It is over two years that the first citizens' report on the State of India's Environment was released. Its reception was far beyond our expectations. We had been able to put the report together in just about five months. Information had come rolling in and as the trickle grew into a flood, the report in turn had grown from an intended 100-page monograph to a 200-page book. That fact had been an indicator to us of the growing nationwide concern over environmental deterioration.
But still the speed with which the concern was growing took us by surprise. Our report, having appeared at such an opportune time, was demanded and read far and wide by voluntary agencies, by social workers, in schools and colleges, by concerned government officials and agencies, by academics, and so on.
However, there seems to be another major factor behind the success of that report. In its own small way, the demand for the report confirms that Indians are really keen to know more about India and are starved for good information.
Their two main sources of information at the moment are books and mass-circulated newspapers and periodicals. Newspapers and periodicals definitely play an admirable.
role in providing us with a daily, weekly or fortnightly, as the case may be, picture of the state of the nation. But there are several weaknesses in this picture: it is seldom more than a snap-shot; it is usually focussed on events and personalities; and, it usually newspapers even more than periodicals-misses out the subtle and deep rooted processes that govern our social, economic and political development, until, of course, these processes emerge as crises. Often even when the crises are reported, the connections with the underlying processes are not made in any great detail.
There are indeed hundreds of books published every year which report and analyse these processes but having been written largely by academics, they tend to circulate within the already knowledgeable. Our report probably succeeded because it was timely; it was simple and readable; it brought processes and events together; and, it provided an overview instead of a snapshot. For many of us who are journalists and who had the opportunity to work on that report, it was a new kind of journalism and we were obviously gratified to see the response.
Our first print run was 3500 and it was sold out in about a year. That is, at a rate of about ten copies per day, including Sundays. Since then we have sold over half of our second print run of 2500. Numerous people have helped us in making these sales, notably Kamla Chowdhry of the Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development, Bittu Sahgal of Sanctuary Magazine, Chandi Prasad Bhatt of Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandal, Dilnavaz Variava of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), Kartikeya Sarabhai of Viksat, Cyrus Guzder of the Save Bombay Committee, Vijay Paranjpye and Ravi Bhagwat of Parisar, and Shekhar Singh of the Indian Institute of Public Administration. Several hundred copies have been distributed by us free, especially to poor voluntary agencies based in rural areas. Agencies like World Wildlife Fund (India), Society for Promotion of Wastelands Development, Consortium on Rural Technology, UNICEF, Oxfam and Bread for the World purchased nearly a thousand copies for free distribution. This helped us to get the book free to a range of worthwhile voluntary organisations and women's groups in the country.
Responses from some readers were really touching Having seen a copy of the report with Dilnavaz. Variava of BNHS, Major lan Grimwood, a retired British major now living in Kenya, purchased 20 copies for distribution to environmental magazines across the world so that they could review the report. A voluntary group in West Germany which used our report to set up an exhibition, later used the proceeds to purchase a hundred-odd copies of the English and Hindi editions for further distribution.
Responses from some readers were really heartening Narottam Shah of the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), who soon became a fond critic and friend of our effort, purchased 250 reports for distribution to all his friends and subscribers of CMIE's publications.
Friends in the press went all out to help spread the word about the report. To name just a few: Dina Vakil arranged for a one and a half page spread in the Express Magazine. Suman Dubey arranged for a three-page review in India Today. Amrita Abraham in the Sunday Observer published a page full of extracts from the report. Claude Alvares wrote two long articles in the Deccan Herald. Darryl D'Monte wrote about the book in a number of publications. Krishna Raj provided enough space for two reviews in the Economic and Political Weekly and Rusi Engineer gave notice to it in Business India.
Friends abroad also went out of their way to review the report. John Gribbin of New Scientist did a seven page long cover story. Alice Barrass of the Economist published a rare two page review. Ignacy Sachs and Daniel Thery of the University of Paris took the initiative to write a full-page review in Le Monde. Harford Thomas, who writes a regular column on 'Alternatives' in The Guardian, London, intrigued us by describing the report as a model for the United Kingdom. Henrik Beer, a former secretary-general of the International League of Red Cross Societies, himself concerned by the fact that natural disasters and their impacts are growing across the world because of growing poverty and environmental destruction, making the traditional Red Cross work of distributing blankets and medicines more and more difficult and to some extent even rrelevant, convinced Dr Mostafa Tolba of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to distribute the report to various governments and environmental agencies across the world. UNEP presented copies of the report to all government delegations at its governing council meeting in 1983. The International Development Research Centre in Ottawa simultaneously purchased a hundred copies for distribution to universities and researchers in other developing countries, where foreign exchange restrictions posed problems.
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