Education oriented to an Ecology-based Economy

Article by Felix Padel & Malvika Gupta

In the Niyamgiri movement against Vedanta’s attempts to mine a sacred mountain, nothing is more educational than comments made by Kond Adivasis in various contexts: “We’re being flooded out by money…. We can’t eat money”, as Dai Singh Majhi said, a leader of the failed movement against the Lanjigarh refinery, sitting in his village of Belamba: words that contradict the basic supposition of the Human Development Index that people’s well-being can be measured by their income. “People think there’s crores of money up there on Niyamgiri. It’s not money up there, it’s our Maa-Baap, and we’ll fight to protect her” in the words of Lado Sikoka, a Dongria leader, at Belamba Public Hearing, speaking against expansion of the refinery. “They even destroyed our gods…. We’ll never grow our own food again” as a Kond woman put it, immediately after being displaced to make way for the refinery. “Taro Karma, Amaro Dharma” (his karma, our dharma), as a Kond elder said, standing outside the Supreme Court in Delhi, on hearing how an Odia judge had just in effect sold their mountain to Sterlite/Vedanta. “We need the Mountain and the Mountain needs us” as a Dongria woman summed up the core values that have carried the movement.

In many ways, ‘Adivasi Economics’ sums up a way of life that has existed for many centuries, that is based on ecological principles, and people’s control over their own labour and environment, ‘embedding economy in the rhythms of nature’.1 The words ‘economy’ and ‘ecology’ have almost the same root meaning in ancient Greek, referring to the nomia (laws) and logos (logic) of correct housekeeping (oikos = house). Aristotle used oikonomia to denote the city state’s correct management of resources and trade, in distinction to khrematistike, which referred to the much less important and even dangerous art of making a profit (khremata is modern Greek for money). ‘Economic(al)’ can still refer to being careful and restrained in how we use money and resources. But on the whole, an economist is not, in today’s system, educated to understand the ecosystems that life on earth depends on, but to see water, minerals and other raw materials as ‘resources’, from which profit/surplus is produced, using human labour. When we talk about being ‘eco-friendly’, this ‘eco-‘ refers to ‘ecology’. But should ecology and economy ever be pulling in opposite directions? The trouble is, what economists and engineers see as ‘resources’, indigenous peoples generally view as ‘sources’ of life and sustenance.

Some people say that this is ‘ecological romanticism’, romanticizing tribal cultures and ‘eco-incarcerating’ them. Obviously, it is true that under modern pressures, Adivasis can become prime destroyers of their own environment. These modern pressures started above all in India with the British-era Forest Acts that undermined the symbiosis between tribal peoples and their forest environment that had developed over centuries: the 1865 one, by which ownership of India’s forests was assumed by the state; the 1878 one, that ‘reserved’ certain forests, closing them officially to use by villagers; and that of 1927, which denied local people’s rights to forest produce ‘simply because they are domiciled there’. These Acts, and the exploitative, corrupt behaviour of Forest officials towards Adivasis, that soon became systematic and remains so, were a significant cause of many tribal rebellions. The Forest Movement in Jharkhand (South Bihar) in the 1970s-80s is one of many that has taken back ownership or management of forests, in this case by uprooting teak plantations etc. Nowadays, Adivasis often cut trees around a reservoir that displaced them, or in collusion with the timber mafia, to get money to survive. Many levels of alienation have evolved since those Forest Acts.

Arguments surrounding shifting (‘slash and burn’) cultivation are related to this: did Adivasis’ traditional agriculture preserve or displace the forest? Verrier Elwin’s collection of evidence (in The Baiga, 1939) that shifting cultivation on hill slopes, when it observes traditional long cycles of rotation, allows the forest to regenerate fully on patches that had been cultivated for a few years, flew in the face of colonial-era Forestry orthodoxy. It was immediately attacked, not only by sociologist G.S. Ghurye (in The Aboriginals – “so-called”…, 1943), but also by A.V. Thakkar, the ‘Gandhian’, who was instrumental in spreading the system of ‘ashram schools’ in tribal areas. Yet logically, it is obvious that what destroys the forest is not shifting cultivation, that keeps shifting fields between different locations in the forest and allows trees to grow back once a patch is left, but cultivation in permanent fields, that encroach the forest permanently.

If one looks to other parts of the world, indigenous peoples in North America or Australia for instance certainly used fire and tree-cutting to ‘manage’ their environment, but overall they enhanced the ecosystems they lived in, rather than destroying them.2 A key difference between an ‘indigenous’ and ‘modern’ outlook lies in the attitude towards nature, according to whether a culture is adapting to natural rhythms and developing a way of life based on understanding them; or whether nature is seen as something ‘inferior’ to culture, that ‘modern’ people dominate and exploit to the maximum. Restraint in what is taken from nature lies at the heart of ‘Adivasi Economics’, for example in not harvesting wild (or cultivated) foods (or e.g. bamboo) until a first fruits ceremony is held, allowing some seeds to regenerate, and in the Dongria taboo on cutting trees on the summits of their mountains (as opposed to the hill-slopes, where they practice shifting cultivation).

This word ‘taboo’ comes from the Maori word tapu, meaning ‘sacred’ as well as taboo. Every New Zealander understands this, and knows that certain mountains, patches of land or stretches of river are out of bounds, since they are sacred. It expresses the restraint intrinsic to indigenous cultures.

Often, in India today, we see environmentalism referred to as a ‘roadblock to development’. But how can real development be based on damaging the environment? ‘Sustainable Development’ is the modern concept that tries to find a balance between ecological and economic needs, and is described as based on three pillars: environment, society, and economy. Often, we find ‘economy’ placed first. This allows mining companies to claim they are teaching tribal people ‘sustainable livelihoods’ – when these are precisely what they are destroying! If ‘economy’ is put first, what is sustainable is basically what can make a profit over a few years. For real, long-term development, the environment has to be put first in the sense that damaging ecosystems should become a total taboo: ecosystems should be understood and respected, and restraint exercised in what is taken from nature. A balanced economy, that will enhance well-being in the long-term, is one that serves society, rather than the other way round, and respects the laws of ecology.

If we understand this need to reaffirm a synthesis between ecology and economy, then we will understand that any economic system, to be sustainable in the long-term, must allow regeneration of the forces and life-forms that we depend on; and that humans form part of a web of life that we manage best by adapting to, instead of trying to dominate it for short-term gain.

This is true above all of water, whose presence on earth is the basis of life, distinguishing our planet from others we know of. Modern, industrialising society has deeply disturbed the natural rhythms and sources of water. Dams devastate environments, as well as human communities, at many levels. One of the first to understand this in India was Kapil Bhattacharya, who as Chief Engineer of West Bengal opposed construction of the Farakka barrage, damming the Ganga, and was dismissed and reviled as a Pakistani spy for warning that it would increase sedimentation and cause the devastating floods in Bihar we have witnessed recently.3

Mining mountains, as the Dongria seem to understand better than many scientists, whose expert training teaches them to delink minerals from their role in an ecosystem, destroys mountains’ fundamental role of storing water, releasing it slowly in perennial streams. For example, the aluminium that bauxite is so rich in bonds with H2O, which is why bauxite deposits just below the summits of Niyamgiri and other mountains act as sponges that store water. The first geologists who studied these mountains in southwest Orissa, around 1900, coined the term ‘Khondalite’, after ‘those fine hill-men, the Khonds’, noting how the fields all around the mountains showed excellent fertility from the perennial, mineral-rich streams. Bauxite mines destroy this water-holding capacity, and dry up the streams during summer months. So when a Dongria woman says ‘We need the mountain, and the mountain needs us’, this statement contains a deep understanding, that combines ecology and economy, and is deeply materialist at the same time as spiritual, in a world view that locates spirit in nature.

As for groundwater, we may be much less conscious of this than depletion and pollution of rivers and mountain streams, which we can see; but it is widely reported that India’s groundwater levels have dropped alarmingly, ever since the ‘green revolution’ started to extract huge amounts of water to spread cultivation using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Perhaps no project should ever be termed ‘development’ if it depletes, rather than enhances, underground aquifers.

This has huge implications for what we understand as ‘development’, and calls into question the whole concept of ‘economic growth’. If growth means showing a profit, and this depends on devastating the ecosystems that life depends on, then basically, the concept needs to be questioned fundamentally, and even discarded. For example, dams are created largely to generate power, and many of the biggest have been, and are being, built to give water and power to steel and aluminium factories. Steel output, like dams, is often taken as a symbol of ‘development’. The ‘Great Leap Forward’ that Mao masterminded in China in 1958 was a huge boost to steel production, based on forcing peasants from producing food to producing steel. The policy certainly produced the world’s worst famine, estimated at 30 million or more deaths. At first, most steel wasn’t even real. But finally, today, China has become the world’s top steel producer, overtaking Britain, the USA and USSR as Mao intended. India is number four in world steel production, and this certainly contributes to our GDP. But at what cost?

It is estimated (by the Wuppertal Institute in Germany) that producing one tonne of steel consumes over 40 tonnes of water, while producing one tonne of aluminium consumes over 1,000 tonnes of water. So what are these industries’ real costs? How long can present production continue to grow? Do the corporate and financial heads, politicians, bureaucrats, engineers and economists who plan and facilitate an expansion of India’s steel and aluminium industries understand the ecosystems and communities that are getting destroyed? When we look at the wastelands being produced where, till recently, forests of outstanding biodiversity existed for hundreds of years, it’s idiotic to call this ‘development’; and the extreme poverty and atrocious labour conditions evident from all the country’s mining areas make a mockery of every promise of ‘development’ that every project has given out when it started.4

Both sides of the Maoist conflict tend to characterize it as ideological, and of course, Maoists are correct that Adivasis are a highly exploited class. But when they started a policy of ‘assassination of class enemies’ in any area, they set in motion a civil war motivated by revenge. Leadership on both sides remains non-tribal of course; and what funds the war is, above all, investment in mining, which pays for a huge expansion of security forces, roads and townships, but also funds the Maoists in terms of ‘protection money’ etc. They may oppose the Raoghat mines strategically, but when they attack a mine or factory, they never try and close it down, and they never focus on assassinating senior mining company officials. So long as they call themselves after Mao, they will never produce a proper critique of the mining industry. In prioritizing steel production above human and environmental well-being, India is pursuing a Maoist mining policy. The conflict in Adivasi areas is essentially a resource war over minerals.

When Jairam Ramesh was Environment Minister, he tried to make one third of India’s ‘easily accessible’ coal deposits into ‘No Go Areas’, since they lay under exceptionally rich forest, and tribal communities. Instead, he was ridiculed and overruled by business interests, and we got ‘Coalgate’ that diverted the public gaze towards irregularities in the bidding for coal deposits, and companies that had acquired rights to deposits but left them ‘unutilized’. So should India use up all its coal, iron and bauxite deposits as fast as possible?

Coal, like oil and gas, is carbon from ancient forests, deposited and stored underground in prehistoric times. The main cause of global heating is the extraction and burning of these deposits, putting them into the atmosphere. If we cannot put some restraint on our use of coal and oil, as well as metals, then we are certainly living in the era of The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight.5

Just as excessive extraction and industrialization produces wastelands and Ecocide, excessive displacement of tribal communities causes cultural genocide, undermining knowledge and value systems that developed over centuries. According to statistics on displacement, over 20 million tribal people – approximately a quarter of India’s Scheduled Tribe population – have been displaced since Independence. But alongside this physical displacement – which of course is a complex web of human stories moving between poles of resistance and alienation – an erosion of values is also taking place, and erosion of knowledge systems far older than any concept of ‘India’ or ‘tribe’.

One element of what is destroying these systems is an education system that was meant to be based on integrating literacy and ‘modern knowledge’ with the genius of each tribal culture, but is actually geared towards forcing the assimilation of these cultures into the mainstream. According to the policies formulated soon after Independence, every child is supposed to receive education in his or her own mother tongue, especially at the primary school level; tribal teachers who know these languages were meant to be employed; elements of tribal culture were supposed to figure large in the curriculum; school timings were supposed to be adapted to seasonal work patterns and festivals; and the whole system was meant to be based on Gandhi’s system of Basic Education, involving ‘productive work’, and an integration of hand, mind and heart. Instead, it is widely reported that the vast majority of schools in tribal areas barely use tribal languages at all, and Adivasi children are often even punished and humiliated if they speak them, or express their culture in other ways; less than 6 per cent of teachers in Adivasi schools are Adivasis; and ‘productive work’, since the Kothari Education Commission in the mid-1960s, has been oriented towards industrial/technical training that will prepare tribals for jobs in an industrialized environment, rather than incorporating elements of tribal culture, or holistic practice.

Studies on tribal education tend to emphasize low literacy levels and high drop-out rates, without any attention on the profound alienation taking place in schools, including cruel punishment and humiliation – a system that produces children ‘neither suited for the home nor for the fields’.6 Often, children from families that have not experienced school-learning before are termed ‘first generation learners’. Do we imagine that there was no learning in tribal cultures before schools were built? Many tribes had some form of ghotul (Muria Gond), dhumkuria (Oraon) – a ‘youth dormitory’ system, in which older children passed on vast bodies of knowledge. Children also, in all these societies, learnt a huge amount of practical knowledge informally by working and playing with grown-ups and older children in fields and around the house. What is happening to all this knowledge in the schools? Do schools even recognize this as knowledge?

The system of residential ashram schools that Thakkar Bapa brought from what is now Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra to Orissa, Bihar and other tribal areas grew from a few dozen at Independence to about 3,500 in 1989. The Kothari Commission recommended more and more residential schools and hostels; and this trend continues now, in the form of village day schools being closed down, especially in Maoist-affected areas where security forces have occupied or destroyed schools, and in models of privatization promoted for example by the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), whose central boarding school in Bhubaneswar claims to be giving education to 25,000 tribal children ‘from KG to PG’, with funding from Nalco and Vedanta.

Recently, many instances of sexual abuse as well as poorly explained deaths have been reported from tribal boarding schools and hostels. More than this direct suffering and violence though, what does it mean to be removing tribal children from their families and communities? Even when KISS claims to be using ‘multilingual education’, and Tata Steel is funding this in Jharkhand, the main emphasis in the vast majority of tribal schools is what the Virginius Xaxa Committee Report has called an ‘ashramization of tribal education’, and a policy of assimilation completely at odds with the official one of integration.7

Tribal knowledge and value systems exist in community traditions and practices that have been passed on informally, without coercive discipline, through countless generations; and in languages and oral traditions that are as ancient as any, and that are disappearing frighteningly fast, mainly because they are so despised and marginalized in the mainstream that, at a certain point, many parents stop encouraging their use, and younger generations turn their back on them. A conversation from a remote village in Ranchi district, that a researcher held with a non-literate man of the Oraon people, sums this up:

‘ “My children are not going to school. But the son of my neighbour went to school. The experience of that family deters me from sending my children… education has brought only misery rather than any relief to his family. Our own dhumkuria I feel was better as it did not wean our children from us.”

“What according to you is wrong with the education that is being imparted?”

“Everything. It is making our children learn to read and write no doubt. But at the same time it is not our education. It is your education Babu, you are snatching our children and are making them diku (outsider). They start to look down on us after education. They want to leave everything that is our identity. Are we not human? You do not teach them our language, our culture, our way of life. You are making them aliens in our own homes.”’ 8

In a very real sense, that has barely been recognized as yet, India has been implementing a covert assimilationist policy, which mirrors the discredited policy of assimilation imposed over indigenous populations in North America and Australia for instance, from the 2nd half of the 19th century until the 1970s or 1980s – the ‘stolen generation’ policy of stealing children from their families and forcing their incarceration in mission-run schools that forbade their languages, names, customs and religion, for which the Prime Ministers of Canada and Australia have issued formal and heartfelt apologies.

In tribal India, this assimilationism is undeclared at a formal level, and goes largely unacknowledged. What is being eroded is undefined modes of knowledge that tribal children have been learning from elder kids, parents and the whole social fabric of their society, passed on through stories and dances, elaborate rituals and work practices that merge spirit possession and spirit-knowledge with practical skills of making a huge range of things from natural raw materials. The knowledge of forest products merges into a value system based on co-operation and sharing rather than the kind of competition that is implicit in ‘modern’ education, politics, law, sport and business practices.

It’s not too late to recognize the mistake and learn from a network of small, alternative schools set up in tribal areas, that use tribal languages and emphasize local knowledge and skills; and from initiatives such as the ‘communitisation of education’ programme in Nagaland, where village communities are put in charge of schools and school-teachers’ salaries.

What is at stake is something far more than just the well-being of India’s Adivasis or tribal people – though this is something of immense importance in itself. It is long overdue that we in the mainstream start to reverse the learning process, making it a two-way education. There is much that even our most highly educated and senior scientists, academics, business leaders and government servants can learn from tribal people about how to live sustainably, in community, sharing the earth’s resources in a way that does not harm our environment, and makes life more joyful.

An esteemed recent position paper on environmental education emphasizes Adivasi knowledge of and sensitivity towards their natural environment, giving an example where environmental scientists learnt from Solliga Adivasis in Karnataka about the role of forest fires in regenerating amla.9 As this paper emphasizes, environmental issues should become central across the school and university curriculum, and children need to be encouraged to teach themselves by exploring their local environment. What can be learnt from Adivasis covers many levels. Above all, right now, a key expression of Adivasi or indigenous values is through the large number of movements aimed at regaining control over local forests, and preventing destructive dam and mining projects. We all need to learn from these movements and the people risking their lives in them. Otherwise, we won’t have clean water, wholesome food, intact forests and wildlife to pass on to future generations.
1 ‘Primitive Accumulation, Labour, and the Making of “Scheduled Tribe”, “Indigenous”, and “Adivasi Sensibility” ’ p.74, by Savyasaachi, in First Citizens: Studies on Adivasis, Tribals, and Indigenous Peoples in India, edited by Meena Radhakrishna, 2016, pp.53-76; and ‘Adivasi Economics’, chapter 2 in Ecology, Economy: Quest for a Socially Informed Connection, by Felix Padel, Ajay Dandekar & Jeemol Unni, 2013.
2 ‘People enhanced the environment, not degraded it, over past 13,000 years’, Nature Communications, 30th August 2016, at http://phys.org/news/2016-08-people-environment-degraded-years.html#jCp
3 Siltation of Calcutta Port, Report of 1961; ‘Over 50 years ago Bengal’s chief engineer predicted that the Farakka barrage would flood Bihar’, 1st September, at http://scroll.in/article/815066/over-50-years-ago-bengals-chief-engineer-predicted-that-the-farakka-dam-would-flood-bihar
4 Rich Lands, Poor People: Is Sustainable Mining Possible? Centre for Science and Environment, 2008.
5 Thom Hartmann, 1998, subtitled The fate of the world and what we can do before it’s too late. The plants that decomposed during the carboniferous era as coal, oil and gas, were nourished by water and sunlight.
6 ‘Neither Suited for the Home nor for the Fields: Inclusion, Formal Schooling and the Adivasi Child’, by Sarada Balagopalan, IDS Bulletin, vol.34 no.1, 2003, pp.55-62.
7 Report of the High Level Committee on Socio-economic, Health and Educational Status of Tribal Communities of India, May, 2014, chaired by Virginius Xaxa.
8 ‘Tribal Education and Fading Tribal Identity’, by N.K. Ambasht, in Contemporary Society: Tribal Studies. Vol.3. Social Concern, edited by D.K. Behera and G. Pfeffer, pp.234-9.
9 National Focus Group on Habitat and Learning, Position Paper 1.6, March 2006, chaired by Madhav Gadgil, under the National Curriculum Framework 2005, published by the National Council of Educational Research & Training, pp.6-7.