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Midway through her book Green Wars, award-winning conservation biologist and environmental journalist Bahar Dutt relates finding fish-eating crocodiles (Gavialis gangeticus) with mutilated snouts. The crocodilians have been disfigured by fishermen who don't want them eating their fish in the Chambal River in central India. Fishing in the river is illegal, but there is little enforcement to stop local villagers who have used fishing as a source of income and food for a long time.
Even worse than being disfigured by fishermen, though, is the effect of pollution spreading from the dirty Yamuna River into the relatively clean Chambal, which has killed thousands of the crocodiles.
It's just one of many stories related in the book that are typical of the tension between environment and development in India.
There's the Sarus crane versus the building of an airport in its wetland habitat in Uttar Pradesh’s Safai village; a mining project in the north-east that posed a threat to the 150 species of birds and more than 100 varieties of orchids in the region; how the small tribe of Idu Mishmis in Arunachal Pradesh took on the prime minister to protect the Dibang valley against the proposal of building Asia's tallest dam.
She also conveys the gigantic scale of some of the development. "Nobody could have prepared me for what I saw on top of the hill - a giant steel frame stretching [17km] into the vast expanse into the floodplains of Bangladesh, standing amidst virgin, dense forests," she writes of a conveyor belt for transporting limestone from a quarry in India for processing into nearby Bangladesh. "The plan makes perfect business sense –India had the minerals; Bangladesh had cheap labour."
Elsewhere, India's most endangered primate species – the gibbon – fights for habitat against palm oil cultivation in Assam. Around 5,000 monkeys live in Delhi waiting helplessly for care as dogs and cats win all the helplines. The government blames heavy rainfall for the Uttarakhand flood catastrophe last year, in an area where massive deforestation and blasting had occurred due to the construction of dams.
She tells me the reason for the ongoing conflicts is simple:
The main reason, very simply, is money. There’s big money involved in making 50 dams as opposed to small cheque dams so obviously what would you choose? The former. The bigger the dam, the more construction material involved the greater the scope for making money. That's why we continue to promote this carbon intensive form of development, and then perceive the environment to come in the way of such development.
Dutt talks at times of the power of the media (in exposés) and at times its powerlessness (when illegal projects still going ahead), but says the strongest solution may be closer home than we think. “If the people who live with wildlife are given a stake in conserving it, would that not be a more effective model of conservation?” Wild animals or green agendas don't form voting blocs, she points out.
The fact that she fearlessly names prominent political leaders and holds them responsible for the dismal state of environmental affairs in the country may have caused her some trouble, but she is unfazed. “I won’t say [I’ve suffered any attempts towards] censorship [of my book] but there’s definitely some form of bullying and intimidation if you say anything against the new government. On social media like Twitter and Facebook, I started getting hatemail and threats,” says the 39-year-old.
Some people may argue that the process may have been comparatively easier for her by virtue of hailing from a family of famous journalists (her mother, Prabha Dutt, was among India's first female journalists, and her sister is the famous Barkha Dutt).
Dutt, though, says it's been a difficult fight for her to come out of the shadow of her surname and carve a place:
I say this outright. I did nine years of rigorous field work in the field of conservation before I came to journalism. I didn't join journalism mainly because I wanted to do something different from my mother or my sister. I roughed it out in villages worked on a community conservation project, studied wildlife biology and then came to this field.
Even when I decided to join journalism, I describe in the book, how I didn't join the TV channel where my sister worked (that would have been an easier option) precisely because I didn't believe in this policy of entitlement. I am very conscious of the fact that yes I have journalists in the family, but no I would never use that to further my book.
• Green Wars by Bahar Dutt is out now, published by HarperCollins
• Soumya Mukerji is a journalist at the Hindustan Times in New Delhi
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