Special issue with the Sunday Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

EARTHSCAPES: May 20, 2001

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Educating for diversity

Kartikeya V. Sarabhai and Sanskriti R. Menon

The writers are with the Centre for Environment Education, the former in Ahmedabad, the latter in Pune.

Adharshila is a small school for tribal children in western Madhya Pradesh, run by the Veer Khajiya Naik Manav Vikas Pratishthan. In this region, as in most parts of India, cash crops or hybrid seeds promoted by government or commercial agencies are replacing local crop varieties. With help from the Adharshila teachers, students interviewed village elders, and made lists of the crops sown on their farms, marking separately the local seeds and the hybrid seeds. Students also collected about 200 samples of 25 varieties of local seeds from 25 villages. A plot of land at the school was reserved for propagation of these seeds. Local tribals explained to the students that the seeds should be intercropped, as this reduces the risk to farmers.

G.B. Mukherjee/Wilderfile

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. - Tagore

A drought occurred that year. A survey of the crop failure in the year showed that soybean failed due to lack of water, but jowar, bajra, a local variety of maize and other smaller grains survived. The wiser farmers were the ones who had planted several varieties of crops, including local varieties. At a parents' meeting the Adharshila teachers discussed the importance of agro-biodiversity, and some parents agreed to propagate local seeds. The understanding of crop diversity, and the need to conserve it for livelihoods and other purposes, was being revived.

In the early 1990s, members of a wildlife conservation organisation, called Nature's Beckon, went to the Chakrashila forest in Assam. They sighted a troop of Golden langurs, which were thought to have disappeared from North East India and were reported only from the hills of Bhutan. One reason attributed to the existence of this population in Assam, was the presence of the tree Terminalia citirina, locally known as hilikha, the fruit of which the langur eat. This meant that the entire habitat would have to be protected to save the langur from extinction.

Nature's Beckon pioneered a campaign to get the reserve forest declared as a sanctuary, after discussing the implications with local villagers. Committees, mainly comprising youth, were formed in all the adjoining villages. Other media were also used to highlight the issue. This helped create a conviction among the villagers that the forest should be protected, and they got together to patrol the forest to prevent poaching and logging. In 1994, the area was declared a Wildlife Sanctuary, and there were further meetings with the villagers to devise alternative fuel, fodder, and other requirements.

Ashim Ghosh/Fotomedia
Forest fires have been one of the biggest threats to Himalayan forests in the last decades, and can be tackled only through large scale community effort and education.

The Chakrashila experience demonstrates that a variety of education and awareness efforts are required in any conservation effort. These range from creating awareness about the need to conserve biodiversity, to lobbying and advocacy, to action-oriented campaigns, and education for lifestyle changes. Of critical importance here is to address girls and women, as they have much to contribute, and equally much to lose if biodiversity declines.

Diverse knowledge systems

India now faces the twin crisis of loss of biodiversity, and of the community knowledge associated with its use. For instance, Dalit women traditionally use weeds to feed their cattle, as they do not have access to more expensive forms of feed. One such weed, Launaea procumbens, according to them is supposed to increase the milk yield of cattle, a fact attested by the Indian Materia Medica. This plant is commonly found but neither modern science nor younger farmers seem to know of its value. This knowledge of its use may well become rare, with land use changes and large-scale use of weedicides.

Sujeet Dongre
Nature orientation for school children, Maharashtra.

In the Western Ghats, the general degradation of forests and conversion of natural areas to fields or urban lands is leading to the loss of medicinal plants such as sandruk (Litsea glutinosa), and jasund (Antiaris toxicara). Traditional healers use sandruk for fractures, and jasund for treating bloat in cattle. The younger generation wants to move away from family occupations, and does not feel the need for going to traditional healers. With few takers of traditional healing systems, knowledge of medicinal plants will die as the healers pass away.

In the late 1980s, two young women who had just finished veterinary training, started the NGO Anthra in Pune and Hyderabad. They found that the problems that communities face with regard to livestock, posed challenges that went far beyond their veterinary skills. Veterinary college curricula are indifferent to community knowledge about livestock management, feeding systems and traditional medicine.

Mahendra Vyas
Youth mobilisation against hunting, creating public awareness.

Anthra's work, which has evolved from this background, now involves documentation of traditional livestock practices, fodder and forage species, and medicinal plants used for treating livestock. The NGO validates traditional practices and then trains village animal health workers in these practices, which are used to cure simple ailments. More complex ailments are referred to the hospital. Veterinary hospitals are few and far between, and Anthra finds that no single medicine system can provide all healthcare answers. They feel that solutions lie in understanding local systems and building on their strengths.

Anthra is, in a sense, learning from traditional knowledge, and coherently combining this with formal systems to better the lives of the communities they work with. This means that traditional knowledge has to understood keeping in mind the historical context and then integrated in environmental restoration programmes in the current context. In the Biligiri Rangan Hills of Karnataka, the Vivekananda Girijan Kalyan Kendra in its school for the Soliga tribals, combines the formal Rs. three with forays into the forests, continuing the powerful oral tradition of teaching in the field. In the process, the children do not get alienated from their cultures and their natural surrounds, a process that is tragically happening where-ever formal educational curricula devised in State and national capitals are thrust upon diverse ethnic communities.

Ashish Kothari
Nature camps establish links between nature and people, otherwise missing in urban areas.

How will the lessons from these examples become part of school/college curricula, research and government policy? The challenge goes far beyond formal education curricula; it extends into creative awareness and training programmes for policy makers, bureaucrats, the legal fraternity, agriculture university staff, NGOs, gram sevaks, and others who have an impact on how biological diversity is conserved and used.

The Anthra experience also shows that there is diversity of knowledge, specific to ecosystems, communities, gender and age. Members of the community - healers, men, women, older and younger folk - have different roles and therefore different knowledge bases. As roles change, as people get "mainstreamed" and as the younger generation moves away from traditional occupations, these knowledge systems are getting lost. Even where interested, the younger generation lacks confidence in traditional knowledge systems, which can be attributed to biases in formal education curricula. Community knowledge is disregarded as having no scientific basis, and has no place in formal curricula.

Bittu Sahgal
Hundreds of school children gather to seek the protection of the tiger, at Ranthambhor, Rajasthan.

In Lakshadweep, the NGO Kalpavriksh, while conducting teacher training workshops on the environment, found that children could recognise an astounding 200 species of marine fish . . . but that this skill had no place in the formal school education. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the problem was different; school teachers, most of them settlers from the Indian mainland, had never ventured into the sea around them, and were astounded when they were taken snorkelling. Their training had never told them about the delights of a coral reef, so near to them . . . and in turn, they would never have conveyed this to the students, had an innovative programme by Kalpavriksh not brought them close to the sea and the reef.

The U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity provides for respect and maintenance of traditional systems of resource use, the need to take permission of local communities before using these systems for outside benefit, and the need to equitably share with them these benefits. A critical implication is that formal education must change to give equal importance to traditional modes of thought, knowledge systems and practices. In the village of Mendha (Lekha), Gadchiroli district of Maharashtra, this is being achieved by village-led abhyas gat (study circles), in which topics of research and enquiry are initiated by villagers, and outside "experts" called by these villagers present their information and ideas. Together, the locals and the outsiders evolve a deeper understanding from various perspectives, and this understanding is then used by the gram sabha to take informed decisions.

Unfortunately, even though there are hundreds of such examples of creative, educational, research and training initiatives, the spread in India is still very minimal. Systemic changes in formal education and training are needed to make impacts at the scale and speed required for the size and diversity of India.

An educational strategy for India

The very diversity of our country poses a challenge: while an educational programme or material might work in one region in one set of circumstances, it would not be applicable in another. Also, no one group can develop educational material for all the different situations in India. Therefore, a different concept of design needs to be explored. The saree provides an interesting analogy.

Ajay Mahajan

The saree is a designed piece of clothing. Over the years, beautiful designs, patterns and textures have been printed and woven into the saree, and yet, several thousands of years of Indian history has not tried to stitch the saree. It is worn in many ways and fits all sizes. It is equally good for working, dressing up or sleeping in. The final effect is the combined effort of the person who designs the cloth and the person who wears it - of the designer and the user. This is a very different concept from that of designing, say, a well-stitched dress. This garment either fits or doesn't fit, and where it fits, leaves little scope for the wearer to be innovative in its use.

Our educational designing has to be somewhat like the saree, more a tool than a finished product, a tool that comes alive in the hands of the teacher, its application being the combined effort of the designer and the user.

In essence, the challenge is to help our education system become flexible and adaptable enough so as to allow for a diversity of situations, approaches and content, and to equip the teacher to recognise this diversity as an opportunity for biodiversity education. The premier decision-making institutions in India, such as NCERT and UGC, would do well to imbibe this principle, and to make the system much more sensitive and responsive to local ecological and cultural situations.

Developing site-specific material The Centre for Environment Education (CEE), Ahmedabad, contains a facility called the Environment Education Bank (EE Bank). This bank contains environmental education activities, case studies, access information to books, magazines and periodicals, details of people and copyright-free, easily reproducible illustrations. The EE Bank is accessed through a training workshop, and is a tool to help educators develop their own educational material suited to their own situation or school. Over the years, several hundred school teachers, and government and non-government agencies have used the various components of the EE Bank, to develop activity handbooks for teachers, field guides, scripts for dramas, radio and television programmes, and so on. One of the latest is a bird observation book for Pune, being developed by Kalpavriksh and CEE, which will use bird illustrations from the EE Bank. The EE Bank is an example of a tool that can help formal education become diverse, need-specific and non-prescriptive. Hopefully, the ongoing National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, will re-focus the country's attention onto such tools and methods, evolve a critical understanding of the problems with the current educational system, and advocate both "deschooling" (unlearning the anti-diversity, monocultural system that is fed to schools and colleges), as also other innovative alternatives. A specialist working group is currently preparing an action plan on Biodiversity Education and Training, and this theme is a strong focus in several local site plan processes, such as that at Uttara Kannada, Karnataka. Kartikeya V. Sarabhai and Sanskriti R. Menon