The Parvati and the Tragopan: Conservation and Development in the Great Himalayan National Park

By Vasant Saberwal, Ashwini Chhatre
Himalayan Research Bulletin | 2001

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digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1437&context=himalaya

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Saberwal, Vasant., Chhatre, Ashwini. The Parvati and the Tragopan: Conservation and Development in the Great Himalayan National Park Himalayan Research Bulletin digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1437&context=himalaya.

Himalayan Research Bulletin, 2001

Abstract

In 1999, villagers in the Kulu Valley in the state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India lost their ancestral rights to graze animals and collect medicinal plants in the area. This blow to their livelihood resulted from the creation of the Great Himalayan National Park, which carved out a vast area for wildlife conservation at the expense of resource use by local residents. However, after excluding villagers from the Park, a part of this protected area was released for the construction of a hydro-electric power project. In this paper, we first document the seeming contradiction in the government's apparent conservation agenda; local livelihoods appear expendable in the interests of biodiversity conservation, but biodiversity may be sacrificed for national development. In the latter half of the paper, we explore the nature of conservation and development politics, particularly as mediated by electoral considerations of the ruling government.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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