Global environment politics, a unipolar exercise of trading and blatant profiteering by the rich countries, have adversely affected millions of workers who have depended on forests for a living for ages. In India, state atrocities on forest workers are on the rise. Incidents of false arrests, persecution and torture of forest workers take place on a regular basis across the country. Disregarding the provisions of the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution, the State keeps all control of forests in its own hands. A string of court orders has restricted people’s access to forests. The situation has reduced the forest workers to mere paws in a game. The years ahead could see these workers, pinned to the wall, reacting to their plight. Struggles for forest rights could thus turn into economic, political, environmental and social struggles directed as much against the State, global capital and the politics of environment as ethnic, caste, religious and gender discriminations.


Perpetual Victims

Forest workers as a ‘class’ emerged in India during the colonial era, when annexation of forest areas by the State heralded the end of traditional economies and lifestyles of forest communities in many parts of the country. Sustained commercial exploitation of forests led to degraded habitats and shattered these communities’ food and energy bases. In some places, new agricultural areas and settlements replaced forests, and in the remaining forests, ‘homogenous’ plantations of exotic and commercially valuable species replaced the natural vegetation. The colonial State created a new Forest Department and framed laws to give this department unlimited power to take over any forest area, and declare the continued usage of forests by traditional communities illegal.

Some sections of the displaced people were housed in the new ‘forest villages’, settlements established to supply free labour in forestry activities like logging, plantation and fire fighting. The Forest Department did not treat these forest villagers as industrial wage labour. As in other plantations like indigo and tea, the workers were treated as serfs or bonded labour. Migrants—adivasi people displaced from their original forest habitats elsewhere, and hapless dalit victims of caste exploitation and the zaminders’ tyranny—started to settle in forest and taungya villages in great numbers, and share the same resource base with original inhabitants. This led to cross-cultural, cross-ethnic assimilation as well as conflicts between these groups.

The independence of the country brought greater misery to forest workers. The new State made old forest laws harsher, limiting people’s access to forests. Meanwhile, in the name of production forestry, depletion of the natural forests went on unabated. A series of new ‘development’ projects across the country led to more destruction of forests and large-scale displacement of forest dwellers. The forests kept on vanishing, and the raj of the ‘forest mafia’ started as a new breed of traders and contractors joined hands with an increasingly corrupt forest administration. The official/unofficial destruction of forests destroyed the ecology of many traditional communities. Degraded forests offered nothing. Because of the water level going down and loss of soil nutrients, agriculture fell, food became scarce and non-timber forest produces vanished. Poverty, unemployment and starvation forced both migrants and autochthons to become wage labourers under the ‘forest mafia,’ thus starting the process of proleterisation of the forest people of the country.



Degradation of Forests

The destruction and degradation of forests represented a major threat to the forest workers, and a yet bigger threat appeared in the form of ‘conservation’. New laws like the Wild Life Protection Act (1972 and 2003) and Forest Conservation Act (1980) gave the Forest Department sweeping powers to curtail whatever little rights the forest workers had on forest resources, and to evict them from a forest area. This new policy of the State reflects the trends in global environmental politics, the apparent awakening to the environmental necessities to preserve natural ecosystems and halt growing industrial pollution. On the other hand, ‘conservation’’ is the magic word that opens the sesame of foreign aid. The Indian government needs a ‘conservation infrastructure’ to tap those aids/soft loans/investments: to start with, more national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, tiger projects, bio-diversity reserves, more new laws. And later, a leeway to international financial institutions to do as they please, plant anything, on any amount of land, as long that is ‘green.’ It matters not that this infrastructure excludes or dupes people whose existence depends on forests, and who had traditionally protected these forests, braving the mafia. Nor does it matter that the ‘conservation’ projects would seldom be able to save a single patch of forest, illegal trade in genetic material would flourish, poaching of wild animals and illegal felling of trees would continue.



Labour and Environment Discourse

The Indian forest labour is still not part of the ‘mainstream’ post-industrial discourse, despite centuries of commercial exploitation. From the Himalayas to the Terai grasslands, the Western Ghat rainforests and dense Central Indian Sal forests to the Eastern mangroves, myriad lifestyles, economies, and cultures they support refuse to die, and be ‘homogenised’. This ancient, inherent resilience had protected the forests from such ‘homogenisation’ attempts in the past; adivasi struggles stopped the British juggernaut on its tracks and made the colonisers review their forest policy. We would have to wait to see how the scenario unfolds now, when the global capital adopts ‘nature’ and ‘community’ as new market phrases and environment-in-itself becomes a commodity. We would have to wait to see whether this is the beginning of the end.