While the resilience of ecological processes in certain types of biomes and climates might well be greater than in others, human impact on the environment and its resources is widely acknowledged to be reaching a stage where it is beginning to limit the opportunities for people everywhere. Left alone, nature has its own sources of resilience, but in the face of growing human intrusion into its processes, any ecosystem can become fragile and die. Nowhere is this more apparent than in many parts of our country.

Ecological security is, by its very nature, a holistic concept. However, the devil lies in the detail. And so, of course, do the angels. If we are to establish a secure ecological foundation for our economy, we must get to the root causes and deal with the fundamental barriers to achieving it. It is crucial to keep in mind the whole picture and also to understand the little elements, the pixels, that combine together to make it what it is.  One of these elements, the importance of which is often not fully appreciated, is governance. By governance, I mean the institutional frameworks by which we make decisions in society and how we allocate its resources among its different constituents. The term governance covers not only the agencies of formal government: it also includes all those policies, laws, rules, and institutions in government, civil society and other sectors that have an influence on the individual’s access to the resources of a society.

Local people, especially women, must be involved in the decision-making process

The nature of governance in any society has a deep and often quite direct impact on its natural resource base and on how sustainably it is managed.   What exactly is governance? As I understand it, governance is the whole fabric of decision making systems that affects our lives. Governance is not the responsibility of just the institutions of government alone, though they form an important part of it. It also includes civil society, the family, the whole community, not to leave out business and of course religion and faith organizations. These are all bodies whose decisions impinge our lives very deeply in one way or another. And what they do is called governance. Government is, of course, one of the primary factors that determines the quality of the governance. But governance has to be seen as a much richer concept: it is the entire social environment that enables or prevents citizens and communities to fulfill their lives and destinies.

In its essence, governance is about leadership – leadership in every sector of society.

I believe that the best systems of governance are those that enable people to create sustainable livelihoods for themselves, that encourage adoption of sustainable lifestyles, that facilitate fulfillment of basic needs and that promote the attitude of self reliance. These are essentially the jobs of a good system of governance and if they are carried out well, they lead people and their communities to acquire a sense of "ownership" — ownership of problems, of their solutions and of responsibility for one’s resources. This sense of ownership – which is not synonymous with formal private ownership of land or other assets, and can effectively exist where resources are owned collectively by villages or communities — is crucial and possibly the most fundamental requirement for ecological security. Without it, people have no incentive to protect their natural heritage.

And what we need to do is to generate that sense of ownership as a way of mobilising the latent energy of our country. I have been to innumerable places in India where the local people say that the reason they allowed their hills to be denuded and their water resources to be depleted was simply that outsiders (often government agencies, sometimes private parties, always from far away, with no commitment to the local community) were responsible for them and why should the local people take the trouble to protect them? Everyone, particularly the women, fully understand that the disappearance of their forests and drinking water supplies, and the gradual deterioration in their lives results from the massive destruction of the eco system around them. When you ask them why was this allowed to happen, they say "well, we don’t own it. But, if somebody else is going to come and do a hit and run on it, we might as well get there first". So whether they do it themselves, or they let the forest department do it, or the forest department lets the contractor do it — whoever does it, basically the root cause lies in this enormous sense of alienation, the feeling that if neither they nor their future generations will benefit from it, why should they take the trouble? Such thinking is a very large part of the reason why our communities have not protected their resources.

Good governance is simply a matter of defining clearly who does what. And, it has well formulated answers to the questions: What is the mandate of each actor in the society? What are their roles and responsibilities? What are the competencies and skills needed? How will they be held accountable?

How effective the governance is depends on the ability of its leaders to make good decisions reflecting the interests of the community or society as a whole, their capacity to implement these decisions and to ensure compliance by those who have to abide by those decisions and the existence of appropriate systems of monitoring, accountability and rewards or punishment.

The key to effective governance lies in establishing institutional frameworks in which the different responsibilities are separate and distinct, particularly between the branches of government, the levels of government and the sectors of economy. And in doing so, the systems of accountability — including legislative bodies, oversight agencies, watch dogs, ombudsmen or whoever is formally charged to audit performance on day to day basis — must ultimately recognize that it is the people who have to be overall in-charge. They must, whenever necessary, be involved directly in monitoring the functioning of government.

To make the argument more specific, let us look at the branches of government. There are three branches of government: the legislature, to make laws; the executive branch, to implement them; and the judiciary to enforce them. Now, in any good management system these are three separate bodies that function independently and act as checks and balances on each other. Each has clearly defined functions and is expected to focus entirely on its own mandate. Unfortunately, in our country every thing is mixed up. The judiciary is doing the work of the executive, the executive is doing the work of the legislature and the legislature is doing no work at all. They are just shouting at each other, or arguing about local issues or private interests, but hardly making any laws at all. That is why we have all these ad hoc decisions and resulting crisis like sudden evacuation of industries or equally sudden prohibition of diesel fuelled buses. We have the Supreme Court making decisions on issues that it has no business to be making but forced to do so because of the vacuum of decision-making in the government.

Everyone in our country, it would seem, wants to do other people’s work – anyone else’s except one’s own. And, this problem is not simply between the branches of government: it is even worse between the different levels – central, state and local. Prime Ministers and ministers often spend their time on the most trivial of issues and have little scope left for matters of state. Decisions on what kinds of houses are appropriate in the villages of Andhra Pradesh are decided in the exalted corridors of New Delhi instead of by those who should know best – the villagers of Andhra Pradesh. Grand programmes are designed at the Centre for eradicating poverty without any consultation with the people most affected – the poor. The central level, the state level and the local level should all be distinct and separate governments with their own domains for governing without interference from higher levels. In actual practice, they are all mixed up. With too many snouts and not enough troughs, nothing much can happen.

Look, on the other hand, at the example of Washington, DC. By any standard, the President of US has considerable power. He is capable of pushing people around all over the world. But as far as what goes on in Washington is concerned, he has not the slightest say whatsoever – running that jurisdiction is the prerogative of the city’s mayor. Democracy can only work if there is adequate discipline – in setting up systems where every job is assigned to someone and in insisting that every one sticks to the job that was assigned. Today, in our country every MP is now angling to run the town councils or local village bodies; that seems to be how our political leaders perceive the basis of power.

Under the principle of subsidiarity, every public decision or action should be made at the lowest level of government at which it could meaningfully be made. Subsidiarity has been made famous in the past decade by the highly centralized European Union which has been under tremendous pressure from member countries to devolve political powers to the lowest possible level. The interesting irony is that the word subsidiarity was actually invented in India some two hundred years ago by the British who needed to run their colony with the least possible people and realized that this could only be done by a thoroughgoing devolution of power. The British, in turn, learnt the concept from an age old system of governance that had prevailed for centuries in many parts of India. Regrettably, with the advent of independence, the concept of subsidiarity simply vanished. We set up a highly centralized form of government that believes in making decisions at the highest possible level.

For the citizen, the most important interactions with the state are almost entirely with the local government. Perhaps 80 to 90% of the considerable time and effort they have to devote to dealing with government at one level or another is with local and district agencies, not the state or central ones. So, we need to set up a system of governance which is the exact opposite of the one we have: the bulk of the decision making would take place at the bottom and only those issues that require higher level attention (because they cross jurisdictions or need to be standardized on a larger scale) would be passed on to higher levels. In particular, it would be the local governments which would have responsibility for maintaining the natural resource base and thus ecological security. I would call this bottom-up approach to governance by the somewhat ungainly but more accurate term "supersidiarity". At one level, supersidiarity and subsidiarity are very similar: the results are often the same. At another level, the two concepts are diametrically opposite: the process to devolve decision-making starts from the bottom in one case and from the top in the other; the results can sometimes be very different. Supersidiarity means that the real government is the government with which the citizen has the bulk of his or her contact: the local government. And it is this level, of course, at which the citizen can exert the fullest possible watchdog authority. Since it is the local government that is elected in a democracy to serve the citizen, the main functionaries – the people who have the responsibility to maintain law and order (police chief), protect and manage the forests, water sources and other public services (the forest officer, those in charge of water and sanitation, etc) must be answerable to the local community, not to some far away department at the state or central level.

Support to science is another way in which governance can impact ecological security. Since the days of Pandit Nehru, our country has made a commitment to science that is truly remarkable. For much of the period since independence, India’s scientific research and development budget was running close to one percent. This is more than most countries other than Japan, the US and a few European nations devote to science. Today, our science budget is close to 0.65 percent of GNP, which still amounts to more than twelve thousand crores. That is a lot of money going into science. But if you ask how much of that twelve thousand crores is going to science that has any relevance to the poorer half of our country, few people will be able to tell you. Based on information supplied by the science departments of the Government of India and its scientific agencies it is comes to much less than 100 crores, i.e., not even 0.1 percent of the money spent on science that has relevance to those 700 million people. If science is so important in solving problems that it merits 2% of the GNP, as the Prime Minister recently promised, how is it that we as a nation see no role for it in improving the lives of the poor?

As long as the decisions come from the top, it is unlikely that we will get the right answers. All we have to do is to look at any of the many large so called "development" projects that have been designed without consulting local people, and you can get a pretty good picture. We have innumerable housing programmes of thousands of crores which are used as cattle sheds because the so called "beneficiaries" are not prepared to live in them. And, empty cattle stalls because the project designers forgot that highly bred cows could not survive on the only fodder that can grow locally.

So, I think it would not be an exaggeration to state that our economy is somewhat mismanaged. And, the mismanagement has led to all these basic issues - poverty, pollution, population, alienation, violence, corruption, destruction and this attitude of hit and run which has permeated our whole society. This short term 'get rich quick' mentality is the greatest threat to our ecological security because we treat nature as just another thing to be mined and left behind.

But it is even worse than that. These are actually the symptoms and not the causes of our problem. This is actually the end result and not the source of the predicament. The roots of mismanaging our nation lie in the priorities that we have chosen. The nation’s priorities are set by the few who control the systems of governance, with very little regard for their impact on the majority. It starts with the simple premise that the majority are ignorant and live not much better than animals. Therefore, it is the job of the mai-baap or the government, which is all-knowing and beneficent, to take care of them and decide for them. With such an attitude, it is only natural that we end up by creating the dependencies and results that we have got. Particularly, we have set up huge, centralised systems for planning and administration that bring forth many promises but very little performance. The overbearing bureaucracy, subject to virtually no real accountability, is quite possibility the greatest threat to ecological security.

Digging even further, we come to the ultimate root causes, but they are very deeply embedded in our systems and culture. It is hard to recognize or understand them because they are unfamiliar and often very inconvenient. Most of us would rather brush them under the rug and not deal with them at all. They are very difficult to sort out and most of the time we don’t even try, which is why we have been called a "soft state". But the term soft has several meanings, and, unfortunately they all apply.

The first meaning is soft, as opposed to hard in the sense of difficult. Our decision-makers have rarely been prepared to do the difficult things that are needed to build a nation. Allocate sufficient funds to ensure high quality education for all our children, for example. Or, introduce the land reform that everyone agrees is necessary.

The second meaning of soft is as the opposite of hard in the sense of solid, as in a pillow. This implies that decisions must be implemented and we as a nation are notoriously bad at doing that. To everything, there are numerous exceptions.

Soft is also the opposite of hard as in harsh or cruel. Our country is notoriously harsh to its underprivileged sections and cruel to its animals. But when it comes to making and implementing decisions that require firmness in the face of resistance from vested interests, which deserve a harsh treatment, we rarely have the nerve to make them stick.

The opposite of the fourth meaning of soft is hard as in hard science, for example physics or chemistry. It implies lack of rigour or deep analysis. In that sense, our planning systems are certainly soft, heavily weighted towards simplistic economic concepts without looking adequately at the issues of technology or physical planning. One part of the bureaucracy frequently negates the work of another for lack of concern of the bigger picture. High level government committees spend their entire time deliberating the cause of one failure or another and finding that lack of coordination among agencies and lack of the bigger picture in each one is the primary cause.

Soft is also the opposite of hard meaning firm or durable. There is no policy in India that seems to stick for long. After a few years, it disappears, to be replaced by one formulated to respond to another emergency. Establishing ecological security needs long term commitments.

And, finally, soft is the opposite of powerful and intense, as in a soft light. Our nation’s leadership is definitely soft in this sense.

So we lose out on all fronts because it is true: we are, today, a soft nation – in all the senses of the term soft — and as long as we are, there can be no hope for our forests, our soils, our waters or any of the other resources that form the basis of our ecological security. We need to take much harder, more rigorous and firmer decisions to hold the line on our ecological security. These solutions will need a different kind of leadership, a very genuine and selfless leadership and a leadership that is capable of taking hard decisions. We need a leadership that does not have to keep watching and looking back over its shoulders to see whether it might lose an election in UP because it does the right thing. We need a leadership that says "this is our country and we have got to make it work for everyone". Since we cannot afford to wait for the next Mahatma Gandhi to come along, we also need to support that leadership with a citizens’ movement. Community organizations, civil societies, religion, schools all these essentially have to play a role in being able to create and support that leadership and make it work.

It is becoming clear that no small tinkering with our systems of governance, a tweaking here, a fine-tuning there, is going to produce the results we need. Poverty is growing, corruption is galloping and nature is rapidly dying. Change is needed urgently and that change must be quite fundamental. The issue right now is how can we bring about such a change? For normal people like us, it is very difficult to question certain basic assumptions and institutions that make up our society. Just as it is hard for a Hindu to question the Bagavat Gita or for a Muslim to question the Koran or for a Christian to question Bible, it is no less difficult for a citizen to question his or her nation’s constitution. However, after more than a decade of initial denial and subsequent deep analysis, my colleagues and I do not see any alternative, but to recognize that the present constitution –which admittedly was a truly remarkable document for its time and purpose – can no longer serve the needs of our country. I refer not to the profoundly important directive principles which guarantee the rights of citizens and the integrity of the country but to the systems of governance it has established: centralized, top-down decision-making, lack of proper checks and balances implied in the Westminster model of government and the marginalization of the citizen in the decision process.

Can this system of government which has been established under the constitution take us where we want to go? The 1950 Constitution of India is basically anti-people. It is largely a replica of a colonial instrument (the Government of India Act of Westminster) whose purpose was basically to enable a colonial power to run a large, sprawling, remote colony in the most efficient manner possible. Many of its institutions are based on exploitative colonial requirements, and at independence these were adopted, often without any change, lock stock and barrel. As a result, the government of independent India simply continued the colonial tradition of being a Ruler that is highly centralized, top down, insensitive, non-participative and non-transparent. Such a system of governance simply cannot deliver equity or ecological security.

While the Westminster system has certain flaws in it from a management theory perspective, it has evolved over a period of almost a thousand years to suit the particular genius and circumstances of its country of origin, Britain. It is not working in India, which has yet to build up the institutions of accountability and the systems of checks and balances needed to ensure that government functions in the best interest of everybody. The mixing up of powers between the branches of government, the centralization of decision structures at the federal and state level and the peripheralization of the citizen lie at the heart of the political, economic and ecological problems of our country.

Gandhiji seems to have understood all this and suggested a totally different form of government, in which local communities would have been autonomous and where the executive and legislature at each level would have been completely distinct and separate. With transparency, citizen’s rights to information, and an administrative system that would nurture professional excellence and responsibility, such a system would have produced a very different outcome for our country. I believe that it is an excellent model for universal democracy. Gandhiji had a fairly detailed idea of how such a government should work. For example, the upper house, which was supposed to protect the interests of the States (but today has become an appendage with little independent meaning) could more appropriately have been a forum for all the major stakeholders to be represented. The Rajya Sabha or the State Legislative Councils need housewives (as housewives), scientists, jhuggi dwellers, business persons and others to represent their interests as stakeholders of society. Such a second chamber would enable stakeholders to bring their professional and personal insights into the legislative as well as audit process, as distinct from elected representatives who have a separate and distinct point of view and responsibility.

How can the constitution be changed? Not very easily. As a nation, we have too much of our national ego invested in it. It can probably only be changed by the will of the people, as expressed through a referendum. Referendum is not allowed for in the constitution, but it is an intrinsic right to any democracy. The sovereign people should be able to express their will at any time – in elections or between elections. And we believe that, we would need a mechanism to administer it because referendums can run away with themselves, as they sometimes have in such places as California or Switzerland. To ensure that referendums are held only for significant issues and are properly formulated, and that they do not touch the issues of fundamental rights or national integrity, People First has proposed the setting up of a "Sovereign Rights Commission" which would act as the conscience keeper of the country.