 So, we were talking about how the demographic and urbanization pressures can lead to various kinds of inequalities in access to resources. As I will show in the next or the next slide, in developing countries like India, the problem of environment is not only a problem of conservation, it is also a problem of access to resources. And therefore, it is very important that we address the issue of equity and that is one of the reasons why it is put there in the UGC syllabus, not everything about the UGC is bad, ok. So, one is about the disparities in northern and southern. So, northern generally refers to the richer countries that is a social science term, global north, global south. Global north is Europe, North America and the rest of the world is the global south. So, this is referred to by Ramchandra Guha, the environmental scientist, sociologist as full stomach and empty belly environmentalism, that there are certain countries and there are certain people and individuals and groups within our own countries who have what we were discussing during the break as full stomach environmentalism, where tigers have become more important than human beings. So, we do not say that tigers and human beings are both important for each other even if tigers hit up human beings and not the other way around. But still there is certain kinds of conservation is given more importance than others. So, there is a narrow view of environment as only plants, only animals and not as human beings dependent on animals for each other. So, for example, there is now increasing biological evidence that some amount of exploitation of forest is actually useful, is it not. So, for example, if leaves and twigs and branches fall and nobody is there to pick them up, they just pile up, that can cause diseases for plants, it can cause imbalances in the soil, sunlight exposure is not there, some insects can breed. So, human beings are part of nature and human beings by being part of nature have a role to play in environmental sustainability, just as human beings have a role to play in environmental degradation, ok. So, full stomach environmentalism is something that only looks at conservation and environment in terms of beauty and aesthetics and recreation and not as something on which millions of people depend every day for the living. People like us are distanced from environment, other people use the environment and give us things which we use, but we do not directly depend on them, ok. But there are millions of people who depend directly and for them this empty belly environmentalism matters. So, there are two kinds of issues here which we should discuss in classes. One is that people who are very poor may end up exploiting resources or may end up using resources in a suboptimal way, either because they do not have awareness or because they do not have the appropriate technologies, science or because there is no other choice to eat I have to use resources, to live I have to use resources. But empty belly environmentalism can also be of a different kind which is what is more important for us and we have to learn that people who have empty bellies know the importance of environment, because today for us if crops fail in Maharashtra because of the freak weather phenomenon and the onions have got destroyed I can always get onions from somewhere else it does not matter. But where will those farmers go, where will they get food from, ok. If I do not get alphons of mangoes, I will get mangoes from somewhere else if I just cross the road across IIT, ten years ago I used to get Himachal apples, now I get Chinese apples, Australian apples, American apples, but not Himachal apples, ok. So these people, the people who directly depend on natural resources for their everyday life they know the importance of the environment for them and therefore they have worked out rules, regulations, mechanisms, institutions to ensure they are maintained properly. That aspect of governance of natural resources is also important because we usually focus on governance in terms of laws, in terms of government policies, in terms of international agreements. But governance begins from below, few people getting together to maintain a resource that is something that we also need to understand that is also part of empty belly environmentalism which we need to understand. The urban rural equity issues is something I have covered earlier. So these are related to resource transfers which enhance inequalities. So one of my students is also doing research on in Rajasthan for example, where rivers have been diverted to support mining industry and therefore cities and villages are not getting water anymore because they can pay more for the same water. So these create a lot of inequalities. But since we have discussed it in detail I will not go into it more. Gender equity is also very important because very often we forget that on the one hand men and women have different perspectives on natural resources because their dependence is different, their role with reference to natural resources is different and the impact of environmental degradation on women and men also different. So if for example, there is a shortage of water, since in India mostly it is women who have to go to fetch water in villages they have to travel many more kilometers to fetch water. There is a beautiful video, a TED talk given by Professor Anil Gupta of IIM-Abdabad. I will give you the link later, I was showing it in the other class yesterday. He shows this picture of for Rajasthan tourism of a woman walking across a desert with a pot on her head to fetch water. This is being used to promote tourism to Gujarat where nobody talks about the suffering of that woman who has to walk barefoot in a desert 5 kilometers to fetch water. That is precisely what full stomach environmentalism is about. And that also tells us that it is women who are affected by increasing lack of access to certain resources like water because it is primarily women's duties to fetch those. Or there is a lot of research by economists like Bina Garwal who talk about this case city of fodder and fuel wood for example. So even now in many villages for cooking household cooking you depend on firewood. As forests degrade women have to spend longer and longer time fetching firewood. So that means there is less time available for cooking, for taking care of children, for education, for all kinds of things. It affects the welfare of the family. So the burden of environmental degradation is fed by women differently from women. But women's attitudes also may be different. So Vandana Shiva how many of you know of Vandana Shiva? You people are not allowed to raise your hands. So yeah can you tell us a little bit about Vandana Shiva? He is actually, I don't know whether I should use the word against, but she does not, I mean she is not favour of the agriculture the way it is going on. And especially against the GMOs and Bohemimli fighting against that at the international level. So I think right now at this moment she is more into anti-GMOs thing. Anyone else wants to tell us about Vandana Shiva? Same thing okay. So Vandana Shiva is a physicist by training but she runs this organisation called Navadania in Deradun, Uttarakhand, deals with environmental issues. He said works on the problems of highly chemicalised agriculture, GMOs, GM crops, but also on water issues on which she has done a lot of work. So she along with another scholar called Maria Mies wrote this famous book called Eco-Feminism. So basically what this is trying to say is that women's attitudes to nature is somewhat different from that of men. And it may not be universal, it may not be generalised but it is a perspective which we have to understand and respect it. Women have a better ethic, a better sense of caring and responsibility because they are trained to take care of children and sick people and elderly people at home whereas men have other responsibilities due to the division of labour within the family. So the argument is that because men have been in control of decision making for a very long time in history, a particular attitude towards nature has developed where we think of nature as a resource to be exploited and used whereas women think of natural resources or environment in more caring and responsible terms that they are there for use but not for over exploitation, not for profit making. So I am giving it in a very simple way but this is a broad perspective and it is very important because this is also a perspective that is emerged from India. So when we talk of environmental issues, very often the textbooks only give us foreign perspectives. So it is important to recognise that there are very significant issues, perspectives, theories that have come from within India that our people are not just people who simply suffer from poverty and illiteracy and ignorance and problems of environmental degradation, we can also come up with ideas. That is also an important lesson which we should share with the students, yeah. Sir we should remember the contribution of Meedha Patkar in Narvada Bachawan. Yes, thank you. Yeah, we do that. So I think Dr. Maya Mahajan mentioned Meedha Patkar. I do not have enough time here to go into everything but I think it is there in one of the slides. Of course Meedha Patkar is there down below. Meedha Patkar, a lot of other women, if you go back to the Chipko movement, the women, I will come to that. Even further back, you know people like Meera Ban, Gandhi Ji's disciple, who has played a very important role in the environmental movement, who has in fact an inspiration also for Chipko in some sense. Even before that recently, I looked at some archival records of writings by Sister Nivedhita who was a disciple of Swami Vivekananda. She visited Uttarakhand and she was writing about the environmental degradation in Uttarakhand even in the 19th century, you know, very interesting stuff. So somehow that is what we are trying to say that maybe, you know, because of the care-giving role of women, the nurturing role that they have, they have a different attitude towards the environment, but also because they have this primary role of providing certain services including water, fire, fuel, wood, firewood, fodder for their cattle and so on. Therefore, a certain kind of attitude has emerged among women with reference to resources which is somewhat different from men who control the economy. Mommalwar from Prichi is basically a B.S.D. degree, agricultural graduate. He worked with the government for 10 or 15 years, I think. Later, seeing the practices which goes on towards the green revolutions using the chemicals, he quit the job and he spent his lifetime, he is no more now, last year he passed away. He actually spent his life for the organic farming practice. Yesterday afternoon we were thinking about the use of urine cow, the panjagaviyam. He was recommending for that. He has to be also included in that list. There are lot of people, of course, in India. Lot of people. And I will mention more of them a little later. But since you mentioned Nammalwar, Nammalwar is also a famous saint, one of the Bhakti saints. And like Sant Thukaram whom I mentioned in the beginning, if you read some of Nammalwar's poems, also you can see the relationship with nature, which is thought of in a very different way. And Nammalwar's foster daughter, Andal, also wrote a lot about nature. So that is why we are trying to suggest that when it comes to environmental issues and you are addressing issues of equity and inequality, there are different kinds of inequality which we try to address between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural. And of course, the gender issues. So we will be taking this up in more detail in the main course, and we will be supplying you material. But it is something that I think you as coordinators should be prepared for. Now, one should not assume that the social approach, the social science approach is only a very general, common sensical understanding of the world around us because many times people confuse social science with common sense. So social science is also science like all of the disciplines and there are terms and concepts and theories. So introducing some of them is also good. Otherwise we fall, we commit the mistake as Professor Phatak said yesterday of dividing the universe into different silos, different compartments, and different compartments have different kinds of value, first class, second class, third class and so on. So that's why we will also use certain concepts, certain terms which and these are all college going students. So we expect that they will also learn some terms and not just understand things in a very general or generic kind of sense. So Guha, Ramchandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil in their book Ecology and Equity talk about three kinds of people with reference to inequality and environment in India. So you all know what is omnivores, we learn it in Class 5. Omnivores, carnivores, herbivores. So human beings are omnivores, we eat everything. Even those which we cannot consume, we eat. We convert them into many different things and we eat. We get them from very different places and eat. And we consume them in many different ways using many different technologies in various kinds of environments. So those groups that are identified there are omnivores. The second they call as the ecosystem people. They are people who directly depend on resources for their livelihood which I have been stressing upon. That is mostly the small farmers, the landless labour and the nomadic pastoralists who graze livestock, cattle, sheep, goats, those kind of people. So what they are trying to say is that the first group, the omnivores in their model of development, they bring more and more area under their control for factories, for power plants, for ports, for cities, housing, all kinds of things. And gradually the second group of people are displaced from their land. They become ecological refugees like you have war refugees who come to the city and start living in the slums as urban poor. So you have three groups of people among whom there is inequality in access to resources. So what they suggest is that between the first and the second group of people there are differences in terms of how much reach they have to access resources. So for example, I can buy apples from Australia and USA and China also whereas there are some people who do not have, cannot even eat food. So the reach of the resources, they can get resources from anywhere in the world. So there are some people who get caviar for example from Russia. That may cost how much, $1,000 per plate or something like that. There are people ready to pay for it. The nature of the economy is different. The subsistence purposes to meet your basic needs are to make profits whether they are rooted in their local cultures. So this section may see itself as modern scientific but they may not be going back to your question, Dr. Mitra. They may actually have studied in Wharton and Yale and all of that. They see themselves as modern scientific but they actually are not adopting a scientific approach to the environment because of the various issues, not seeing it in a holistic manner. Whereas the people who may be traditional, authentic, who may not have studied agriculture or modern sciences may actually have a more scientific approach like your Mr. Namanwar who has a BSc for example. So just because somebody has a PhD in agriculture doesn't make that person a good farmer. These are the different kinds of classes and they are separate from the resource base which means that even if resources get exhausted in one part they can still access resources from somewhere else. They don't feel the pinch as people who are directly dependent like it happened with the recent heavy rains in parts of Maharashtra suddenly their whole life turned into a crisis because they lost all their crops. So because of this what we say is that in developing countries or countries of the global south it is not only conservation of protection of the environment that is an issue. From a social perspective we are interested in conflicts. Why are there so many conflicts and so many different kinds of conflicts around resources in countries like India? You have water disputes between almost every state in India? Okay. You have everybody promising free water, nobody worrying about the consequence? Okay. There are struggles against mines and various other kinds of projects like Posco. So issue is how do we understand environment from a social perspective the primary issue is not conservation but conflicts and why are there so many conflicts, why are there so many struggles? And going back to what I mentioned in the beginning you have to understand it with respect to particular periods when these became issues. So why for example there were conflicts over river water sharing between Punjab and Haryana at a particular point of time? Why Tamil Nadu and Karnataka now but not 50 years ago? There are reasons for that which we have to understand and those reasons pertain to our use of resources. So the question is here the problem of struggle is related to all these things who owns resources? Who should own them? Who should manage them? What technologies should be used? So the British for example when they came to India they decided through the 1872 Forest Act that all forests belong to them. For centuries people living in forests it belonged to them. They had rights to manage them which the rulers had given and the government of India in 1947 in great wisdom continued to follow that policy saying the forests belong to government of India not to the people who live there which is why it leads to lot of conflicts because there are 120 million people who are directly dependent on forests which is more than the population of many countries in the world. Obviously if you ignore their interest there is going to be struggle there is going to be conflict there is going to be violence. So it is a question of what kind of policies we follow with reference to creating access or disabling access to resources. Similarly with water. So the river water disputes are related to the kinds of agriculture we practice. So since the 60s after the Green Revolution was introduced we introduced varieties of crops which require more water. So before the 60s this kind of conflict did exist because farmers did not require so much water the varieties of rice and wheat we grew did not require so much water. The new technologies require more water. So why did we not do research in a different way for a country like India you do not need hybrids that you grow in America which can get plenty of water. You need hybrids which are tolerant to drought which can grow in with less water but nobody does that kind of research. So those are the kind of choices we made which leads to particular kinds of conflicts or this issue we were discussing during the break who should manage who should own should it be the government should it be the private sector which is more efficient so during the break we were discussing that there are some environmentalists who think that forests and wildlife will be conserved if we keep human beings away from them. So we did that very successfully in Sariskar not a single tiger is left. We removed the human beings along with them the tigers also left or they were killed off because human beings living next to the forest depending on the forest it is in their own interest to make sure the forest health is protected. If tigers are there the entire ecosystem because tigers are at the top of the pyramid the entire ecosystem is maintained and if the ecosystem is maintained the tigers also can get something from the forest for their livelihoods but if people are not there there is nobody to see who is poaching the tigers nobody to ensure that the health of the forest is protected. So this was a case of a massive failure of that particular ideology which thought that we should separate human beings from wildlife conservation and so somebody like Valmik Thapar who his entire life was arguing for separating human beings keeping them away finally changed his mind to a little bit to a little extent after seeing that not a single tiger was left in Sariska now they have to export tigers from Samvelas from Gujarat and Rajasthan and other places Ranthambur So that brings in the last question there So how should resources be governed or managed? Because sometimes there is a feeling especially among educated people that people who are more educated people who are experts people who are scientists have the best ideas they can come up with the best schemes strategies, solutions that's not true So poor people, people without education also can come up with good schemes to manage the resource and that is something that we have to also impart through the educational system that's something that we look at here So the products are also in the task force because tiger task force task force you don't find a single one the tribal or the forester who are actually living with them I can talk about Kajiranga Rhinos as you know that 2015 already 4 or 5 already killed Yes, I have been reading about that and it is going to be I think the next major issue after tiger but by that time Rhinos will be vanished These task forces which are prepared by various policy makers doesn't have a single person from the forester That's a very good point That's a very general point also Every year, like last month the budget was presented by the finance minister Every year before the budget the finance minister speaks to all the editors of economic newspapers the corporate leaders but doesn't speak to farmers doesn't speak to people living in the forest doesn't speak to you and me doesn't even call academics like us So how are decisions made and why is it that people who have brilliant ideas about managing the resource are not part of these kinds of task forces or decision making that's what we are trying to say and therefore the question is which form of ownership which form of control is better for preventing resource depletion So the government in India can get away by not involving people because the government owns those resources What if that was not the case what even if government owns they see it control of management of resource to people at the lower levels will it be more effective So there are some studies which show yes some studies which say no some studies around the world which say sometimes government is better sometimes private sector is better sometimes local people manage resources more efficiently So it's a question of somebody said earlier about population optimization one solution will not work everywhere we need to find out which solution works best for environmental efficient environmental management So if you look at some of these issues for example so these are I have used a few examples here you can multiply these examples depending on what your interest is your teachers interest are your students interest are and you can also choose things based on where you yourself are located So if you are based in Nagpur for example or Vidarbha you can look at issues related to forestry and mining in that region if you are in Orissa you can focus on those issues So depending on where you are from you can focus on issues which are relevant and which students there can relate to So forest resources we know there are huge conflicts in India because somehow whether it is God or it is nature or it is evolution somehow in India all the mineral resources are located under forests So you have to destroy forests to extract those minerals So we say those minerals are important for national development but then we don't consider those people living in forests to be nation and because the law says that you can only give compensation if you show a pata showing that you own the land and so people living in forests don't have a pata so they can be displaced without giving compensation there is no question of R&R relief and rehabilitation So these are all the kind of issues that emerge that is why there are so many conflicts around resources because of the way in which we have governed resources we have developed policies laws and so on same thing with water there is excessive utilization we are seeing floods again and again we don't know how to manage them so recently I saw this alarming statistic that India and Pakistan together extract so much of groundwater that it goes through the hydrological cycle to cause sea level rise can you imagine how much of water is being pumped out goes into the air and then goes into the ocean there ok and that is partly because most states in India until very recently had no law about groundwater exploitation no laws at all only recently they have laws that are the first to enact this law after a big conflict about Coca-Cola extracting a lot of water Placimeda same thing you know mineral resources if I can just give you an example there was an NGO from Andhra called Samatha so in 1990s they filed a case saying that the local people who are living in a mining area should be made partners in a mining project their consent should be taken if it should be shared with them because historically they have been protecting that area in 1999 this judgment came that Supreme Court said within 6 months you should organize a conference of chief ministers and implement this law implement our judgment so there are ways in which one can meet national goals and meet the goals of environment as well as local people but because they are not being done in that way there are more conflicts more struggles similarly with human wildlife conflicts also so on the one hand it is a real problem to people you know elephants so those who are from Amrita will know about the elephant problem so in IIT of course we have the leopard problem so there are human wildlife conflicts are increasing but we are not able to realize why these are increasing is it because we are encroaching on their space is it because they are not able to find enough prey there or is it because leopards want a degree from IIT we do not know we need more study one can also use a range of case studies from different parts of India to understand the environment society interactions as well as struggles and conflicts over environment so these are all very famous case studies there is plenty of books, materials, articles available there are films documentaries and all of these which we all know the silent valley in Kerala in the 1970s which is one of India's richest biodiversity hotspots and interestingly a lot of scientists from TIFR, from TIS the Kerala Paitya Parishad was involved in it they all documented so there is a role for science here to explain why this is very important water conflicts Plachimata is the famous case of Coca-Cola in Kerala around water and then dams and multi-purpose project Narmada which was I think briefly mentioned earlier why there are so many conflicts again Narmada is also related to rural-urban conflicts because much of the water is diverted for urban drinking water purposes less for agriculture and very little for past dry areas like Kutch so the government spends a lot of money but not equal benefits distributed to everybody and also the issue of green revolution again there is a lot of material on what kind of inequalities is created what kind of sustainability problems it created because of excessive use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides so because of which now Punjab which was once a prosperous state now you have farmer suicides because yields are stagnating the soils have been degraded so much so using a lot of video material books, articles, actual interviews this is a very interesting interview you will see one could talk about these movements in this for example Sundarlal Bahuguna talks about the difference between a temporary economy and a permanent economy that if you exploit the forest only for employment and income generation it is a temporary benefit in a few years there will be no forest how do you use the forest in such a way that there is a permanent economy there that is something he talks about he also talks about the difference between men and women the women wanted to cut the trees to make cricket bats the women wanted the trees to remain because it protects the soil from degrading prevents floods, provides fodder for their animals there was a conflict between men and women also this half an hour documentary on the fence is a documentary which was made recently a few years ago 40 years after the original chipco movement in the early 1970s and you have all the women who were very young at that time between the age of 15 and 20 who participated in the movement and they are talking about what kind of changes have happened or not happened now the documentary starts by saying call the prime minister here a woman is saying call the prime minister here and then they say everybody has benefited from chipco movement the photographers the cameramen, politicians, the academics the activists nothing has changed for us everybody has benefited from it so it talks about the entire history of that region that it is not just about what happened in 1970 the history of degradation of Uttarakhand can be traced back to the British rule where they cut down a lot of forest for constructing railways, roads all of those kind of things and then up to the present movement so there is a long history to that those are the women there who are the original women who participated in the chipco movement who dared the loggers to come and kill them and they hugged the trees like this there is a similar movement in Karnataka called Apiko some of you may have heard of it Apiko Apiko in Canada means to hug Pandurang Hegde similarly with the forest right side I told you earlier about this Lekha Menda village in Ganchiroli district of Maharashtra this is the documentary which is made by the people of the village themselves very interesting or about Anna Hazare today many people know of Anna Hazare only as an anti-corruption leader but what a management he is still famous for what a management in Raleh Gaonsidhi in Arangabad district or this Hivre Bazar in Popat Pawar it is so famous that every day there are bus loads and car loads of people going there to see what is happening okay so these are all cases where one could talk about how communities manage to use laws, policies governments decentralization of power through panchayats how these were used to regain to reclaim land and rivers and water and forest and grassland which were degraded so in this video Anna Hazare for example mentions that we could not have done this without panchayats because now we have the power to use the panchayats to decide our own policies to make our own policies for the land which was not possible before 1993 so people power is also important there and he also mentions how the same policy when it was implemented by the government of Maharashtra failed when they used the same money it succeeded this of course is the most famous I won't talk about this in detail I think it was mentioned yesterday and all of you are familiar with it there are many issues you see Mehta Patkar there but you know what I want to talk about is the these three so there is a fundamental failure of imagination with reference to Indian reality there because most of the projects claim that these are the four kinds of benefits that we can get that's why dams are necessary but then in the Indian context they don't work that way the first multipurpose project constructed in India was the Damodar valley project the primary purpose was flood control that's where it has failed the most in India you find very often that floods are caused when dams release water they are supposed to protect you from floods they release water and then they cause floods it happens with every dam in India Kosi of course happens because of the damage that Nepal does to us so the inter-country cooperation is also important with Tungapadra it happened and so on so if you want to generate hydroelectric power you need to maintain a certain level in the reservoir as engineers we all know that if you want to maintain the reservoir level you cannot let out water for irrigation so obviously you cannot do both okay if there is excessive rainfall then you cannot store you have to let out water what also happens is that the most common problem in dams is silitation 700 dams have been identified for decommissioning Australia is decommissioning all its dams India and China the only two countries which are constructing more dams dams are economically not feasible the cost of silitation over a period is so high that the benefits you get is less compared to the costs okay this doesn't mean that dams are always bad Meza Patkar as you know is only opposed to large dams not to small check dams like somebody was talking about village tanks in south of the the traditional system of irrigation has always been village tanks which are the most efficient way of water management so people they are one of our alumnus B.Tex from 80s Sripad Dharmadikari and many others they actually showed how you can meet all of these needs all of these needs even in small dams so some of you may have seen the movie Swadesh so in Swadesh they show a scene where they generate electricity from a small water body isn't it that technology actually was created by IITNs along with NBA people in a village called Bilgaon in Madhya Pradesh okay so you can do those kind we have the technology now to meet many needs using small scale technologies so the problem with the Sardasarovar project is that it entirely consists of very large projects of course there is also the issue here of large scale you know submersion of land and all of that that's a different issue here this is the example that I was talking about Bilgaon is what was shown in the movie Swadesh so this is up there is another project which we did in IIT some of us from HSS department civil engineering sitara technology it is we all together built a small check dam whose picture you see here so you can actually do this Konkan area Raigad is known for very heavy rainfall and yet it doesn't have drinking water for 6 months in a year which shows a complete lack of imagination and scientific ability among us if you can harvest that water you will not need large dams at all okay so there are plenty of technological options which we can talk about without the adverse consequences of these large projects so I think for students that is what we must explain otherwise it just seems as though we are anti technology we are anti dam we are anti certain kinds of things we are not anti for these services we are for appropriate choices that's what we are sir another problem with the large dam is the water logging so in the surrounding area we are losing the fertile land and also there is problem for the residents they will live in the unhygienic condition due to dampness etc in their houses thank you in fact one of the issues with the green revolution is also that the Indian soil type in most parts is such that it is not suitable for what we call as flooding irrigation where we flood the field for a long time because of that it has created lot of soil salinity problems which causes diseases for plants so water logging is not really suitable that kind of irrigation is not suitable for India which was done through the green revolution and this is the plachimada case again there was a tribal organization this lady there Janu I think know CK Janu if I remember her name correctly was the leader of that so this is related to groundwater depletion the aquifers as well as leaching of chemicals because they were using a lot of chemicals to clean the bottles and all that so initially they were not able to the local people were not able to get justice because there was no law eventually the Kerala government passed the groundwater act through which the panchayas could use that act to deny permission to Coca-Cola so again what we are trying to say is that there may be individuals, there may be groups who are for or against certain things but there needs to be support in the form of institutions, laws, policies to bring about certain kinds of changes that factory is shut down now so that brings me to the institutional issues which is again one of the issues in the UGC syllabus so what I I have tried to do in this presentation is to identify key themes and topics in the UGC syllabus deal with them in my own way but touching upon both what is covered in that syllabus but also developing a larger perspective so the issue about the institutions and here I want to pick up on the issue of the comments that Dr. Nikhil mentioned yesterday okay so earlier I mentioned that I have doubts about this role of the individual of course it is important that individuals have to change individuals have to transform that is important but individuals alone cannot do much because the scale of the problem is very high also for managing resources whatever kind of resources forest, water, grassland, oceans air quality people have to come together there has to be collective action for that and so the importance of collective action is that people to come together to transform institutions institutions in social sciences also includes rules and regulations rules, regulations, laws, norms as well as institutions like IIT or institutions like organizations associations laws are institutions regulatory body is an institution all of these are institutions so how did human beings develop different kinds of models to prevent degradation and promote sustainability in terms of a solution that you are constantly searching for the solution could be an institutional solution so we know certain kinds of models that have failed but what kind of models have succeeded so what kind of institutions have people developed that promote sustainability have those institutions disappeared and is that a cause for environmental degradation is something we will try to understand in this module and there we will take up the issue of the commons so yesterday Dr. Nikhil mentioned about the tragedy of the commons and some of you explain about this tragedy so I am going to focus on the criticism of that tragedy of the commons model and the alternative that is proposed by people like Eleanor Ostrom who won the Nobel Prize for her work on the commons so this is the tragedy of the commons model cartoon I do not know if you can read it can you read it the two small I will read it I am going to get some cows and take advantage of this free grass too there is a lot of grass I will just increase my herd by 200 head I could double my income if I double my herd so because the grazing land or pasture is free everybody decides to maximize their profits by having more cows over a period of time there is no grass available people have to move out or sell off their cattle and they have nothing to depend on the tragedy of the commons only problem is this is not commons so Gareth Hardin completely misunderstood the idea of commons because Gareth Hardin was interested in promoting private property had an ideological motive he believed that private ownership is the best so he believed that this way this kind of commons is bad it will lead to environmental degradation we should have private ownership because I own the land I will be interested in sustaining that resource for a long time but this is not commons this was never commons this is open access so there is a difference between commons and open access where everybody accesses a resource like the ocean like the sea like the powai lake uses a resource and allows it to degrade commons means that the people using that resource design some rules and regulations about how to manage it how many cows you can have how many days can you graze it if the grass depletes do you replant grass do you do seeding do you make sure that people from outside the village do not come and do the grazing all of that is taken care of in the commons by the way going back to that population issue this Gareth Hardin was an extreme right-wing kind of economist so in the 1970s he made this very controversial statement he said countries like India and China there will always be poor that population is very high you cannot develop them the best thing to do is to drop a few atom bombs and kill them off that is the best thing he actually said this that is why we should not go in for that kind of logic that paper you also talked about the river pollution by that does not bring the picture that just now you said that he proposed private ownership because if I remember the paper correctly that in the river upstream and downstream he talked about so even in the upstream if somebody has an industry and in the downstream if suppose people are staying there having agriculture in the upstream he pollutes so that pollution definitely may not affect him that much the way it will affect the downstream so I don't know how here he is talking about private ownership no more know that water is common precisely that is what he is trying to say because it is common there is no efficient way of managing it so he says all resources should be privatized so that people take an interest in addressing these kinds of problems where upstream downstream there are inequalities or what you do in one area affects another so he says if you allow private property then eventually you will evolve a certain kind of market mechanism where people acquire different kinds of resources and will devise rules and regulations that is what that is a larger objective of what he is trying to say so if you look at this two minute animation documentary there that I have given that explains both of these perspectives what Gareth Harding is trying to say and the alternative idea of commons where people actually design rules so in that they show as opposed to this cartoon where people decide to fence off that these people who decide to obey these rules can only use this common this grassland or pasture there is a limit on how many cows you can graze there is also a contribution expected from every individual every household to maintain that pasture there is also punishment that if you violate these rules what will happen to you all of that is there or if I can give you an example from Mumbai so the fishing community in Mumbai there are about 100,000 of them we do not realize that it is not only IIT that is in Mumbai there are 100,000 fishing households fishing community has a informal customary ban on fishing during the monsoon season because monsoon is when the fish breed they spawn if you do fishing during the monsoon next season there is no fish but people from outside of Mumbai come to do fishing in the monsoon you cannot do anything about them because they are not part of the commons so there is the local people know how to sustain the resource they have developed a rule of how to maintain it so eventually they of course influence the government of Maharashtra to ban fishing during the monsoon but of course when you give a task to the government you know it is not going to succeed it is very easy to flout that rule so this is the tragedy of the common so Gareth Hardin says freedom in a common brings ruin to all because and if you remember what I just said he is actually talking of open access regime not commons ok here also he is saying ruin is the destination towards which all men rush each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons so he is clearly anti commons ok so the IASC which is a worldwide organization for the study and research on commons it differentiates between different kinds of resource management these are what are commonly referred to as commons or common property resources or common pool resources because they are not only about ownership property indicates ownership whereas the commons actually is about management they do not believe in ownership they are about management so open access leads to the free rider problem everybody is a free rider on the resource there is overuse, exploitation, there is tragedy but not commons what is commons so Eleanor Ostrom is one of the most famous scholars who worked on the commons she was a political scientist but was given the Nobel prize in economics she is the first woman in economics to get a Nobel prize again maybe but she is not an accident because she had a different way of looking at the economics of resources ok so here in this interview with her she talks about what are commons and it is related to what I just said but she is not a commons fundamentalist she is not saying commons is the only or best way to govern resources in some cases it can be private in some cases it can be public so she is talking about multiplicity arrangements so for example when it comes to global warming or climate change individuals can change their lifestyle that is not going to make a difference governments have to step in and enforce certain norms and regulations for automobiles for example there may be certain kinds of resources which are maintained very well by private sector actors ok so Sariska is the case where government failed the private sector failed so why not give a chance to others so she is saying that people develop different kind of institutional arrangements people are not stupid they will allow resources to degrade because it is in their own interest to maintain it therefore people will develop diverse arrangements to prevent the collapse of ecosystems how to be understand these arrangements and how do we use that understanding to enhance the sustainability of environments that is her main objective so she says that the nature of human ecosystem interaction is not the same everywhere it is different from Mumbai to Kalahandi to Kashmir to Singapore in different places it is different it is cultural it is related to state policy it is technology everything it is economy there is no unique problem and here she says bureaucrats sometimes do not have the correct information while citizens and users of resources do ok let us not assume that government knows best ok people like you and me and ordinary people also have knowledge how do we make use of that there is an excellent film which you can show which ties in all of these issues which talks about the developmental impact of common so this film he is an artist who made this documentary he shows that the average benefit to people dependent on the commons in India alone is 5 billion US dollars and they relate it to things like farmer suicides because far drought has been occurring for millions of years but then when a drought occurred farmers had an alternative option they could use their livestock to graze on pasture and get something from that they could get something from the forest they could get something from the river from the lake closing off these commons meant those commons which acted as a safety benefit ceased to exist that is why these kinds of social security problems have emerged farmers commit suicide they also talk about biodiversity here so for example the implications of protecting forests so you can have a lot of medicinal plants in forests for example if you destroy the forests then the chances of discovery of pharmaceutical drugs are less that was one of the justifications for the you know not giving permission to the silent valley project for example because it is very rich in biodiversity it talks about cultural commons also now we talk of digital commons so for example culture can include knowledge it can include information it can include music arts so one of the examples they use is the use of common food products for medicinal purposes in India like turmeric or neem so they talk about how there are attempts being made to patent the medicinal uses of turmeric and neem in other countries and therefore we who have been using them for centuries are forced to pay for those things they talk about this song from Hamdil Dechuke Sanam called Nimuda Nimuda Nimuda you all know that this is actually a folk song which was written by a Rajasthani Manganiar folk singer okay now this song was taken over by Sanjaila Bansali and he his company has a patent on it so the original writer of the song has to pay Sanjaila Bansali to perform his own song that is the destruction of the cultural commons so they talk about different kinds of commons in this film and how that has implications for livelihood for environment as well as for broader developmental issues finally something very concrete in terms of solutions again so Eleanor Ostrom came up with these design principles so how to prevent those systems from collapsing design proper rules so she did research among hundreds of commons around the world including in India okay and came up with this set of design principles she says that most of the successful examples of commons follow these principles if you can implement these principles if you can design rules and regulations in this way environment is most likely to degrade more likely to be sustained over a long period of time these are easily implementable kind of designs or principles or norms or rules so I will not go into detail on explaining all of these you can read up all of these and then if you have any doubts you can write back to me later but these are things which students generally find very useful in class when we talk of what kind of institutional solutions can exist to prevent these kinds of problems okay so I will just end here we will have some time for discussion just want to end here by saying reiterating what Professor Fatak was saying that the idea is that not to just burden you with extra things that you have to teach with which you are not familiar I know you are all engineers none of you are social scientists so a lot of you think like social scientists that you have a social conscience okay and that you are concerned deeply about social issues and as Professor Satie mentioned during the break that you are thinking as a community of environmentalists who are interested in addressing environmental issues in a particular way so challenge yourselves get inspired be passionate if you want to be passionate you have to read up things which you do not like okay that is what we do every subject that we take up okay sometimes there are always some topics some courses which is very boring you have to do it but what we are trying to say essentially is that you cannot address environmental problems in a narrow way that has been the thrust of what we have been saying from the beginning in this course so there are multiple aspects multiple perspectives to addressing environmental issues and hopefully putting the problems to the students posing the problems to the students in these ways will help them not only to understand the issues more clearly but also enable them to come up with solutions so I was thinking of calling a few students here today but they were not free there are 3 students who did our environment studies course last year they started a project in a rural area for sanitation inspired by a course another student who passed out 2 years ago management enterprise okay so hopefully your own course will also touch people's lives in that way because this is what I like to call as an impact course all courses have an impact okay they do things for students in their later lives but this impacts as as persons as human beings as individuals and if you can do that as co-ordinators as teachers and you can you know in turn guide your own teachers to touch other students lives then I think it would have been worth it okay so I will stop here before I take questions on any of these topics one thing I want to reiterate which I mentioned in the beginning that you are co-ordinators and what I have done is to select topics from the UGC syllabus and pose the issues in a particular way and the handouts that you have been given there those contain questions some of which I have touched upon here some of which I have not for lack of time so as co-ordinators and as teachers I would like you to think about how you can relate each of those questions to the topics from the UGC syllabus which I have picked up I have also given in parenthesis or brackets some examples of themes topics case studies which you can use with reference to those questions so I do not expect that you will read that and immediately you know find out ways in which you can use them in your classroom please go through them today next 3 days next 2 months but my own suggestion is that this will amplify the message that we want to send out to students about the environment instead of simply following the textbook in that way so topics are important as given in the textbooks in the UGC syllabus but the method of dealing with those topics is quite outmoded so I would ask you to challenge yourselves and the students by raising those sorts of questions ok so that we reflect more and it does not just become a issue of you know road learning whatever you taught in the classroom and through guidebooks and then regurgitating them in the exams yeah so any questions about anything welcome good evening all yeah I can hear you I am from Hyderabad campus so here is my observation environmental chemistry are studies as I am from chemisties coming chemisties we are teaching for engineering graduates particularly engineering graduates they will listen to the teacher in the classroom then after they once the semester ends I am sorry to say this is my observation they don't have any little bit concern in the environment but what I observed I visited many schools children I addressed the children say third class, fourth class sixth class people they are having lot concern in the environment and once we encourage them they are ready to let our activity will give they are taking it granted and they are doing without any expecting nothing so school that is my observation particularly though we are putting this much efforts in engineering graduates they are not having for that what we have to do this one of the my observation thank you thank you for that observation in fact you know it's not very different in IIT as well so most of the students do it because they have to do it what we find is that over the years our own ability to teach this has improved and the choice of topics has been transformed in response to what we think will make better sense to students and of course our teaching ability has improved and as a response to that we find the number of students who take this course seriously is increasing more importantly you know in a course of this kind in fact that 100% will take to this course and our objective is not to make all the students into environmental scientists our objective is to see how in small ways they can incorporate the learnings from this into whatever they will do later so we are finding increasingly there are few students who take it very seriously and turn it into careers but we also see there are other students who will incorporate this in all ways into whatever they are doing for example last year I had a student from civil engineering and he went and fought with his professors because he was given a BTIC project on something to do with high rises or stadiums or something he said I wanted low cost housing and nobody was willing to guide me on that low cost housing green housing low carbon housing and all that so he came and talked to me he said you please talk to my professors and make sure someone guides me I said no and on his own there was this controversy going on around Lovasa that big township near Pune he did his own environmental assessment it came up with a beautiful paper so there are these kind of things which encourages so over a period we hope that this number will expand even if it is 10% or 20% it is worth doing it it will make a difference this is Pavitra Vasanam Devi University actually my question is actually related to policy issue actually generally we all academician we talk so many big things and polish all these things but in practice actually we don't actually implement it like we talk about environmental issue but none of us that we don't plan that tree because at one two or five trees we should plant or I think some somewhere that there should be a rule from the government that if there is a serious issues that government should make the rule at least a teacher or somebody or environmentalist or somebody who are working in government sector they should come forward and they should the plant trees because lot of people they are degrading and they are polluting but people who are actually they have some sense to an environment they should do that and the second issue that also environmental issue that people they have three car, four car, five car something like that we should have some ceiling or government have some rule that you can't buy more than two cars something like that and that in some way it will help to actually damage environment so thank you so those there is just one response that I can have of course the second issue there are many countries are trying out different mechanisms Singapore for example has something called COE certificate of entitlement suppose a car is $10,000 you have to pay $100,000 to buy a car to get that certificate there are limited number of certificates of entitlement even to buy a motorbike so in Britain, London for example certain cars with different kinds of license plate can only come into London city on particular days odd days even days and so on these are being tried out so that's for the government rule but on the first issue that you mentioned what government should do say increasingly we have moved away from government to governance so we believe the job of government is not only that of the government job of governance is of everybody in a democracy okay so everybody has a responsibility so communities groups, associations businesses all of them have to contribute to the maintenance of laws to the enactment of laws to implementing laws so that's what professor Fatah was saying yesterday he says why do people not follow traffic rules okay so we know it is wrong but we still go ahead and do it so governance is not simply about saying that the government should do this because we know it doesn't happen okay so how to enhance governance that is the making of decisions and the implementation of decisions what kind of exercises does it involve what kind of decision making does it involve what kind of participation does it involve and that's why you know the commons model makes a lot of sense because it is probably the most democratic process of decision making and implementing decisions and we find and at least Ostrom's work for which she was awarded the Nobel prize shows it works so I think we have to move away from that model of top-down approach where the government does everything to how we can facilitate so government can enact laws when it is up to the people to put pressure and make sure it works and also follow those rules okay I want to raise one topic which is probably quite relevant to this discussion conformity to the environmental rules industry, environment and employment how do you correlate employment industry and environment okay yeah because often there is a self-conflict I have seen yes yes so that's in fact one of the dilemmas of the government also faces in terms of conflict between multiple objectives of employment generation industrial activity and environment so in terms of yes so while conforming to all the rules and regulations so very often many people even educated people will say that employment is more important or industry is more important we can ignore environment for a little time and so on so this is the you know classic environment versus development kind of debate and we know it doesn't work this way because ignoring the environment even for a short term can cause disaster so you know lot of activities have been situated around coastal areas in Mumbai which was one of the reasons for the flooding that we experience all the time because what happens is many of the flood barriers like salt pan and mangroves and so on were destroyed let's take the issue face by face suppose in an industry it is not conforming to the environmental rules and people who are taking care of the environmental rules I mean the police and gun robot people they are going to there and they are going to put some clues and notice and immediately the trade union leaders are coming up and telling are you giving me my bread who has given you the right to close the company I am not addressing this problem because this budding engineers they have elected most in the industry passing out from the college it is a valid point in fact there have been a complete top interest getting from the institute and what they are getting in the industry it is a direct conflict there is actually a very interesting article on Delhi because some years ago there was a judgement asking all industries in Delhi to shift out of Delhi and there were huge protests by the trade unions so what we are saying is it is not a question of employment there are solutions which you can work out which manage both kinds of needs so we need to work on them one last question here activity which I am carried out here in my institute so that experience I want to share with all myself, professor, R.S. Patil DICATI engineering college, textile engineering college, it is a crunchy co-op district so what I am doing some barren lands are available here in our institute so every year we are given admission up to 550 students in our institute and I am particularly a teacher in second year so what activity I am carried out for to make the role of individual about the upholstition every year we are going to plant only 7 trees there in our campus and in one class 70 students are there, 70 and that plant we are given through the institution and in 3 years from second year to final year so they will take all the maintenance and all these things are there so at the time of aluminium when they have seen that particular tree of the plant so they will also they are going to happy that our plant is still live in our area, our campus so every year only we are going to plant 7 trees from each and every branch now the total area it is looking like a green belt now in this 10 years so it will also helps to other institutes which are having the barren lands ok, thank you for sharing that we also have, every batch has something called a legacy project one of the legacy project is a park which an alumni group paid for and got constructed here it's called the Shikshitij Park which you can see on campus thank you very much for all your feedback