Sharachchandra Lele - Session 01, 2022-11-20

(00:01:14) Parents, interests as a child and studying at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay Sharachchandra Lele was born in Pune, Maharashtra, but moved around due to his father being in the Navy. He lived in Delhi and Jamnagar before returning to Pune. His mother was a homemaker from a politically active family. He went to IIT Bombay for his undergraduate studies. He says he was not pressured to pursue a specific career. Lele talks about his childhood and what enabled him to develop an interest in hiking and climbing. This interest grew during his time in Pune, where a teacher took him and his classmates on hikes in the Sahyadris, leading to a love of mountaineering. However, it was not until the twelfth grade that he began to appreciate the variety of wildlife in his local environment, particularly birds. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, careers in the environmental field were uncommon and Lele ended up studying engineering. However, attending IIT Bombay allowed him to pursue his interests in mountaineering, bird watching, and wildlife conservation as hobbies. Lele did not consider conservation biology as a career due to a lack of interest in biology, but his interests developed in environmental studies and sustainability. Lele discusses his experience of entering IIT Bombay, when it was relatively easier to clear the entrance exams and pursue hobbies alongside studies. He chose electrical engineering as it seemed like an interesting area he had an aptitude for, but he then shifted to questioning the relevance of a Bachelor of Technology degree and the societal investment in IITs when most of the cohort went abroad, which led to a sense of disillusionment.

(00:11:20) Desire to serve the country/society and developing an interest in environmental issues Lele says he was influenced by his father, who desired to serve the country and was in the Navy. The school he attended, Jnana Prabodhini, also inspired him and instilled the idea of serving the country or society. Attending school in the mid-1970s, he had teachers who supported this idea, and the experience of the emergency of 1975 increased his awareness of political issues. Initially, he did not make a conscious decision to pursue social service. He was inspired by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)’s landmark 1982 State of India’s Environment report, which broadened his understanding of environmentalism beyond wildlife. He decided to pursue a career in Environmental Studies with the goal of contributing to alleviate environmental problems. Initially, he was not focussed on pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree for academic purposes but to gain a deeper understanding of environmental issues. He realised later on that there was a trade-off between being a conventional academic and feeding knowledge into change on the ground.

(00:18:30) Peers, mentors and time at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Along with a group of friends, Lele discovered the 1982 State of India’s Environment Report and it had a significant impact on their interest in the field. He mentions his friends Sushil Borkar, Jayant Kulkarni and shares details about their and others’ career paths related to the environment. Despite being a scattered peer group, they all shared a passion for charting their own path in the field of conservation. Lele describes how he was able to get into IISc in 1984 despite not having the required background in biology, thanks to some faculty members interested in energy and environment issues. He also mentions the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA) centre at IISc, which focussed on appropriate technology for rural areas. Taking Madhav Gadgil’s advice, Lele was able to join the Master of Science (MSc) programme in computer science and automation under a faculty member interested in energy- DK Subramanian. Lele eventually did his MSc thesis on the environmental impacts of big dams under Subramanian’s guidance. In his Master’s work, Lele was advised to approach environmental issues from an economics perspective, which he found interesting and accessible despite his engineering background. Interacting with Mangesh Venkatesh Nadkarni at the Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC) on topics such as environmentally extended benefit-cost analysis proved to be fruitful. While he took courses in the ecological sciences programme at IISc, he found it frustrating to not have a cohort or a formal environmental studies programme and he went on to leave IISc. He had initially wanted to work on Indian environmental issues without going abroad, but had to change his decision due to the lack of suitable programmes in India at the time. He laments the fact that even forty years later, IISc still does not have an interdisciplinary environmental studies programme.

(00:27:41) Views on ecology and biology and applying for a PhD degree Lele then explains his experience with learning ecology during his PhD work. He found traditional biology education to be too descriptive and boring, but appreciated a newer approach that focussed on understanding the workings of the biological world. He was drawn to ecology and found it more interesting than his previous brush with biology. Wanting to link questions of energy with the environment for his PhD research, Lele speaks about applying to various universities abroad and choosing University of California (UC), Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group’s programme. He was accepted with full support for the first few years and chose UC Berkeley because of the fit with his interests in third world issues.

(00:33:34) Arriving at topic for PhD dissertation and time at UC Berkeley Talking about how he arrived at the topic for his PhD dissertation, Lele speaks about his interest in energy and environment and researching hydropower in the mid-1980s. He was interested in the impact of dams on forests and the value of forests for local communities. He was also influenced by Gadgil’s work on the biomass budget of rural Karnataka. Lele describes his experience UC Berkeley as a turning point in his intellectual development. Students were encouraged to straddle the natural and social divide, to work on projects in developing countries and to consider the role of the social sciences in environmental issues. There were many discussions and debates on a host of subjects. The student body was involved in the department’s decision-making processes, including faculty recruitment. Lele shares that although his dissertation focussed on household economics, development economics, and property rights, he developed an interest in political ecology after revisiting the landmark book published in 1987, Land Degradation and Society. He notes his limited exposure to the other social sciences, which he looked down upon due to his background in IIT, which, he says, specialised in trashing the humanities and social sciences. In the 1990s, Lele was reflecting on the role of justice in the environmental context. Around the same time, Ramchandra Guha and Joan Martinez Alier introduced the idea of ‘environmentalism of the poor’. Listening to a seminar by Guha on the critique of the deep ecology movement and its pristineness-oriented conservationist approach, along with discussions with him, influenced Lele’s work on sustainable forest management. His subsequent work explored how access to forest resources influenced village societies’ ability to manage them.

(00:46:26) Forests, sustainability and the role of livelihood Lele recalls a pivotal moment during his dissertation work when he was discussing forest management with colleagues and realised there was a clash of ideas regarding what forests should provide to society. He created a matrix to identify what different kinds of forests provide, and the clash between ecological and social definitions of a ‘good’ forest became clear. This led him to focus on defining and measuring sustainable forest use, which he continued to explore in his later work. His advisor, Richard Norgaard, gave him books to read which triggered his interest in understanding sustainability. Field exposure was crucial in understanding the debates surrounding forests. He tried to understand what forests provide to society and what is maximised under different management systems. RJ Ranjit Daniels, Lele’s friend, was working on bird ecology, leading to discussions on conservation. Lele talks about prioritising the livelihood role of the environment in his dissertation and subsequent work.

(00:54:07) Indian academia and interdisciplinarity, collaboration with Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, ISEC and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)

After completing his PhD, Lele assumed Indian academia was more open to interdisciplinary work than the US, but found it to be compartmentalised, hindering his job search as he was not an ecologist according to the Centre for Ecological Sciences (CES), IISc, nor an economist, or social scientist. Lele discusses how his work in sustainability led to an opportunity to collaborate with the think tank, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. Through the Pacific Institute, he applied to the MacArthur Foundation for a grant to work in India in collaboration with Nadkarni at ISEC. He worked on a project focussing on property rights regimes in the Western Ghats in Karnataka. He also had a position at TERI at the time, splitting his time between his own work [interviewee addition: on the MacArthur-funded project] and a project on enterprise-based conservation in Biligiri Rangana (BR) Hills. He shares how collaboration with Kamaljit Singh Bawa on the latter came about.

(01:01:23) Setting up of Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development (CISED) and it being separate from Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) Lele describes the motivation behind the setting up of CISED in 2001. He had previously found it difficult to find support for his interdisciplinary work in ecology, which he felt was needed to approach environmental problems in a comprehensive way. He had worked at ISEC, a social science institute, and TERI, an interdisciplinary research institute, but found shortcomings in both. He felt that TERI’s work was too short-term and donor-driven, while academia was too siloed and lacked relevance to real-world issues. CISED was thus founded to fill this gap, with help from Bawa, Nadkarni and KS Jagadish and financial support from Ford Foundation, aiming to balance relevance and rigour by being both interdisciplinary and long-term in its research. He shares that there were discussions about merging ATREE with CISED and cites reasons that led to the two being kept separate. Lele agrees that he sees himself as a creator of knowledge for action, to be used by practitioners, governments, and the wider public for policy change.

(01:11:32) Merging of CISED and ATREE 2001 to 2009, he says, was an exciting time for CISED. CISED was initially hosted by ISEC, but changes in the board led to transaction costs becoming too high, and it was no longer a good place to host the Institute. ATREE was going through significant changes at the same time, becoming more academic and interdisciplinary. CISED and ATREE then merged, coinciding with ATREE’s move towards a more research-oriented and interdisciplinary approach, open to a focus beyond conservation. [Archivist’s note: the interviewee and interviewer refer to it as ‘TERI’ but the summary and index term use the authority record name The Energy and Resources Institute, though it was called the Tata Energy Research Institute at the time being spoken about in the interview] [Archivist’s note: the interviewee refers to it as ‘the mountaineering institute in Manali’ but the index term uses the authority record name Atal Bihari Vajpayee Institute of Mountaineering and Allied Sports (ABVIMAS) though it was called Western Himalayan Mountaineering Institute at the time being spoken about in the interview]