How To Develop the Himalaya in Four Easy Steps

Action Plan for Himalaya
Himavikas Occasional Publication # 2
Govinda Ballav Pant Institute for
Himalayan Environment and Development,
1992; Kosi, Almora

The book proposes a technocrat's model for eco-development. It does not touch base with the villager

Even the bada sahebs of development community would acknowledge that development of mountain areas proceeds along a somewhat different course than that of the plains. What these differences are precisely is a matter on which there is less agreement. After plethora of reports around the "Rio process", including the State of the World´s Mountains document and different country and subject-wise reports, those differences persist.

Part of this is because of differing perceptions of development itself: is development "human development" as defined by UNDP, is it weighed in terms of productivity and income, or is it calculated by substitution or supplementation of mountain subsistence by the market? Do these differences imply different goals or are they different ways of measuring the same thing?

The second reason is the differing perception, of the various actors involved in the development of the Himalaya: scientists, planners, engineers, foreign donors and their consultants, the independent sector, local communities, etc. None of these, on their own, can define development for the Himalaya, yet all of them are involved in it in some way or the other.

The third is the often times admitted lacks and uncertainties of Himalayan data. In Uncertainty on a Himalayan Scale, M. Thompson, M. Warburton and T. Hatley suggest that the latter two are related — that the differences in data are caused by differing perceptions, notions, cultures, etc. of the constituencies involved. They argue that, under these conditions, two models suggest themselves: the Tinkering approach and the Grand Design. The first builds on what there is — facilitating and empowering people through new technologies, processes and institutions and if it goes wrong (as it sometimes will), it cannot cause much damage. The second seeks to supplant what exists with what "should be". If it goes wrong (as all things sometimes will), it can cause major problems, even disasters. And since perceptions of what "should be" vary, it will cause major problems for at least some people most of the time.

Thinking about Thinking

The 1980s was a crucial decade for thinking about thinking on the Himalaya. Part of this brain activity was transmuted into two key institutions. The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) was initiated in Kathmandu, and India began an indigenous clone, the G.B. Pant Institute for Himalayan Environment and Development, in Almora.

Two alternate conceptions competed while the G.B. Pant Institute was being set up. The first involved a decentralised structure in each region of the Indian Himalaya, with networking facilities for planning and communication. The second wanted a hierarchical institution with a central office ,and branches in the other states. The first was the engaged scientist´s approach, while the second, the interested bureaucrat´s. It was the second model that won, shaping, in a sense, the rutureof die Indian Government´s thinking on Himalayan development.

Now hang on to your Himalayan topis! For here comes the G.B. Pant Institute's Action Plan for Himalaya. It proposes clear links between research, demonstration and what it calls "extension/execution", and includes a matrix of actions, "existing" and "desired", for different constituencies.

As a contribution to the Himalayan development debate, this plan serves a purpose; as a basis for the eco-development of the Himalaya, it is something else. Nevertheless, it is useful if only because it offers an insight into the state of official thinking about the Himalaya in India, today.

A typical excerpt:

One of the dilemmas being faced is the inevitable fact of the administrators (managerial staff) and the scientists {academic staff} working differently. It is, however, vital that they work as a team. At present this concept of partnership between the two types of institutions is completely lacking and this has further been aggravated by the prolific rise of the third Institution of a recent origin, the non-government organizations, which should have been the ´customers´ of new technologies rather than becoming the ´creators´ of technology and ´critics´ of the government infrastructure. Their deviation from the main role of spreading the technology is creating and independency instead of inter-dependency."

On the prospect for people, the plan is equally dim. A section on roads:

Road alignments should be worked out on the basis of geo-technical feasibility instead of the desire of the people, which is more often put forward and emphasized to serve political motives.

A Technocrat's Model

Despite its sincere approach to problems of scale, and its delineation of potential income generation scheme, such as eco-tourism, horticulture, bee-keeping (which many a Himalayan village has waited so long for), the Institute´s document is a technocrat´s model for eco-development. Its failure is that even where its proponents see the relevance of the efficiency-equity axis, they do not realise that it is different cultures and perceptions that are the issues.

And efficiency for whom? What is efficient for the fanner may not be efficient for the government; both may be inefficient from the perspective of the businessman. This involves scale, but also ends and paradigms. To give a very bad example, a bulldozer is of no use to a hill woman who wants to chop an onion. An axe might be. Both can be used to fell trees, in different paradigms.

But the main problem with plans like this one by the GBP, and the Grand Design approach in general, is that it fails to recognise the wonderful creativity of the Himalayan people in nurturing their harsh environment, in husbanding their forests and terraced fields sustainably, in raising democratic institutions. True, this is not invariably the case, but reasons for this state of affairs is one of the critical areas institutes such as the GBP should be examining. The well-known failure of many people´s institutions cannot be used to justify the technocrat´s approach, for isn´t the Himalaya littered with the debris of failed technocratic projects?

The Action Plan would like to see people as passive recipients of its largesse, not as thinking interactors shaping their own destiny. The fact that "the people" become "critics", not because of genetic predisposition but because of actions such as the GBP proposes, is an idea that never seems to have entered the calculations of its designers. As such, the Action Plan is illiterate about the possibilities of the very people it presumes to plan for.

The third thing that the authors fail to realise is that it is the task of institutions as the GBP to interpret the will of the people, not of some abstract, supposedly "efficient" Western managerial model—specially now, when the pure techno-managerial model is in disrepute across wide parts of the world, and is held as the prime cause for the environmental crisis. If, when they are unleased on the Supposedly "innocent" people of the Himalaya, the results of such plans are criticism, counter-pressure and lawlessness, (what the authors term "political considerations"), it can hardly be surprising. For politics mediates the process of development as much as its discourse and the preparation of this plan is proof of that.

Nowhere is there a mention of transnational linkages, so vital in a region as important as the Himalaya. The assumption is that the Indian parts of the Himalaya function in isolation from Nepal, Bhutan or Tibet. Nor is there any sustained analysis of upstream/ downstream linkages between mountain and plain, or within the mountain themselves. This, then, is apian that basically sees the Himalayan environment in terms of abstract policies and seamless national boundaries, rather than in terms of forest and field, mountain and slope. upstream and downstream, peasant and animal, all integral to the processes by which it survives.

More Litter

This is a document replete with current buzzterms such as "paradigm", "conflicts over natural resources", "sustainability ", but in ways that escape their essential meaning.lt also lists an impressive line of advisors, such as Madhav Ashish, M. S. Swaminathan, T.N. Khoshoo and K.S, Valdiya. One is forced to conclude that good advice might have been offered, but was not completely understood. And the merits of any document does depend on its authors, not on the quality of advice they might have been offered. This Action Plan fails to achieve what might have been its most basic goal: to articulate the Government´s position on Himalayan development intelligently and purposefully.

This Action Plan will never be implemented on the ground. It is too simplistic for that. But it will mediate government thinking about the Himalaya, and may even fool a foreign donor or two. The mind-set it represents will simply exacerbate local resistance, causing more of the "problems" it ostensibly seeks to solve. Finally, it will add to the litter of information on the Himalaya: neither respected and credible, and completely non-biodegradable.

Which is a pity. For whether administrator or scientist, planner or activist, the Himalaya deserves better from us all. Just as the processes of subduction and uplift as well as of weathering and erosion have shaped the mountains, so top-down planning must be in alignment with bottom-up strategies in order to work. It is time that India´s high planners incorporated the shocks and tremors of ground truth within their vision, uncomfortable though these will be.

Prakash is Himal's Consulting Editor.