HOUSEKEEPING FOR BHUDEVI

Nandurbar is one of Maharashtra’s smaller districts by area (5,955 sq. km.) and its forest cover, according to the India State of Forest Report, 2019, is just over 20% of its area; which means that about 1,196 sq. km. of Nandurbar is forest. Far away from Nandurbar is the district of Kokrajhar in Assam, which has about 1,166 sq. km. of forest covering a smaller total area (3,296 sq. km.).

For all those who prefer seeing the wood for the trees, the more forest a district has, the happier it must be. There are a host of reasons why this is so and many of these reasons have to do with the idea of ‘environment’, both as the presence of and manifestation of what in English is called ‘nature’, and also as the provision of many of the basic materials that are central to our lives.

Our Indic conception transcends ‘environment’ entirely, for our tradition regards the earth as Bhudevi, whose consort Vishnu incarnates from age to age to rid her of the accumulation of demonic forces. He does this out of love for the earth and its inhabitants.

As guardians and practitioners of this tradition, those who live close to and within the forest tracts of Nandurbar and Kokrajhar would be the ideal persons to inform us about the worth and value of the forest to their lives. To even the partially observant traveller, India’s tribal and rural societies – wondrously variegated though their individual cultures may be – take much of their identity from the forest and from nature.

The forest supplies them with firewood and timber for construction, it is home to the animal and bird prey they seek for their cooking pots; the forest contains the medicinal plants and herbs that indigenous and local medicinal traditions depend upon; fruits are plentiful, cattle are watchfully allowed into the forest to seek the remedies they are preternaturally aware of; and the forest is home to the wild relatives of the grasses we call cereals and to the great majority of our vegetables.

If we compare this list of what the forest supplies its residents with with another list, that of what contemporary industrial society supplies its residents with, then there is no contest about which list is the longer one. However, the most elementary materials on both lists are none too different from each other. What is different is that the non-forest list supplies each and every one of its items for a fee.

That fee embodies several important concepts. There is extraction or collection of the primary material (wood, for example, in the form of whole, uncut logs), movement of the primary material to a place where some initial transformation to it can take place (such as a saw mill), movement of the transformed material to a consumption centre (such as a town or city), further transformation (sections for door and window frames, for furniture, shaping into ordinary household goods, shaping into crafts items and curios), final purchase and use in a wholesale or retail transaction.

These concepts communicate with us in today’s world not as the transformation of a material, not as a reminder of the origin of a material, but through a number we call the cost that is connected to either the extraction of a material, the transformation of a material, or the marketing of a transformed material to its final consumers.

These costs, whether considered once depending upon where, in this chain of transformation, you stand, or whether considered two or three times by those tasked with analysing an industry based on a primary material, satisfy the current frameworks we employ to describe how value is understood, multiplied and given economic substance. But they are utterly unable to convey other kinds of valuing, especially the kind that the tribal societies of Nandurbar and Kokrajhar use when they regard primary material from their forests.

What are these other kinds of value? From the point of view of the holders of knowledge about the primary material in all its aspects, values associated with the forest in their living vicinity are cultural, social, spiritual and pertain to health and well-being. Their knowledge relates not to the market worth of a cubic metre of wood and how much price value can be added to that block of wood by transforming it into a contemporarily styled cabinet, or an objet d’art. Their knowledge relates to the numerous physical conditions that need to be maintained and balanced so that trees in the forest, just as much as the forest’s flora and non-human residents, continue to be nourished.

The manner in which our system of national accounts is framed, there is no scope whatsoever for knowledge of this kind to be recognised, let alone to be valued even if imperfectly. Yet it is becoming clearer with every passing year that such a valuation is needed. The clarity comes because several biophysical and geophysical changes are becoming more intense.

There is the diminishing of biodiversity, which means fewer species than before. There is the expansion of the human settlement footprint, which encroaches on nature’s territory, and in doing so alters natural rhythms (such as when a wetland is filled in to become a city suburb). There are the effects of climate change and variation, which affect crop cycles as much as coastal towns or snowfields.

The science that monitors these changes has led to some sophisticated models being created which, in turn, lead to estimates of risk (and the corollary, prescriptions for the mitigation of risk) and therefore estimates of the costs of not acting to reduce risk. This is where cost sets that can apply to the bewildering complexity of our natural world make their appearance. A domain dedicated to this nascent art has been named, too: it’s environmental-economic accounting.

India’s official statisticians have considered how to ‘cost’ (or ‘price’) nature since the mid-1990s, when experimental accounts which included ‘nature’s value’ were drawn up for a few states. The activity has languished at that level since. Had they looked at our wisdom, they may well have found inspiration, for the Shiva Purana explained to us that during Kaliyuga, our present age, one of the many signs of growing chaos is that the merchant class ‘have abandoned holy rites such as digging wells and tanks, and planting trees and parks’ (II.1.24).

Now, however, India’s obligations to the large number of multilateral treaties and agreements which have to do with environment and biodiversity broadly, as well as the effects of climate change, and moreover to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, are running into the inherent limitations of the system of national accounts that, so far, excludes nature and knowledge systems associated with nature.

The accounting fraternity in our country possesses experience and wisdom aplenty, for they know the daily pulse of a huge and astonishingly variegated economic web. As our companies and industries learn to lighten the environmental footprint of all their activities, their need to adopt methods to measure, cost, assess and plan for the environmental consequences of those activities will only increase.

Yet it is not for us to adopt, in the name of standardisation, an ‘international’ method that values nature. Rather, what is called for is an Indic conceptualisation of nature which suits our civilisational economic trajectory and which is rooted in our scriptures. ‘Heaven is my father; my mother is this vast earth, my close kin,’ says the Rig Veda (1.164.33).

By taking up such a challenge – conceiving and imparting a new accounting literacy that sensitively interprets the wisdom of our rishis and sants to temper the demands of our era – the accounting fraternity will contribute considerably to renewing our homage to Bhudeví.