No sea lions in India
Mining is an environmental sore point internationally, and
India is no stranger to battles over resource extraction. Choudhary
is bringing a case before the National Green Tribunal from the
state of Uttarakhand in which an environmentalist is trying to
halt in-stream rock and gravel mining in the Gaula River — a
known corridor for Asian elephant migration. Chernaik says the
mining would have an unacceptable impact on endangered Asian
elephants in the last remaining forests of Uttarakhand and that
ELAW is also assisting Choudhary in arguing against the claim
that “stone and boulder mining of the Gaula River provides the
benefi t of minimizing fl ood risk.”
Choudhary speaks in a British-tinged accent of the wide variety
of cases he works on, from lions to coal in a single day. Thanks to
a history of colonial rule, English is the language used in India’s
Supreme and high courts. With English as a legal language, this
can lead to confusion for people in communities who speak
their native tongues and may not read English. Choudhary cites
an instance in which a gold mining proposal, written in Hindi,
described how the mine would use “foam water” to extract the
gold, which sounds fairly benign. In the English version, however,
the mine admitted the gold would be extracted using cyanide.
In another case, Choudhary sent Chernaik an environmental
impact assessment for a bauxite mine. Chernaik pulled up an older,
similar proposal to compare it. It wasn’t just a comparison; the Indian
proposal was a cut-and-paste version of the same exact proposal for
the Russian mine, Chernaik says, and had sentences such as, “The
primary habitat near the site, for birds, is the spruce forests and the
forests of mixed spruce and birch.” Not only are spruce trees not
present in that tropical part of the country, the proposal referred
to sea lions and other species that “you would never see in India.”
Choudhary says that before the NGT, clearance for proposals such as
these sailed through all the time, and in fact this one did.
RAHUL CHOUDHARY
‘It shall be the duty of
every citizen of India …
to protect and improve
the natural environment
including forests, lakes,
rivers and wildlife, and
to have compassion for
living creatures.’
— CONSTITUTION OF INDIA
hydroelectric project are built, but Choudhary says the rights of
the forestland dwellers to forest resources come before that of a
project. The villagers have seen what has happened downstream,
he says. “The beauty is destroyed,” houses have cracks, orchards
laid to waste. In addition, the high-altitude forests that would be
cut contain slow-growing chilgoza pine, which Choudhary says
cannot easily be replanted and grown.
People and the environment in India, as in many countries, are
up against foreign companies looking to make money or to use the
natural resources. Just as Oregon’s coal train controversy is largely
fueled by Asian countries looking to import coal, some of India’s
environmental woes stem from foreign investors. In a win before
the Green Tribunal in May, Choudhary’s legal arguments stopped
trees from being cut for a controversial $12 billion steel project in
Orissa by a South Korean company called Posco. The plant is the
largest foreign direct investment in the country, involving high-
level government offi cials from both countries, and has been held
up for eight years. If the several-thousand-acre Posco plant comes
to fruition, it will result in communities being forced to relocate
from their lands and more deforestation. Posco is still fi ghting to
build the steel plant.
Affordable Fashion
for Everyday People
Constitutionally green
PHOTO BY TODD COOPER
Communities at risk
Though headquartered in New Delhi, Choudhary and the three
other attorneys of LIFE spend their time in smaller Indian villages
to help give voice to those communities’ needs when faced with
industries that could devastate them. In one case that may sound
familiar to Oregonians, given the current focus on coal exports
and the impacts of coal trains, a coastal fi shing community is up
against a proposed coal-fi red power plant near Mundra, Gujarat.
As in the Northwest, coal is not easy to fi ght in India. OPG
Power Gujarat’s 300-megawatt coal-fi red power plant fi rst
proposed a wet-cooling system, using seawater, then proposed
a dry-cooling system. The dry system would use groundwater
in a place where that water is scarce, create air pollution and
greenhouse gases due to the increased energy need for cooling in
a hot area and use a great deal of land, creating confl ict with the
nearby village of Bhadreshwar. This coal plant will be decided
when the NGT reconvenes next month and “hopefully keeps this
pretty bad project from going forward,” Chernaik says.
In another case, Choudhary and Dutta represent residents of the
village of Lippa, high in the mountains of Himachal Pradesh, who
are fi ghting a dam that would divert a snow-fed Himalayan
waterway. Forestland will be taken as the stages of the Kashang
Though LIFE has had many successes arguing in front of the
NGT — the wins are a huge turnaround from before the tribunal
existed when Choudhary says 99 percent of environmental cases
were dismissed — the legal battles continue.
It hasn’t been that long since fi eld burning ended in Oregon,
and many communities here still remember the choking smoke
from the burning of grass-seed fi elds that made people sick and
led to car accidents and deaths. Some Indian communities face
the same thing.
The burning fi elds are so legion in Punjab and Haryana that,
Choudhary says, a NASA photo shows a red spot that can be seen
from space. Burning fi elds hadn’t historically been a large-scale
practice in India, but he says that when harvesting wheat and rice
by hand, leaving very little stubble, was replaced by machines,
farmers began to burn fi elds to get rid of the leftover plant matter.
The thick haze, with all its commensurate health problems,
envelops Delhi, Chernaik says. He says his research shows that
a practice called zero- or no-tillage farming “is a very feasible
alternative.” This solution is also one that is used in Oregon now
that the state ended fi eld burning in the Willamette Valley.
While in Eugene at the beginning of June, Choudhary toured
Short Mountain Landfi ll and the Glenwood disposal site to see how
Lane County deals with waste in order to inform his work. He also
went out to the West Eugene Wetlands. He says wetlands are called
“wastelands” in India and laughs ruefully at a clearance letter he
dealt with that said a seasonal wetland “was not a nesting site for
migratory birds, nor a proposed migratory route for the birds.”
The birds, whether or not they develop an ability to legally
propose their own migration routes, have some hope, as do India’s
forests and small communities as Choudhary and the attorneys
of LIFE continue their legal work. This is not only because of the
fl edgling National Green Tribunal, but also, as Choudhary points
out, because India’s Constitution says, “The State shall endeavour
to protect and improve the environment and to safeguard the
forests and wildlife of the country,” and “it shall be the duty
of every citizen of India … to protect and improve the natural
environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife, and to
have compassion for living creatures.” ■
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