Natural Inclination

A naturalist is who Indira Gandhi really was, who she thought she was. She got sucked into the whirlpool of politics, but the real Indira Gandhi was the person who loved the mountains, cared deeply for wildlife, was passionate about birds, stones, trees and forests, and was worried deeply about the environmental consequences of urbanisation and industrialisation.

She was the only head of government, other than the host prime minister, to speak at the first-ever United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in June 1972. Her speech there has reverberated down the decades. She was singularly responsible not just for India's best-known wildlife conservation programme - namely, Project Tiger - but also for less high-profile initiatives for the protection of crocodiles, lions, hanguls, cranes, bustards, flamingos, deer and other endangered species.

She almost single-handedly pushed through two laws - one for the protection of wildlife and another for the conservation of forests, which continue to hold sway. Today's laws for dealing with water and air pollution were enacted during her tenure. Indira Gandhi used her political authority to save ecologically sensitive areas from destruction like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the entire northeast and the rainforests in the Western Ghats.


She repeatedly drew the attention of chief ministers and other political colleagues to issues concerning wildlife, forests, pollution, resettlement, and for the need to always maintain what she called 'ecological balance'.

From "Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature"