Fortress India is a national movement to reconnect Indians – especially the young – with the land, history, ecology, and values that define us. It brings together four verticals into one continuum of awareness. Together, they strengthen the idea of India – not only as a place on the map, but as a living, evolving civilisation.
The greatest challenge confronting India today may not be environmental degradation, institutional fatigue or even the pressures of rapid development. It may simply be that too many systems, which were once connected, have gradually stopped talking to one another and, in the process, we have become accustomed to treating interconnected challenges as independent problems requiring independent solutions.
Yet, nations do not function that way and neither does nature. Rivers cannot be separated from mountains, mountains cannot be separated from forests, forests cannot be separated from water security, and water security cannot be separated from human prosperity. Equally, education cannot be separated from citizenship, institutions cannot be separated from society, and national security itself cannot be separated from the landscapes that ultimately sustain it. Somewhere along the way, however, these relationships have weakened, and perhaps the first task before us is not to search for immediate solutions but to reconnect systems that were never meant to drift apart.
This understanding lies at the heart of Fortress India, an initiative that was born from a simple but increasingly urgent realisation that no government, institution, military organisation, environmental group or corporate entity, however capable, can by itself address the interconnected challenges that confront India today. Society itself must become a stakeholder and the conversation itself must widen to include every citizen who has a stake in India’s future.
Rivers cannot be separated from mountains, mountains cannot be separated from forests, forests cannot be separated from water security, and water security cannot be separated from human prosperity.
Building Connections
Fortress India is unusually precise because it does not begin with solutions. It begins with connections. It seeks to reconnect geography with education, education with citizenship, citizenship with stewardship, stewardship with innovation, and innovation with institutional integrity, thereby creating an ecosystem within which ideas can continuously evolve, pilots can be created, and successful models can eventually be replicated elsewhere. Its ambition, therefore, is neither to become another institution nor to create another silo. Its ambition is to restore circulation between systems that have gradually drifted apart.
This is not a statement of pessimism, nor is it an invitation to despair, because India stands at one of the most exciting moments in her long civilisational journey. Infrastructure continues to expand, technological capabilities are multiplying and a new generation has opportunities that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Yet, every generation must periodically pause and ask itself whether it is simultaneously strengthening the systems upon which such growth ultimately depends or inadvertently weakening them in the process. Rivers that have nurtured civilisations for centuries are struggling under the burden of human activity, mountains that once appeared eternal display visible signs of stress, wetlands disappear quietly and weather patterns become increasingly erratic, reminding us that these are not separate stories but chapters of the same story.
Fortress India was therefore never conceived as a movement that sought to solve India’s problems. It was conceived as a mechanism that could continuously generate ideas, create pilots and inspire replication, because a nation of India’s complexity cannot possibly be served by rigid blueprints and predetermined outcomes. The challenges confronting Uttarakhand will not be the same as those confronting Uttar Pradesh, and the solutions appropriate for a river basin may not necessarily apply to a fragile Himalayan ecosystem. Consequently, Fortress India has deliberately chosen to remain unfinished, because there is wisdom in recognising that the challenges before us are themselves evolving, and therefore any response must evolve alongside them.
How it All Began
My own association with Fortress India began through Shiv Kunal Verma (see page 22), with whom I have worked closely over many years. We worked on the seminal Northeast Trilogy, and then as the co-author of my autobiography that was published 13 years ago. The continued association has allowed me to understand not only the breadth of his experiences but also the manner in which his mind functions, for it is a mind that persistently refuses to conform and is forever searching for ways in which India can continuously reinvent itself without losing sight of the systems that sustain it.
Anyone who has read his autobiography, Industani, will immediately recognise this trait, because there is a thread that runs through his work, namely that nation building is not a finite project but an endless process of observation, experimentation and adaptation. What makes Kunal unusual is that throughout his life he has inhabited worlds that most people occupy separately. His early years with Tiger Tops in Ladakh, his association with Sanctuary Asia and the filming of Project Tiger for Sanctuary Films created a canvas that would continue to expand over decades, while subsequent stints with India Today and the Associated Press widened that perspective even further, allowing him to observe India not as a collection of isolated geographies but as a living and interconnected civilisation.
Few people have seen and experienced the country in the manner that he has. Over time, these journeys would take him from forests to frontiers, from wildlife conservation to military history, and from remote Himalayan valleys to some of the country’s most strategically important landscapes. Whether travelling with the Army, the Navy or the Air Force, the underlying instinct remained unchanged, namely to understand how systems interacted with one another, and how those interactions could contribute towards strengthening the nation itself.
Long before environmental stewardship became a mainstream concern, he had advocated the concept of Ecological Task Forces to General K. Sundarji, the long-term benefits of which are visible for all to see today. Years later, when discussions centred around the increasing ecological fragility of parts of the southern Himalaya and the enormous burden associated with maintaining roads in certain sectors, he suggested that entirely different transport solutions such as hovercrafts needed to be examined. One may or may not agree with every idea, but that is beside the point. The point is that the mind never stops searching.
Finding Allies
This tendency to think unconventionally has remained remarkably consistent over time. I vividly recall the period following the change of government in 2014 when, having completed the transition from Army Chief to first-time Minister, I found myself inhabiting an entirely different environment. It was during this period that Kunal suggested the creation of Eco Task Forces in every district of India, manned by all-women teams of approximately 200 personnel and tasked with integrating water management, horticulture, sericulture and wildlife conservation within a single framework. The proposal never acquired the traction it perhaps deserved, but 12 years later, as I read the recce reports emerging from Fortress India, I find myself struck by the fact that his mind is still ticking along exactly the same lines. One cannot help but wonder how much progress we might already have achieved had such out of the box thinking found a way to become institutionalised. Fortress India may finally provide that vehicle.
Perhaps because he has always inhabited the space between the Armed Forces and the rest of India, Kunal has an instinctive tendency to gravitate towards the Army. The Army, in turn, recognises a force that is driven by the same principle that guides its own ethos, namely that the nation always comes first, and this relationship has already begun to produce tangible outcomes.
The reccees undertaken at Meerut, Dehradun and Lansdowne are excellent examples of what Fortress India is trying to achieve because they are not environmental reports in the conventional sense, nor are they beautification exercises disguised as sustainability projects. They are attempts to examine landscapes as integrated systems where hydrology, biodiversity, education, innovation and institutional stewardship interact with one another. The significance of these reports lies not in the answers they provide but in the methodology that underpins them, because once a landscape is examined through an integrated lens, entirely new possibilities begin to emerge. Waterbodies that appear degraded begin to reveal opportunities for restoration, forest fires cease to be merely fire management problems and instead become indicators of unmanaged or poorly managed biomass, while biodiversity enrichment becomes linked to education and education becomes linked to community ownership.
The Army itself may neither possess the resources nor the mandate to fully implement every idea that emerges from such exercises and that is perfectly acceptable, because implementation was never the sole objective. The real objective was to demonstrate that once an idea is properly articulated, it acquires a life of its own and begins to attract institutions, communities and individuals who can collectively carry it forward. If military landscapes between country borders, in ‘noman’s-land’, can evolve into demonstrative biosphere reserves, there is no reason why entire cities cannot one day aspire to become urban biosphere reserves in their own right. This will not be easy, for governance in India has over decades quite naturally created protective cocoons around itself, each institution operating according to its own rhythms, priorities and mandates. Yet the 21st century will increasingly demand that these cocoons become more permeable, because the challenges before us no longer respect administrative boundaries and therefore neither can the ideas that seek to address them.
For decades, Sanctuary’s extraordinary Kids for Tigers initiative has taught children to care. The task before us now is to build upon that magnificent foundation and widen the circle of curiosity.
Changing Minds
Fortress India also recognises that every enduring initiative requires those who can connect, those who can educate and those who can innovate. This is why educational outreach under the guidance of Rajinder Pal Devgan (see page 32) occupies such an important place within the movement, because stewardship cannot be outsourced to specialists and knowledge must leave reports and enter classrooms. Students who understand the relationship between geography, institutions and national resilience will eventually cease to become passive recipients of information and instead begin to see themselves as future custodians of the landscapes they inhabit.
The books that are emerging from Fortress India are similarly intended not to replace existing curricula but to enrich them, because a generation that can visualise the Nam Ka Chu, understand the Gomti as a living ecosystem, and recognise the relationship between geography and national resilience will inevitably become a generation of stakeholders rather than spectators. Equally important is the work within Fortress India being undertaken by Prabhat Kumar and others, who increasingly train themselves to recognise opportunities where society sees only liabilities, because innovation often begins not with new technologies but with a willingness to ask different questions.
It is therefore encouraging that Sanctuary Asia has once again stepped forward, because there is a certain symmetry to the fact that Bittu Sahgal and Sanctuary should now become an important cog within the advisory council, given that many of the seeds that eventually grew into Fortress India were planted decades ago during those formative years spent observing India’s wildernesses and understanding that environmental stewardship could never be separated from nation building.
Others too are increasingly being drawn into Fortress India’s orbit and perhaps that is because people are beginning to recognise that this is not another movement competing for attention but a seminal idea whose success is imperative rather than merely desirable. Policymakers, bureaucrats, politicians, corporate leaders, teachers and citizens alike may all need to periodically step away from their immediate responsibilities and examine the larger proposition being placed before them, for each one of them is already an integral part of the system whose resilience we seek to strengthen.
Perhaps that is why I have chosen to become its patron, because every once in a while one encounters an idea that does not seek to replace existing systems but simply reconnect them, and in an age increasingly characterised by fragmentation that may prove to be one of the most important acts of nation building of all. Failure, therefore, cannot be an option, not because Fortress India is infallible, but because the challenges before us have already reached a scale where we can no longer afford to remain spectators.
Today, Kunal lives in Kullu, itself one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, even as his work repeatedly takes him to the distant frontiers of Arunachal Pradesh and some of the remotest corners of the country. It is perhaps this extraordinary geographical canvas that gives Fortress India its authenticity, because these are not ideas being imagined from afar but ideas born from decades of observation and a lifetime spent traversing the country. The invitation, therefore, is not to join another movement but to become part of a national conversation that has become impossible to postpone any longer, because every river, every mountain, every school, every institution and every citizen and future citizen already has a stake in the outcome. For whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we are already participants in this story and the choices we make today will determine whether future generations inherit a nation that merely grew or one that learned how to endure.
The success of Fortress India will not be measured by the number of reports it produces, partnerships it creates or pilots it launches. It will be measured by something far more profound, namely whether it persuaded India to think as one again.