They are celebrated one day and arrested the next. Their solutions are projected as national achievement when suitable and forgotten when their stand poses a bit of a threat to industries or the government’s plans. For years they have spoken for those who could not, yet despite the undeniable truth of their words, it has been very easy to ignore them, if not vilify them, punish them and shun them.

So what do environmental activists really do in a country like India?

“I don't really measure our existence by the use we have. I personally am a climate activist because everything and everyone I've ever loved is on this planet. I'm an extension of nature, I don't do this work because of some kind of saviour complex,” says Disha Ravi, a founder of Fridays For Future India – the mother organisation of which is spearheaded by Greta Thunberg.

“This is our collective home at the end of the day, and we do all have a responsibility to take care of it,” adds Ravi.

Ravi, in her early twenties, is amongst the legion of climate activists who take off from a long and illustrious line of environment warriors in India. Stories of how environmentalists hugged trees to protest forests against deforestation, risked arrest and FIRs for better rehabilitation plans for those displaced by plans of dam constructions, and managed to overturn government proposals to save crucial rainforests populate Indian textbooks and are also global stories now.

Eleven years ago, Sonam Wangchuk of Ladakh became a poster child for India’s climate conscious advancement with his Ice Stupa invention. He had already set up an innovative school in the Himalayas by then, but the stupas – conical ice mountains – he devised, could store close to 15,000 litres of water in the winter which would come to farmers’ use during the dry months of the summer. This was game changing as it was in summer when cultivation would take place in the high-altitude desert. Wangchuk has been feted by IITs, ministries, magazines and the United Nations. He has met with and been photographed with the prime minister, Narendra Modi, whose efforts in protecting the environment, Wangchuk has publicly lauded. When he won the Magsaysay Award – Asia’s highest honour by many counts – in 2018, Wangchuk spoke for “countries pooling their budgets for defence…against new environmental catastrophes and climate change.”

In the meantime, Wangchuk reached what is promised land for all Indians – Bollywood glory. A blockbuster film, 3 Idiots was made on his life.

Tellers of uncomfortable truths

As many have noted now, in this course of his cautious public life, Wangchuk has championed the cause of Ladakh’s environment but has always been aware of the role the government must play in it – he has never criticised without cause, backing even controversial political decisions with the future of Ladakhis front and centre.

What Wangchuk was cautious of, was the role played by a term capable of dividing most of India – “development.” Often a stand-in word for industrial efforts undertaken at the cost of the rights of locals – development has seen whole plateaus ribboned, the rights of tribals and locals trampled upon, and the very laws that are supposed to safeguard them blunted.

Thus environmental activists are now caught offering a perspective that a lot people are skeptical about or do not want to hear. This phenomenon coincides with an extraordinary degradation of India’s environment – its air pollution places it near the top of ‘most polluted’ lists, its forest cover has drastically reduced, placing at least 30% of its land under degradation and the pollution in its rivers is becoming a global problem.

Author and climate change chronicler Usha Alexander suggests that Indians in cities now tend to believe in an idea of development that relies upon increased burning of fossil fuels, the generation of electricity, more private cars and so on than a generation or two ago. “A few decades ago, India was a different place. More of us were living in villages or had parents living in villages, where they developed a stronger environmental awareness through living more closely with the land. Now more of us live in cities and we have forgotten the wider consequences of meddling with the environment,” Alexander says. 

She adds that anyone who inserts themselves in the space where they need to say that the government has destroyed trees and forests to pave the way for infrastructure projects is believed to be standing in the way of “development.” “Industries own governments these days. Environmental defenders stand in the way of them making money,” she says.

In challenging people who have the most power on behalf of those who have the least, activists are always treading dangerous territory.

In -40°C weather, Wangchuk has protested for Ladakhis through the most peaceful of ways – fasts. Making his body the site of protests, he has fasted to demand constitutional provisions for Ladakh, like statehood and inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, and to raise awareness about the impact of climate change on the Himalayan ecosystem. As Ladakhis push for more attention, these protests have worked to draw attention to a region that the rest of this vast country has been quick to forget. Wangchuk has used this instrument to keep Ladakh alive and in the process, as a noted veteran journalist put it, “emerge as a voice of reason and activism” in an area battling crises on multiple fronts – out-migration, receding glaciers, loss of groundwater, dilution of language and culture, poor government school education, absence of representational power in the respective national polities, and so on.

It was during one such fast by Wangchuk and other Ladakh leaders in September that a section of protesters got violent, and alleged police firing killed four of them. The government invoked the draconian National Security Act against Wangchuk. He has been in jail since. In the days and months before his arrest, the government had cancelled the 40-year lease of Wangchuk’s Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, Ladakh, and withdrawn a key licence of his NGO.

'At high risk'

This is a situation that Disha Ravi, quoted earlier in this piece, is acutely familiar with. In 2021, the Delhi Police arrested Ravi and accused her of “sedition”. Ravi had shared online a ‘toolkit’ by activists which aimed to help those organising peaceful protests in support of the then ongoing farmers’ movement in India.

“Environmental activism in India and even around the world is a dangerous job, and it makes me quite furious because what we're asking for is clean air, clean water, and fertile land, but asking for that has become a crime and it's something we're punished for,” Ravi says.

Earlier last month, authorities stopped lawyer Bhanu Tatak from boarding her flight to Dublin at the Delhi airport citing “pending cases” against her. Tatak is legal adviser to the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum (SIFF) that has been actively protesting against the mega dam proposed by India on the Siang River.

Medha Patkar, who has kept up with the Narmada Bachao Andolan as its head through the years, is booked in numerous cases and earlier this year was arrested in a 2000 defamation case filed against her by the Delhi lieutenant governor Vinay Saxena – for calling him a “coward.”

This is a disquieting series of events but more so if we consider the immense value environment and climate activists have in a country as vast as India, where the government and every stage of stakeholder depends heavily on people who are willing to situate themselves as bridges between the government and the people they are meant to serve. But with the prime minister himself decrying activists in a parliament address, they are now increasingly seen with suspicion. In the last decade, activists – including environmental – have been increasingly vilified. For many, it is unthinkable that a group of people can dedicate their lives to protecting the earth that surrounds them.

And yet, the rivers, lakes, mountains, forests, wildlife and biodiversity of the country are being protected by untiring activists who lead ground-level surveys, conduct scientific tests, lead protests against infringements of rights, connect the grassroots to the rest of India, file right to information requests to know more about the government’s plans, take injustices to the court, make routine trips for hearings at tribunals and generate awareness on issues most of us are happy to ignore. 

In a recent report, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Mary Lawlor, examined contributions by human rights defenders to addressing climate change and achieving a just transition, despite the risks they face. “In some countries, the broad level of State repression is such that any form of human rights activism has been rendered extremely difficult. Authorities in these States have made no exception for activism around climate change and a just transition, and any form of organizing by human rights defenders on the topics can only be carried out at high risk,” Lawlor writes.

Alongside examples from around the world, Lawlor writes how in Andhra Pradesh, Dalit women human rights defenders have been developing small-scale but widespread climate-resilient farming practices based on the principles of food sovereignty since 2007, while simultaneously bringing the voices of marginalised groups to discussions on global climate policy.

'Untiring'

For journalists, environment activists are also a deep source of knowledge. “Researchers deal with specific studies. They will not extrapolate or go beyond that. But when it comes to a particular environmental topic there could be other linked topics which environmentalists and activists will be able to give us an idea of. They have a handle on the pulse of a place – how people, wildlife and other issues overlap,” says Aathira Perinchery, who covers the environment for The Wire.

Perinchery used to be a wildlife biologist and knows this ecosystem from both sides. “One of the activists I spoke to said that they have lost count of the innumerable number of RTIs and first appeals that they have filed to get information about the Aravalli zoo and safari park, for instance. It is back-breaking work and they have to bear the repercussions,” says Perinchery.

Disha Ravi puts these difficulties into perspective when she says that all she wanted when she got into activism was for her mother to not have to wade through knee-deep water when her city is flooded. But there are moments when hope shines through.

“In the middle of the pandemic in 2020, the environment ministry proposed amendments to the draft Environmental Impact Assessment, and they invited the public for consultations. They said, ‘Since we're under lockdown, please send it through email.’ They gave us one email ID,” says Ravi. 

In India, only around 37% of households are digitally literate, making this email process exclusionary. The EIA was already diluting environmental protections and this was another obvious hurdle in a legislative process that was originally designed to involve people and the government, both. This is where Ravi and her colleagues came in. 

“The FFF and many different environmental groups across the country came together to make sure that our daily lives don't get disrupted by the new EIA. We mobilised, we translated the draft amendments, we hosted webinars, some groups basically dropped banners across the city educating people about why it's bad. And we got, I think, 20 lakh emails sent opposing the EIA. Twenty lakh people cared enough about an issue, and for me to see that was great and it was really inspiring,” says Ravi. 

The draft has been pending since. 

So what do environmental activists really do in a country like India? Much more than meets the eye – often at a cost much greater than we realise.

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