It was only in the early 1970s that the Chipko Movement laid out before the country the need for an environmental agenda and emphasised the significance that the environment held for the poor people of India. It made Indians realise that deforestation was taking place at a rapid pace and had to be stopped.

By the early 1980s, experts had started describing nearly one-third to half of India as a wasteland. In 1985, the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi announced a major initiative to green these wastelands through a people's movement. But the idea was stymied by the bureaucracy's lack of understanding on how to deliver the concept. Over the years, Ralegan Siddhi and Sukhomajri have been able to show that it is possible to reverse degradation of even the most degraded land. The biggest lesson being that to deal with "economic poverty' it is necessary to deal with "ecological poverty'. And people's management is essential to undertake ecological restoration.

The economic success of the community-based natural regeneration efforts that had started in villages like Sukhomajri and Ralegan Siddhi in the 1970s was beginning to attract nationwide attention. It was also in the mid-1980s that Tarun Bharat Sangh ( tbs ) had started reviving the traditional water conservation techniques in Alwar district of Rajasthan.

By the mid-1990s, this model of community-based natural resource management was already spreading. tbs is today working in nearly 500 villages. The governments of Punjab and Haryana have tried to replicate the Sukhomajri model in several villages. But, most important of all, Dig



of the lesser-known projects of the same kind have delivered reasonably good results. The best result of all these projects is that they have either totally stopped or greatly reduced distress migration from the villages. In other words, greening India's villages has a great potential to reduce the immense pressures that exist on the country's urban centres in the form of slums and exploitative labour conditions, including child labour.

Undoubtedly, these are still the high points of the lessons that India has learnt in the last two decades. And, by historical standards, this is no small achievement. Over the last 200 years, with the advent of the British, a state-dominated paradigm has taken total control of the country's natural re
dertaken in Jhabua becomes a model for drought and poverty-stricken Kalahandi? Orissa has not learnt anything from Madhya Pradesh as yet.

Also, it is equally important to understand that the new natural resource management paradigm developed in Sukhomajri, Ralegan Siddhi and Madhya Pradesh is not universally applicable. This new paradigm