This book describes major environmental changes in India. It's a balance sheet of India's resources and focuses attention on the effect of ecological degradation on the poor. The interesting thing in the second report is the information that is provides on the linkages that operate on what can be called the interface areas: at the interfaces between different ecological spaces like croplands, grazing lands and forests; between the people and their environment; between economies of towns and villages, and so on.

The Task Force was set up in pursuance of the recommendations of the Indian Board for Wildlife and its standing committee at their meetings held on 9th February 1981 and 1st July 1982, respectively. The term 'wildlife' as globally understood, denotes all uncultivated forms of flora and fauna and has been so construed in this report. The Task Force commenced its deliberations by assessing the current levels of awareness and the degrees of apathy, indeed antipathy towards wildlife among the different sections of the public and endeavoured to determine the causes.

This report analyses the little understood relationship between development and environment, the impact of environmental degradation on individual, social groups, tribals and nomads. In many ways, this voluntary report on the state of the environment in India is a unique document. It is the product of an enormous participatory effort. A range of voluntary agencies and individuals interested in environmental issues have contributed their best efforts towards making this report.

This report examines the adequacy of the existing administrative, legal and institutional arrangements for protecting the environmental aspects.

On reading this book it will be clear to the reader that a glimpse of what Mahatma Gandhi had been doing between 1920 and 1922 regarding the Satyagraha and Non-co-operation Movement had been seen in the Champaran Movement. I need hardly add that what happened in Champaran has been repeated, as I had hoped, on a vast scale in the country as a whole. Champaran became free from planters tyranny, India today is free from foriegn rule.

(Foreword by Dr. Rajendra Prasad)