S. Gopikrishna Warrier: You are listening to Everything Environment by Mongabay-India.

In 1989, Tracy Chapman sang You Got A Fast Car, a song that was the Grammy winner that year. In the song, a young couple see their fast car as a vehicle to get away and get out of poverty. It is the song of struggle and aspirations.

Forget a fast car, but just any car was an indicator of affluence in India before the economic reforms. It changed in the past three decades. For many young professionals, a car is their first vehicle now.

In the 1970s, I went to school in the Nilgiris. The number of cars on the upper plateau were limited, owned either by the residents of the district, or those brought in by those coming in from outside to the hills.

Flash forward to the present. There are traffic jams on multiple mountain roads across the year. The most significant impact of India’s increased mobility has been on the environment of the mountains.

Welcome to our show Environomy. I am S. Gopikrishna Warrier, Managing Editor, Mongabay-India. Through this series of podcasts, I will take you through the journey of how the environment and economics got interlocked after the economic reforms of 1991. This is a journey for which I had a ringside ticket as a journalist reporting and writing on the environment for the past three decades.

In the first three episodes of this series, we looked at how the Indian middle class got a distinct economic and political voice after the economic reforms of 1991, how this changed Indian environmentalism, and how the power equations changed between the executive and other pillars of democracy. In this fourth episode, we will examine how these changes impacted the environment of the mountains and the rivers in the country.

Let me start with the mountains that I know well: the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. In 1819, the British collector of Coimbatore, John Sullivan, was attracted by the mountains that he saw in his jurisdiction. Supported by a detachment of British and Indian soldiers, Sullivan’s group reportedly traveled for six days, lost a few men on the way and reached the Nilgiris plateau. Sullivan was so enamoured by the salubrious climate of the plateau, he returned to build a home for his family in present day Ooty. It was the time when other Britishers were discovering the pleasant climate of other mountain ridges in India. Mussoorie was another hill station from this period.

Sullivan’s reports to his seniors and colleagues in the company administration about the benefits of staying on these mountains brought many other Britishers to the Nilgiris.

His reports were unlike those of the only other European who had gone up the plateau earlier: Jacomo Finizio, an Italian Jesuit priest, who had trekked up the mountains in 1603, to check whether Christianity existed among the communities living there. Disappointed to not find Christians, Finizio was also happy to be back from the mountains as soon as he could. He left written records of what he saw on the mountains–accounts that became important for future researchers.

Before Sullivan, or even Finizio, there were communities already staying in the Nilgiris. Todas – the pastoralists, Irulas and Kurumbas – the hunter gatherers, Kotas – the artisans and Badagas – the settled agriculturalists, were already living on the upper plateau before the British arrived. But it was the British who created a hill station out of Ooty.

Writing about the colonial ad communities in the Nilgiris, American anthropologist David Mandelbaum states that by 1834, even the Governor General, the highest British official in India, spent several months in the Nilgiris. Mandelbaum talks about how habitations on the mountain plateau, developed into a full-fledged hill station with the British. I quote him, “All sections of the ruling class were represented and function there. They were in a climate, social as well as physical that was almost like home.”

While the administration brought in the entire coterie of support staff, both British and Indian, there were many other professionals not seen till then in the mountains. This population grew even more by the 1850s when tea and coffee plantations were started. The British had taken to the Nilgiris so easily that a former British administrator from Punjab, Major General Henry Lawrence, even started a school for children of  non-officer British soldiers on the plateau.

In the decades that followed, especially in the 20th century, many Indian kings built their summer homes in the Nilgiris. The Maharaja of faraway Porbandar in Gujarat, has a home in Ooty even today.

In short, till the 1990s, the Nilgiris was a place for the rich and powerful in the country to escape from the heat of the plains in summer.

The increase in incomes and the growth of the Indian middle class after the 1991 economic reforms changed this arrangement. Increased incomes translated to improved mobility, and many made their way to the mountains. In the Nilgiris, for instance, though the resident population stayed stable between 700,00-750,000 during the 1991, 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of annual visitors to the district is more than 10 times this (number).

According to the Tamil Nadu government data, the Nilgiris district had 16.91 million tourist visitors during the year 2018. Of this, 16.78 million were from within India and only 129,000 were from outside the country. If the mountains were the preserve of the rich and famous before the 1990s, the economic reforms made travel for tourism more egalitarian.

More people could enjoy the salubrious climate that John Sullivan wrote to his bosses about. But also the ecological footprint of the mountains increased manifold.

Today, if you fly over the mountains in a commercial aircraft, you will notice that buildings have been built almost right across the upper plateau. Agricultural fields have taken over grasslands and wetlands. The Shola forests cringe in the crevices of hills. The environmental consequence of this conversion of green and blue areas into brown is akin to killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. And the change has already started.

The reason why John Sullivan could find a piece of Europe on the upper Nilgiris plateau was because of its sky island characteristics. Despite standing in the tropical latitudes, the upper Nilgiris plateau has a temperate climate. At 2,000 meters and above altitude, the air is cooler than the surrounding plains. This distinct temperature profile has led to the evolution of the unique vegetation of the upper ridges of the Western Ghats. Hill slopes are blanketed with grass and in the groin of hills, stand evergreen Shola forests with short statured trees.

As the mountains rise, less than a 100 kilometres away from the coast, they block the rain bearing clouds from the Arabian Sea. The clouds unleash their moisture load onto the plateau. While rainwater drains quickly off the grass-covered slopes, it flows into the mountain folds covered by shola forests. From each shola forest, starts a stream that flows and later forms the Bhavani, Moyar, Kabini and Chaliyar rivers.

Millennia of leaves dropped from the shola trees have flown into the shola stream beds. They have decomposed and turned into black, gooey peat bogs. These bogs hold the rainwater and release it slowly all through the year. Even during the summer of 2017, which followed the drought year of 2016, I found water flowing through the shola streams. I had gone to the Nilgiris for field reporting on the climate resilience that the shola grassland ecosystem provides.

A river is, after all, a drainage channel that delivers rainwater falling on a slope to the sea. It is the quality of the catchment to hold and release rainwater gradually, that ensures that water flows through the river all through the year. There are more than 1,000 streams that emerge from the shola grassland tracks of the Nilgiris. It is these streams that ensure that Moyar, Bhavani, Kabini and Chaliyar rivers flow all through the year. Three of these rivers Moyar, Bhavani and Kabini, later join the Kaveri (Cauvery). Thus, if the rice cultivators in the Kaveri delta near the sea, have water for the crops, it comes from the humble streams in the Nilgiris.

So, if we were to draw an analogy that all of us living in modern homes are aware of, the mountains, along with the forest and grassland ecosystem, are like overhead tanks. They store water when it rains and release it to the plains all through the year.

I realised the importance of the shola grassland ecosystem for continuous river flow when I drove through the Cardamom Hills in Kerala a few years ago. While streams originating from the shola grassland ecosystem had good flow, it was a much reduced flow from cardamom-covered hills and relatively dry streams from tea gardens.

A Supreme Court order had come to the rescue of these streams and the forests in 1996. As discussed in a previous episode, in its order in T.N. Godavarman Thirumulkpad vs Union Of India case, the Supreme Court had defined forest to mean the dictionary meaning. This meant that as per the Forest Conservation Act, alienation of any forest to non-forest activities, irrespective of whether they were on forest, non-forest or government land, required approval from the Union Environment Ministry. This in turn protected forests from conversion in critical areas.

However, with the most recent amendments to the Forest Conservation Act, forests not notified as such lose this protection. Any threat to the forests, or the shola grassland ecosystem of the upper plateau, could mean a threat to the supply of the overhead tank of peninsular India. The overhead tank and perennial water supply is further under threat in a changing climate.

Recent studies talk about increase in sea surface and in-depth water temperature of the Arabian Sea. These temperatures have reached close to the tipping point or the heat point at which cyclones form. This could mean that there could be more cyclones in the Arabian Sea and more extreme weather events in the western coast. The Nilgiris rise less than 100 kilometres from the Arabian Sea coast and stand to face the rain-bearing clouds. There could be more intense and frequent storms and floods on the plateau. This, in turn, could affect the flow of the rivers.

There is another environmental threat to the mountains that is still not fully understood. When I was a young boy, I used to spend my vacations in my grandmother’s home, close to the Palakkad Hills, which are part of the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. I could see the mountains clearly every day. Five decades later, as I drive through Palakkad, there are many times that I only see a haze instead of the mountains.

Honey, we vanished our mountains!

This haze is because of the particulate matter, or aerosols that we emit into our air. In the Himalayas, particulate matter has been proven to stick to glacial surfaces and hasten the melting because of increased radiation. The impact of aerosols on the mountains of the Western Ghats are as yet unknown. However, the recent report by the Earth Commission, an international body of climate scientists, has included aerosol pollution as a planetary boundary. The commission’s report states that aerosols have the potential to cause a southward shift of the monsoonal belt. If that were to happen, the rainfall profile over the Nilgiris could change, affecting the water flow into peninsular India.

A combination of extreme weather events due to a warmer Arabian Sea and a southward shift of the southwest monsoon track, could trigger multiple tipping points, with impacts on the environment and economy.

The Nilgiris is not the only mountains in India, and Bhavani, Moyar, Kabini and Chaliyar are not the only rivers in India. But the story of the Nilgiris and its rivers, will find parallels across the country. While many of the environmental issues in the Nilgiris started before the economic reforms, the massive inflow of people from the other parts of the country into the hill district happened after the increase in people’s incomes since 1991.

In fact, there’s a joke in the Nilgiris that states that while residents of the district went out in search of employment, many more from outside came into the district and built houses and hotels for themselves. While multiple causes such as industrial pollution, mining, or crop burning, could release particulate matter into air,  in the Nilgiris and nearby regions, excessive vehicular emission is the major contributor. Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car starts with the hope of new life, but ends in a despondent note. Perhaps the story of the ‘fast cars’ climbing the Nilgiris and other mountains in the country is following a similar trajectory.

In the next episode, we will examine how the economic, social and political developments since 1991 impacted the environment of the agricultural sector in India.

This episode was written and produced by me, S. Gopikrishna Warrier. Production editor: Kartik Chandramouli. Audio editor: Tejas Dayanand Sagar.