in the Indian case, to blunt the criticisms

of the mainstream conservation paradigm that called for an exclusion of people from

areas of conservation interest (Pandey and Wells 1997). Its objectives were remarkably

clear – it proposed to reduce local dependence on Park resources by providing for

20

alternatives based on non-Park resources, without violating World Bank guidelines on

involuntary displacement. In a two-pronged strategy, funds were proposed to be

deployed through community institutions – in response to criticisms of exclusion of local

communities – and used for developing alternative sources of livelihood – in response to

evocation of dependence of local communities (World Bank 1994). The Village

Ecodevelopment Committees (VEDCs) were expected to plan for increasing resource

productivity in the vicinity of the villages and work towards developing sources of non-

forest based employment and income. The Ecodevelopment Support Fund (EDSF)

component of the project was to be exclusively deployed by the agency of VEDCs, on

activities identified through participatory microplanning (Pandey and Wells 1997).

Between April 1994 and March 1999, the period for which figures are available,

2.63 crore Rupees were spent on approximately 2450 households distributed over

eighteen ecodevelopment units in the ecodevelopment zone.3 This zone was itself

demarcated somewhat arbitrarily by drawing a line 5 km from the Park boundary as the

cutoff for local use of Park resources. It included most of the local users but completely

disregarded the use of the Park by migratory graziers. Since the knowledge of their usage

was available to the planners and designers of the project, it can be assumed that their

claims were simply not considered legitimate or forceful enough to be entertained. The

official documents refer to the intended beneficiaries as dependent rather than the local

preference for rightholder, claiming up to 15,000 people in the periphery of the Park as

likely to be affected by its closure (World Bank 1994, 1996). It was these people, in 120

hamlets and thirteen revenue villages, which were targeted by the project.

The first three and a half years of the Ecodevelopment Project were

characterized by a complete indifference to its objectives and a disdain for the

'participatory' spirit as enshrined in the official documents. The prevailing idiom of

development as politician-mediated largesse dominated the execution the project. A

21

defining characteristic of this phase was a deliberate negation of the conservation

objectives of the project that would ultimately result in the exclusion of local

communities (Baviskar 1999). Consequent upon local protests against the Park in 1995,

the authorities and local politicians went out of their way to assuage local sentiment and

assured the skeptical people that the Ecodevelopment Project was a development project

for their benefit and that the National Park would not in any way impair customary use

(Chhatre and Saberwal 2005).

Initial activities were directed towards repairing the general antipathy towards the

National Park. The main instrument of confidence-building was, initially, gifts of

pressure cookers to several individuals in the villages. This was done on the pretext of

saving fuelwood consumption but was largely designed to build bridges and gain entry

into the community. Simultaneously, the process of setting up the VEDCs and preparing

microplans was also taken up. Sat Prakash Thakur, local representative to the State

Legislative Assembly and the state Cabinet Minister for Horticulture, choreographed the

process. Thakur, a senior and powerful Congress leader, successfully lobbied for political

control of the project monies and activated local networks for distributing the largesse.

Working through the Park authorities amenable to his direction, he established a

foothold and succeeded in diverting attention to the benevolent developmental aspects

of the project.

Typically, VEDCs were formed without the process envisaged in the project

documents. A group of people – men, high caste – were selected from among the several

hamlets in a unit and constituted into a VEDC. These were supposed to represent the

respective hamlets or areas they came from. It would again be simple to denounce the

process as top-down or non-participatory. For the people, however, this was precisely

how things worked. There was something to be gained from the project and it was

convenient to depute an alderman to the council (hopefully one having good relations

22

with the powers that be) to draw funds to the village, rather than going through the

painful process and costly transactions of ‘participation.’ Consequently, microplans

turned out to be wishlists compiled from several villages and were filled with almost

everything that the project did not explicitly disallow.

While VEDCs were being constituted, Trust and Confidence Building Measures

(TRUCO) were expanded in the target villages. Water tanks and rain shelters were

constructed, natural sources of water were dressed up, feeding stalls for cattle were built,

and animals were vaccinated among a host of other such activities. Since trust was the

currency being transacted, there was no question of any recipient paying for these goods

and services. However, TRUCO activities backfired almost all over the ecodevelopment

zone. These activities failed to barter trust for money for two main reasons. In the first

instance, most of them did not work. There were widespread complaints of water

sources having dried up after the masons were through with them. Rain shelters had

gaping holes; many water tanks could not store water due to bad construction quality.

The feeding stalls for animals were too far from the water sources, or they were too

close. In one case they were perceived to be too deep, and posed a safety hazard for

children.

But the other, and more important, failure of TRUCO activities lay in their

selective and partisan nature. On the whole, beneficiaries of the TRUCO measures

seemed to be those whose trust had already been won over; it was a reward for trust and

confidence. In many cases, it spilled over from individual rancor to inter and intra-village

confrontations. In early 1996, Shrikot witnessed a serious division within the village on

the question of who is benefiting from a bridle path and a rain shelter being built in the

village as TRUCO activities. One section, dominant and numerous but out of political

favor, clashed with the other section leading to violence, police charges, and a criminal

case against five men and three women. At another level, whole villages felt

23

discriminated against. When news of a road being built to Shangarh reached Raila and

Shainshar, there was general indignation about being bypassed in spite of having superior

claims to the road. Equally, there was a belief that Shangarh got the road because of their

Congress affiliation, when the Park authorities were busy proclaiming that roads were not

allowed under the ecodevelopment project. People left out of the loop generally talked

about the bright future that was waiting till 'their' government came to power, that is, the

opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. This schism, borne of political affiliation and bolstered

by the TRUCO activities, continued to dominate the popular consciousness for the

remainder of the project period. The manner of expenditures continued to be patronage-

oriented and divorced from any conservation objectives.

The change of guard: This process was interrupted in April 1998 with the

change in government at the state level. A new Director of the National Park, Sanjeeva

Pandey, was put in place in June. Pandey had had a prior stint as Director of GHNP in

the late 1980s but that was before the Ecodevelopment Project. In between, he had

served at the Wildlife Institute of India as ecodevelopment faculty and had served as the

Principal Investigator for the Research and Monitoring component of the

Ecodevelopment Project. In several ways, Pandey was the ideal choice for the unenviable

task of turning the Ecodevelopment Project around. One of the first activities

undertaken by Pandey was the recruitment of Eco-volunteers, a group of enthusiastic

men and women from the project area, to serve as ecodevelopment emissaries. He

sought to train and develop this cadre of young volunteers – they were paid a nominal

wage – to approach the local communities with a fresh set of ideas about

ecodevelopment. Simultaneously, Pandey opened channels of communication with NGO

initiatives, notably Society for Advancement of Village Economy (SAVE) and

Navrachna.

24

Pandey initiated the task of rebuilding the VEDCs into effective agencies for

ecodevelopment. At the outset, Pandey had to contend with the repressed fury of local

communities on several occasions as he traveled through the villages. In a major shift

from the earlier administration, Pandey tried to disavow the notion that rights would not

be acquired for GHNP. He explained to the villagers the need to conserve GHNP and

its linkages with the Ecodevelopment Project. He was the first official who told the

people that rights in GHNP would ultimately be extinguished and that use of the Park

could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. Enlisting the support of Navrachna and

other local NGOs, Pandey strained to bring community leaders together to talk about the

threat to several medicinal plants due to excessive and unsustainable extraction. Picking

on microplanning as the vehicle for reconstitution, Pandey tried to improve the linkages

between microplan activities and reduction of dependence on Park resources. He also

consciously attempted to devolve limited decision-making powers to select VEDCs and

transfer some money to them according to new microplan provisions. In recognition of

Pandey’s efforts, the World Bank extended the project to December 1999 and started

discussions for a second phase. However, on almost all fronts, these efforts failed to

generate an equivalent reciprocal interest on the part of local communities.

Several factors contributed to the failure of Pandey's initial attempts at

resuscitating the Ecodevelopment Project. He was working against time; there were less

than eighteen months left for the project when he took charge. He underestimated the

bitterness aroused by the experience of the project in the first few years – a fact that

contributed heavily to the electoral defeat of Sat Prakash Thakur in the Assembly

elections. He grossly overestimated the potential of the frontline staff and the eco-

volunteers to help him turn the tide. Most significantly, he felt let down by the local

NGO, SAVE, in his effort at collaborative work amongst VEDCs and women's savings

and credit groups. In spite of his best efforts, Pandey was also overwhelmed by the turn

25

of events in 1999. In May, the Government of Himachal Pradesh issued the final

notification of the National Park, providing compensation for the termination of rights

of use. Local residents responded with spontaneous agitation, supported in their

opposition by all manner of politicians (Chhatre and Saberwal 2005). In October 1999,

three months before the expiry of the project period, the World Bank pulled out of

negotiations for a second phase of the ecodevelopment project, demanding a five-year

moratorium on the settlement of rights on grounds of involuntary indirect displacement,

bringing to an end rising hopes of project extension.

Evaluating the Ecodevelopment Project : On almost every count, the

Ecodevelopment Project failed to meet its objective of reducing dependence of local

communities on Park resources through alternative livelihood and income generation

strategies. At the end of the project in December 1999, there was no indication of a

diminution of livestock numbers entering the Park for grazing. The other major

dependence, medicinal plant collection, actually increased by all accounts to a level that

was considered unsustainable even by local collectors. Everyday use of Park resources by

villages in the immediate vicinity continued, unaffected by the ecodevelopment

investments. The institutions designed to implement the project, VEDCs, were disowned

by the forest department itself, not being favored either for consultations during the

settlement proceedings nor preferred for disbursing the compensation. No new

livelihood strategy was internalized in the community during the project.

To begin with, the conceptual framework was alien and incomprehensible to the

planners and executors at the local level. It was in many ways incongruent to the

prevailing idioms of both development and conservation. At the design level, there was

little attention to this anomaly. Trainings for front line staff were woefully inadequate,

comprising of a four month course in Park Management for the Director in the first year

and another one-and-a-half month course in Wildlife Management for a Range Officer in

26

the third year, both in foreign countries. There were no formal linkages with staff

training strategies in the HP Forestry Project being implemented in the same district. The

situation was complicated by higher officials and politicians publicly negating the

possibility of termination of rights in GHNP. With the prospect of facing a wrathful

population, the front line staff relegated duties to their political masters and avoided

controversy.

New village institutions were conceived in complete ignorance of traditional

institutions or practices of cooperation. There was no attempt, in the design of the

project, at incorporating and building upon local customs or traditions. Even elected

bodies like the panchayats (village councils) were not assigned any role in the scheme of

things. The VEDCs were visualized in a vacuum and endowed, in the design, with an

agency that turned out to be superbly ephemeral in practice. Coupled with official apathy

with respect to the autonomy of the VEDCs, this neglect of existing local institutions,

both traditional and modern, resulted in the denial of any agency to the VEDCs by the

communities themselves and they remained in a state of suspended animation

throughout the project. Five years after the project ended, the VEDCs have vanished

from the institutional landscape.

In the absence of any cogent and critical assessments, it is also impossible to

evaluate the equity aspects of the project. A very large amount of wage labour was

created but there is no way of speculating on the share of the benefits that went to the

poor or lower castes. Traditionally deprived of equal access to development and lacking

the networks to access it, this section of the population may as well as have been absent

for all the other actors involved in the process. Almost similarly invisible to the

ecodevelopment project were the migratory graziers, their livestock alone numbering

15,000, who were not even mentioned in any of the ecodevelopment documents. To all

appearances, therefore, the failure of the Ecodevelopment Project in meeting its stated

27

objectives was an institutional failure at several levels. However, within the larger general

context of development in Kullu, it was essentially life-as-usual. The people continued

with their struggle for a share of the development pie, unmindful of any new ecological

values that the project may have attempted to weave into the narrative. The political and

kinship networks were demonstrated to be worthy of investment, as evident from the

road built by the Ecodevelopment Project to Shangarh or by the road built through the

MP Local Area Development Scheme to Shainshar.

The end of the project did not mark an end to anything significant for people in

the ecodevelopment zone, testimony to the etherealness of the project against the

bedrock of development as practiced in Kullu. It was, though, put to use in the end in a

manner consistent with the practice of development. After the final notification of the

National Park in May 1999, and before the end of the project, ecodevelopment became

the favorite scapegoat for all the actors. Local populations justified their claims to the

Park on the grounds that they did not get anything from the project. Local politicians

justified their support for the local population's right to access because they contended

that the Forest Department should have provided alternative livelihoods to the people, as

promised by the Ecodevelopment Project, before terminating rights. In the absence of

such alternatives, the closure was illegitimate. Even far-away conservationists lamented

that only if the project had been efficiently implemented, things would have turned out

better. There was nary a voice suggesting a critical look at the mismatch between the

assumptions in the design of the Ecodevelopment Project and the practice of

development in Kullu.

V. Conclusion : Participatory Conservation and Development

The trajectory of development in Kullu, driven by the state and guided by the

market, has transformed land-use and local perceptions of nature in the last four decades.

It has resulted in new income and employment opportunities and, coupled with state

28

provision of basic services, raised the over all standard of living. The process has had

differential outcomes in the main valley of Kullu and the side valleys of Seraj. However,

the difference lies in variations in commercialization of nature and natural resources. The

ideology of development – exploitation of nature for market-oriented livelihoods with

state support – has been universally internalized and acted upon by the people in several

forms. It has undoubtedly resulted in high cash returns to a large number of people in a

dispersed manner. On another dimension, the fruits of development have been unequally

distributed, in proportion to historical location on the social pyramid and contemporary

ability of individuals and groups to align themselves with the emerging networks for

accessing development.

This development has also proceeded upon the construction of another

consensus between the state and society at large – that of externalizing ecological and

environmental costs. The cultural resistance to such development, muffled as it was after

a century of battery, seems to have been overwhelmed by the course of events and their

speed. Throughout the 1970s spruce and fir trees were mercilessly felled from the high

forests of Kullu for making packing cases for apples. During the same time, the

boundary of the forest receded as powerful interests within villages encroached upon

forestlands for apple cultivation. Even on private lands, oak trees were felled because

these were known to be carriers of the dreaded stem borer insect, destructive for the

apple crop. The process was checked only in the mid-1980s after a furor over the loss of

forests and its environmental consequences. Almost the same drama is being played out

in Himachal Pradesh with respect to medicinal plants. Extraction levels of several herbs

have multiplied manifold during the last decade leading to an outcry of indignation from

conservationists. In the absence of requisite research, it is difficult to hazard a guess as to

the implications of such high levels of extraction on the status of these plants.

29

As of now, there is very little space for an erudite approach to conservation in

response to ecological distortions in the development trajectory. The Ecodevelopment

Project was a unique opportunity to weave together the developmental and

environmental narratives. However, the opportunity was lost even before the project

reached Kullu. The universalist assumptions of the model – an apathetic state and

divergent priorities of state and community – predisposed the project to certain

institutional structures that were eminently unsuited to the practice of development in

Kullu. Notwithstanding the rhetoric of conservation, ecological costs continued to be

externalized during the project, while the project activities were neatly and almost

seamlessly incorporated into the web of relationships that characterize development in

the region. The participatory processes envisaged in the design of ecodevelopment failed

to amplify the voices of the poorer sections of the population, nor could it strengthen

those aspects of local institutions that could be harnessed for the sustainable use of

nature.

Given the experiences in Kullu, it is not possible to blame an unresponsive state

apparatus for the failure. In fact, people at all levels ‘participate’ in ‘development’ on their

own terms. However, neither the practices of participation nor the meanings of

development match those idealized in the model of participatory development adopted

in the project. Access to development resources is dependent upon wider caste, kinship,

and political networks, and any fixed notion of ‘community’ does not play a central role

in the process. Politicians and elected representatives mediate the distribution of state

resources. Moreover, the consensus around development between state and society in

Kullu is predicated upon externalizing ecological costs, and state interventions in

development have ensured that most people did not have to bear the costs of such

externalization in the short term.

30

The paradigm of participatory development, being transplanted in hundreds of

projects across the developing world, is based on the assumptions of an apathetic and

unresponsive state and contradictions between local and state priorities. Further, its

appeal also hinges on the presence or creation of a strong local community that can, with

external support, withstand the apathy and contradictions. The experience of the

Ecodevelopment Project in Kullu illuminates the limitations of the paradigm in situations

where the assumptions do not hold. More generally, there is little room in the model for

adaptation to local histories of state formation and development. Our argument should

not be held to be a general denouncement of participatory approaches to conservation

and development. Rather, we wish to caution against a blind faith in this approach, and

call for a careful selection of locations and situations where the paradigm would be

appropriate.

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1 Figures kindly made available by Navrachna, an NGO based in Palampur, Himachal

Pradesh.

2 These figures are higher than cited by other studies of incomes from medicinal plants in

Kullu and HP (Bajaj 1996, Tandon 1997). It can be attributed to the fact that the three

villages studied represent the higher end of the spectrum, and 1998, the year Navrachna

conducted the study, represented the peak of a growing collection trend that has since

declined slightly. However, even these studies propose an average annual income of

more than Rs. 10,000 per household, very high by any standards of poverty.

3 These figures were kindly made available by Sanjeeva Pandey, Director, GHNP.