(a) That there is a deep relationship between the poor and their habitat, in other words, that there is deep relationship between poverty and environment. That the survival of the poor depends more on the Gross Nature Product than on the common economic indicator called the Gross National Product. That the poor are so heavily dependent on their environment that any development process that is destructive of the environment will inevitably go against the very objectives of development by destroying livelihoods and creating unemployment. In other words, in situations where people’s survival is environment-dependent, environmental destruction and social injustice will become two sides of the same coin.

These arguments have had a considerable impact both within India and in other parts of the developing world. The late 1970s and early 1980s were still marked by a debate in which many people argued that development must take priority over environmental concerns and that environment was a concern being pushed by the West to keep developing countries backward. The counter-argument, first made in the first citizens’ report on the State of India’s Environment in 1982, provided the social rationale for a developing country like India to take environmental concerns into account. It helped India’s civil society, already working in rural areas, to see the importance of environmental protection and natural resource management. And this spurred the growth of NGO environmental action in India in a myriad ways.

It slowly helped to resolve the debate of environment versus development even internationally which finally took the shape of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ in the Brundtland Commission report. The first citizens’ report on the State of India’s Environment published in 1982 received wide coverage because it was the first major report from a developing country on the importance of environmental conservation. New Scientist from London did a cover story on it and the Economist gave it exceptional attention with a two page review. In addition, there were numerous reviews in papers ranging from Le Monde in France to Asahi Shimbun in Japan. A chemistry professor in Tunisia who saw the New Scientist cover story, intrigued that some group from a developing world was arguing for the environment, ordered a copy of the book and presented it to his former teacher who was then prime minister of Tunisia. Within a year, he later told me, the ministry of environment was constituted for the first time in the country.

Slowly, the message went through to the government of India as well and after the publication of the second citizens’ report on the State of India’s environment, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi invited Agarwal to address the Union Council of Ministers, an unprecedented gesture on the part of an Indian prime minister, because he felt that his ministerial colleagues did not understand the importance of integrating environment with developmental concerns. He then went on to ask Agarwal to address all the 27 Parliamentary Consultative Committees attached to different Union Ministries to achieve two objectives. One to educate all the MPs. Gandhi told Agarwal that even he as the Prime Minister could do little to push the environmental concern unless MPs were with him. And the second objective was to start a discussion within each Ministry on how it should integrate environmental concerns into its work.

Later Agarwal addressed all the Members of Parliament together on the subject of Floods, Droughts and Environmental Destruction at the request of the Prime Minister . The 1980s were years of both bad floods and bad droughts. The Prime Minister was keen to educate the MPs about the importance of good environmental management in order to deal with these natural calamities. Subsequently, Agarwal addressed legislators in several states of India.

b) Agarwal has also consistently argued that it is vital to involve the people in the task of environmental management, both in rural and urban areas, and to learn from people’s traditional knowledge and cultural systems.

Agarwal has spent considerable time travelling to various parts of rural India to document community-based environmental regeneration efforts in villages. Agarwal’s reports have helped Indian decision-makers to understand the importance of involving people in environmental conservation and natural resource management. His work resulted in a study called Towards Green Villages: A macro-strategy for participatory and environmentally-sound rural development in 1989. The study, based on years of learning from the documentation of micro-experiences, presented a macro-strategy for environmentally-sound rural development. The study was translated into French and Oriya, Hindi and various other Indian languages. Towards Green Villages showed that ‘local democracy’ is essential for good village ecosystem management based on principles of participatory democracy, environmental rights and self-organisation – a principle now widely accepted in India. Village ecosystem management would involve a holistic programme for integrated land-use, water use and biomass production.

Agarwal has repeatedly argued that a major anti-poverty and employment generation programme can be undertaken in India and in the poorer countries of Asia and Africa through a community-based programme to regenerate the biomass-based subsistence economy. The programme will not generate wealth as modern economies do but it will at least put a floor to poverty, and thus bring an end to abject misery and make the world a far more human place to live in. In 1997, Agarwal was invited to address the UNDP Executive Board on the subject of poverty and environment and advise its staff on the subject of ‘sustainable livelihoods’. Later, as part of the EU-UNDP Poverty and Environment Initiative, UNDP invited Agarwal to address the environment ministers attending the 1999 meeting of the Commission on Sustainable Development in New York.

In 1997, Agarwal completed an eight-year exercise which documented India’s traditional knowledge in rainwater harvesting technology and management. The book called Dying Wisdom: The Rise, Fall and Potential of Traditional Water Harvesting Systems, which has been widely read and reviewed in the country. Not only the Central government but also several state governments, namely, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh have since launched major rainwater harvesting programmes to combat drought and enhance food security. In 2000, even while Agarwal was undergoing cancer treatment, President K R Narayanan invited Agarwal to address all the governors on Indian states and senior Indian ministers, including Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, on the importance of community-based water harvesting as a solution for combating drought and fighting land degradation.

Dying Wisdom also attracted attention abroad. In 1998, Agarwal was invited to become a member of the World Commission on Water sponsored by the United Nations and several governments to develop a strategy for the growing water crisis. The commission endorsed Agarwal’s views on the importance of community-based water harvesting as one way of meeting poor people’s water needs and for combating desertification.

c) Agarwal has also argued that women are most affected by environmental destruction in the rural Third World and that women often are most willing to participate in environmental regeneration efforts.

In 1985, Agarwal wrote the first paper in the world documenting the adverse impact of environmental destruction on the lives of poor, rural women in developing countries. This paper, published as a chapter of the second citizens’ report on the state of India’s environment, received wide attention in feminist NGO and academic circles and helped to promote the debate and discussion on the need to involve women in environmental projects.

In 1990, Agarwal conducted a study in the Himalayan village of Bemru which showed that it will be impossible for governments to improve female literacy in areas where environmental destruction has induced heavy work burdens on women. Girl children in such situations are forced to work as assistants to their mothers from a very early age, thus, neglecting education. As female literacy is strongly correlated with the demographic transition, Agarwal was able to show that environmental destruction has implications not just for literacy but also for population control programmes.

d) Agarwal has argued that sustainable rural development, which is heavily dependent on local land-use systems, must recognise and respect local ecological dynamics, and therefore sustainable rural development must be ecosystem-specific.

The third citizens’ report on the State of India’s Environment published in 1991 focussed on an ecosystem – the vast Indo-Gangetic Plains -- that normally gets little attention from environmentalists. Though it has a potential productivity, it continues to harbour the largest number of poor people in India, and it is a place where social inequality and tensions run high. This book looked at the ecology of the world’s most flood-prone plains and raised questions about the specific nature of sustainable development that would be needed for what is still the most economically and environmentally vexing region of India. Agarwal strongly believes in the validity of science and questioned the scientific basis of several assumptions of environmentalists regarding the growing incidence of floods in the region. Agarwal’s findings showed that it was ecological changes in the floodplains themselves that was the key cause of the growing flood menace rather than the ecological change taking place in the Himalayan uplands. The book still remains one of the very few available on the ecological dynamics of the central and lower Indo-Gangetic Plains. It contains a very important message, that of ecosystem-specific rural development and agriculture, if countries have to move ahead with sustainable development planning.

e) At the international level Agarwal has argued that it is very important to take equity and social justice into account while developing global environmental management systems.

In 1990, Agarwal co-authored a paper called Global Warming in an Unequal World which led to a global debate and had a considerable impact on the G-77 position in the negotiations leading up to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It was the first time that the issue of equity had been raised in the context of global warming.