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.