Earth, Air and Water
Women Fight for the Environment in India
It is now a universally established fact that it is the woman who is the worst victim of environmental destruction. And the poorer she is, the greater is her burden. What may spell prosperity for some, spells disaster for her.
Industrialization, the phenomenal growth of cities, the proliferation of a cash economy, all these factors have played havoc with the earth's vast stores of natural wealth- its forests, its rivers, its very air.
What has all this meant for the women of the developing world ? In simple terms, it has meant longer hours spent doing back- breaking household tasks, like collecting water, foraging for fodder and fuel. A ceaseless cycle that goes on in good health and bad, in pregnancy or old age, in all kinds of weather. It has also meant industrial disasters which have snuffed out thousands of human lives in the course of a few hours. It has meant that whole communities suddenly find themselves face to face with starvation.
I would now like to take you on a guided tour of India. We'll be making three important halts. The first, which I have called "Earth", is a case study from the northernmost villages of Uttar Pradesh (U.P., a northern state) which lie in the lap of Himalayas. The region has witnessed a remarkable nonviolent ecological movement, popularly known as the Chipko andolan (the hug-the-tree movement).
The second section, which is entitled "Air", deals with the great Bhopal tragedy. Bhopal is a city of approximately 800,000 people in Madhya Pradesh (a state which forms the heartland of India).
For the third section, we'll travel down to the coastal villages on the southern tip of the subcontinent, in the state of Kerala, which have witnessed a 34 year fisherfolk agitation. This section goes under the heading " Water".
Earth
The Chipko movement clearly demonstrated, as no other movement did before it, that women have a deep commitment to preserving their environment, since it is directly connected to their household needs. It also shows how nonviolent methods can sometimes "move mountains".
The first incident that heralded this new movement took place at Gopeshwar village, in the Chamoh district of U.P. Three hundred ash trees in the region had been allotted to a sports goods manufacturer by forest officials.
In March 1973, the agents of the company arrived at Gopeshwar to oversee the felUng of the trees. Meanwhile, the villagers met and decided together that they would not allow a single tree to be cut down by the company.
With the support of Sarvodaya activists (Sarvodaya workers beheve in the nonviolent ideology of Gandhi), they walked in a procession, beating drums and singing traditionsil songs. They had decided to hug the trees that the laborers, hired by the company, were to axe. The agents of the sports company had to retreat in the face of this unexpected onslaught.
The Gopeshwar incident was only the first of a long hne of similar actions, but ah-eady the enthusiastic participation of the women was very evident.
Actually, flooding had helped to dramatize the issue, when the Alaknanda River, which runs through the region, breached its banks in 1970. Hundreds of homes were swept away. Sarvodaya workers succeeded in explaining the links between the flooding and the consistent tree-felling by lumber companies, which had resulted in tremendous soil erosion. In 1973, when the floods occured again, the villagers were quite conscious of the deforestation problem.
A year had gone by since Gopeswar village had managed to retain its trees. The Forest Department announced an auction of almost 2,500 trees in the Reni forest, overlooking the Alaknanda River. This time it was the women who acted.
It so happened that men of the village were away collecting compensation for some land taken from them when the employees of the lumber company appeared on the scene. One little girl spotted them and ran to inform Gaura Devi about it. Gaura Devi, a widow in her 50s, was a natural leader, and organized a group of about 30 women and children who went to talk to the contractor's men.
Gaura Devi is said to have pushed her way forward and stood before a gun carried by one of the laborers. She defied him to shoot her first, before touching the trees. "Brother, this forest is our maika (mother's home). Do not axe it. Landslides will ruin our homes and fields." She and her companions were successful in forcing the angry contractor and his men to return without their logs. That night, the women of the village stood guard over their beloved trees.
Soon after this incident the U.P. government set up an official committee to inquire into the validity of the Chipko activists' demands. After two years, the committee reported that the Reni forest belt was a sensitive area and that no trees would be felled there. The government banned tree-felling in the area for ten years.
News of the Reni victory soon spread. The real importance of the Chipko movement was that it did not fizzle out. Its message was taken by committed activists from village to village.
In August 1980 a curious thing happened at another village in Dangori Pantoli. The all - male village council had made an agreement with the Horticultural Department under which a nearby oak forest was to be felled in exchange for a cemented road, higher secondary school, a hospital, and electricity for the village.
On hearing about this deal, the Sarvodaya activists working there tried to persuade the council to change its stand. The men did not agree, but the women in the village decided they would protect the oak forest at any cost. The men were so incensed by this that they warned the women they would be killed if they defied the council's decision. Undeterred, a large number of women went ahead, held a Chipko demonstration, and saved the forest.The government soon banned tree-felling in this region as well.
The incident showed just how far the women had progressed. They had new confidence. They now demanded to be members of village councils; they formed Mahila Mandals (women's committees) to ensure the protection of forests; they appointed watchwomen who received regular wages to supervise the extraction of forest products; they planted saplings.
Today, there is a woman leader in the Gopeshwar (local government); that was unheard of earlier. Little wonder, then, that the image the Chipko movement brings to mind is that of a group of toil-worn women hugging a tree to save it.
Similar movements are taking place in other regions of India too - like the Appiko Movement in the western Ghatts region of Karnataka; the Girnar Movement in Gujarat and Goa. The bad news is that, according to the latest satellite data, India is losing 1.3 million hectares of forest per year. The Indian government's ambitious social forestry programmes seem to cater more to the needs of paper and other wood-based industries than to the fuel and fodder requirements of the people who are being robbed of their forests. So unless more and more Chipko-type movements take place, the harvest will be a bitter one.
Air
"Bhopal" is now synonymous with mass death through industrial pollution. It has become the sharpest indictment yet of the duplicitous and hypocritical policies of multinationals that have one set of safety considerations and criteria for plant and equipment design in the West, and quite another set for their Third World subsidiaries.
Spread over an area of 40 square kilometers, the Union Carbide complex at Bhopal manufactured MIC-based pesticides. (MIC is Methyl Isocyanate.) On the night of December 23,1984, the highly toxic MIC escaped from the factory, converting a quarter of the sleeping city into a gas chamber.
No one knows how many people really died that night. While the official figure is 2,347, an unofficial UNICEF assessment put it at 10,000. About 30,000 to 40,000 people were seriously injured, and another 200,000 badly affected, of which 75 per cent were slum dwellers, 40 per cent children, 15 to 20 per cent women in the reproductive age group, and 10 per cent elderly women. The worst affected by far were the poorest of poor. Their patched dwellings offered them very little protection against the gas.
Autopsy findings done on the bodies revealed massive destruction of lung tissue, damaged livers and kidneys, and circulatory systems completely drained of blood. Cyanide was found in the blood and viscera of the victims.
For those who survived, it was almost a living death. Men and women were completely or partially blinded, with continual watering and burning of the eyes, incessant headaches, vomiting, breathlessness, racking coughs. Psychologically, they were anxious and depressed, many had lost their loved ones, many were reduced to poverty because they couldn't work any more.
The manner in which the government conducted relief work was singularly ineffective and chaotic—a confusion compounded by controversy over the right Hne of treatment. Union Carbide did not help matters by its attempts to feed the public with disinformation. Relief funds very often did not reach the hands they were meant for. And the victims, with women figuring prominently among them, began to heckle medical teams. They also held demonstrations outside the residence of the chief minister of the state.
Voluntary agencies did some of the best relief work. For instance, the women of the Nagrik Rahat aur Punarwas Samiti discovered for the first time that women exposed to MIC were suffering from severe disorders of the reproductive system, in addition to other complications.
It was left to two committed women doctors - Dr. Rani Bang and Dr. Mira Sadgopal - to systematically document their findings after examining 55 gasaffected women, three months after the disaster. Their study confirmed that, since the gas exposure, an extremely high percentage of women had developed gynecological diseases Uke leucorrhea (94 per cent), pelvic inflammatory diseases (79 per cent), excessive menstrual bleeding (46 per cent), retoverted uteri (64 per cent) and cervical erosions (67 per cent).
Those women who were pregnant at the time of the disaster were in a pathetic state. Quite apart from the effects of the poisonous gas itself, hypoxia or lack of oxygen resulting from lung damage in the mother - is known to cause fetal distress. Most of the victims were given high doses of corticosteroids and tetracycline - both of which could have caused fetal damage. All this was known at the time, but no effort was made to educate women about possibilities of the ill-effects and offer safe facilities for abortion to those who didn't want to take chances.
Somehow, the women's movement in India was not able to make a deep impact on a situation that warranted much more sustained campaigning and relief work. But there have been a few exceptions. Members of Saheli, a Delhi-based women's group which works toward providing a social support structure to women in distress, camped in Bhopal for months together, helping to run a clinic which offered medical relief to victims. SEWA (Self Employed Women's Association) of Bhopal, helped give employment and rehabilitation to affected people. The Chattisgarth Jagruti Sanghatana, the Women's Centre, Bombay, and the Sahiar, Baroda, sent women activists to conduct surveys and highlight the problem in the media.
Today, the gas victims of Bhopal receive very little media attention. They remain locked in their own private hells, face- to-face with prospect of adverse carcinogenic and mutagenic effects visiting not just the generation of children conceived around the time of the tragedy, but future generations as well. Today, about two years after the incident, mental illnesses proliferate. Surveys revealed that 22 per cent of the screened population suffered from mental disorders.
The damage the Union Carbide complex did to the people of Bhopal cannot be measured in monetary terms. Yet, as the case for compensation comes up in the Bhopal district court, the company has launched an aggressive counterclaim, shifting the onus for the disaster to the government of India, and quibbling over the amount of compensation. Regardless of the ensuing court battle, the real losers are the victims themselves.
Water
The struggle to obtain clean drinking water is written into the lives of so many of my countrywomen that a former member of our Planning Commission once wryly remarked, "If men had to fetch drinking water, then 230,000 villages would not have remained without the provision of drinking water after 30 years of planned development."
By and large, Indian women have not organized enough to fight for their right to clean drinking water. There have been, however, some remarkable mass actions initiated or supported by women.
Noted political activist and sociologist Gail Omvedt reported on how a rural women's group, the Mukti Sangarsh, tackled the drought situation, aggravated by the failure of the rains for the fourth successive year in the Sangali district of Maharashta (ironically) enough, the wealthiest state of India, where Bombay is capital). Their crops were drying up, their cattle were dying of starvation, there was an acute shortage of drinking water, so the peasant women came out in large numbers for the first time and joined the men in organizing a road-blocking agitation on July 30,1984. They drove their bullock carts and cattle on the road and held up traffic for several hours. The authorities were forced to sit up, and promised organized relief. In the same state there is a unique body called Pani Panchayat (Water Committee), also dominated by women. The women here corner politicians at public meetings, organize sit-ins and rallies - all on one issue - water.
In Ambut Town, Tamil Nadu (a southern state which has had to face alarmingly frequent droughts), men, women and children protested against polluted drinking water caused by tannery effluents released directly into the Falar River. They carried pitchers of the contaminated water and broke them in front of the municipal offices. But most of these actions are desperate measures taking place in the face of acute hardship.
A more sustained ecological movement is taking place in adjoining state —Kerala. The fisherfolk of this state are locked in a 34-year-old struggle with the trawler owners. They are agitating against the government's blind policy of adopting various foreign fishing techniques without taking into consideration local circumstances and needs.
For generations, traditional fisherfolk have caught fish in shallow coastal waters. In the 50s, mechanized trawlers were introduced, in a bid to exploit the rich marine life of the coastal waters. These trawlers use nets that sweep the depths of the sea, disturbing the ecology of the sea basin, gobbling up fish stocks far in excess of their specific requirements. All this, in turn, has drastically affected the yields of the traditional fisherfolk.
One of the main demands of the agitating fisherfolk is a ban on in-shore fishing by trawlers during the three month breeding season, so that marine life in these waters is not threatened. But now the scene is riven with a new class of middlemen and investors —some of whcwn happened to be powerful poHticians in their own right- who have vested interest in seeing that the trawlers hold undisputed sway over the fishing waters.
Women have been both in the ranks and in the forefront of this struggle. I met some of these women activists, and heard the powerfully moving songs they sang. They are extremely articulate - Kerala having the highest levels of female literacy in India.
One of the biggest challenges facing the Indian women's movement today is to forge links between some of these disperate and scattered struggles, between rural and urban women's groups, and bring about a more broad- based women's liberation movement.
There are some very real problems. The most obvious, of course, are the practical difficulties of keeping in touch and in tune with each other's aspirations and involvements in a sustained manner. India is a large country, and while it may make a very powerful symbol to have a Chipko activist extend a hand of support to a Kerala fisherwoman, there are over 4,000 miles separating them.
There is also the great urban-rural divide. Most of the urban women activists come from backgrounds that are far removed from that of their sisters in the country-side. Their experiences as women and as activists in the city are, in many areas, totally different and so, too, not surprisingly, their preoccupations. But there are areas of commonality.
The image of a group of women hugging a tree to save it has inspired many a city activist to document the Chipko struggle through books, news
papers, articles, videos and films. It has brought many city activists into the forefront of the campaign against environmental destruction. In the same way, "urban issues" like bride-burning, personal law reform, and issues of health are now increasingly relevant in the countryside as capitalist relations of production become more and more manifest here.
On an international level, too, there is tremendous scope for extending hands of support. Each and everyone of the case studies I have cited here have international parallels. To cite a few examples: tree - felling in the Amazon basin; a major industrial disaster is Seveso, Italy, when deadly chemical gases escaped from a chemical plant; drought in Ethiopia; severe fish depletion in Peru; mercury poisoning in Minamata, Japan; the recent accident near Basel, Switzerland involving the pharmaceutical multinational Sandoz, which has led to the Rhine being poisoned right up to the North Sea; and, of course, Chernobyl. The list is endless.
I would like to improvise on a phrase from the feminist poet. Marge Piercy. All the women around the world who take part in movements like the ones I've described are working to make parts of the same quilt to keep us from freezing to death in a world that grows harsher and bleaker. More power to their workworn hands!
Source:
Healthsharing, Winter 1989 Pub. by Women Healthsharing, Inc. 14 Skey Lane, Toronto Ont.M6J3S4, Canada
This article is excerpted from Healing the Wounds: Vie Promise of Ecofeminism, edited by Judith Plant, published by Between the Lines, 1989, $15.95.
Pamela Philipose is a journalist and women's health activist in India.