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Off the Record features interviews with local and national musicians as aired on WKNC 88.1 FM HD-1/HD-2.
Environmental Policy with Dr. Ritwick Ghosh - WKNC...
Meeting created at: 25th Sep, 2026 - 6:41 PM
00:00
Kendall
Hello and welcome. You're listening to WKNC 88.1 FM HD1 Raleigh. I'm your host, Kendall, and this is Off The Record. Here with me today is Assistant professor at NC State, Dr. Ritwick Ghosh. Welcome to the show. So Dr. Ghosh was recently awarded first place. Also congratulations, for his photograph in the Envisioning Research competition which is the university's annual research image contest. So do you just want to start off and tell us about what inspired you to ultimately take and submit this photograph?
00:28
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
Sure. The photograph is something I took while I was traveling in central India working on a forest rights project. And the photograph represents a group of villagers in Madhya Pradesh, which is a state in central India, as they document their engagements on forest conservation as a means to assert a legal right to the resources and access to the forest. This is contentious because there is a push towards setting aside forests as these conservation sites which pits these goals of forest conservation against goals of community well being and community livelihoods. And there are legal mechanisms to resolve these disputes, but they do require people to assert their legal rights. So what I was doing was following a group of activists who work with community members to help them and educate them about these legal rights. They are bottom up rights.
01:43
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So the community has to document their meetings and their interactions with the forest in order to claim that they have access right to the forest. So for me it was a very unique experience to be in this little school. It was a children's school. It was the setting sun, it was a very colorful room with red walls and all of these activists and farmers peering over documents trying to establish that they have regular meetings and discussions that ultimately contribute to a effective governance structure to manage these forests.
02:28
Kendall
Wow, that's really cool. How did you get involved in that? Like how did you end up traveling with that activist group and what was that like?
02:36
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
I have been visiting this part of Madhya Pradesh for a few years now. It's part of a larger project that I've been working on an Indian conservation program called Compensatory Afforestation which is somewhat similar to these various kinds of forest and carbon offset programs that you may hear of when you hear say Microsoft or Amazon claiming to be Net zero. A lot of the times they're continuing to do the emissions and claiming that we are contributing to afforestation and reforestation activities which store carbon. So in the net you are emitting zero carbon net zero. In a similar way, in India you have a domestic regulatory program that requires any development activity that cuts through A forest causes forest diversion to compensate for their deforestation by paying into a fund that does afforestation activities. This fund is quite expansive.
03:45
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
It pulls in about a billion dollars a year, which is in fact almost as large or sometimes more than the entire Ministry of Environment's budget. So it's a massive amount of money which then needs to be spent for various kinds of afforestation and forest restoration activities. So I have been studying this program for the last five years now. There's some writings about it in peer reviewed journals. But one part of this is that when you have so much money that's supposed to be spent on conservation, which you know sounds like a good problem to have, is that you have money to spend on nature conservation. Conservation. But in a country like India, which is the most populated in the world, you don't have land that just waiting to be afforested. So there are people everywhere, and that's not just to India.
04:42
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
There are, you know, communities and cities and you know, even when it looks like nature, which is pristine, there is often people who walk through it, who live on it, who depend on these resources. So the question then became, how do you spend this money to do nature restoration, but do so with the support and interests of different communities? So this was a series of villages where I was spending some time with these communities which were soon to be displaced because there was a new tiger reserve that had been established and was supposed to, is supposed to be coming into this area and the work is already ongoing. So as this, as I was starting to study the implementation of the compensatory afforestation program, I visited these areas.
05:45
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
And while I was there, over the years that I was spending time there, the larger tiger conservation project started. And these communities, a lot of the villages, about 50 or so of them, received notifications from the government that they are now within the buffer zone of the Tiger Reserve. And communities were worried that now they will soon be displaced or come into new kinds of wildlife conflicts. As a response, activist groups entered the area to support the communities to establish their claims, the property claims over the land under a jurisdiction india called the Forest Rights act, which says that communities and villages who have had, who can claim legally to have been in this area or had an access to this forest, their rights will be recognized and nobody can displace them.
06:43
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So I was spending some time with the activists as they go from village to village exploring, explaining the importance of this Forest Rights act, the importance of democracy, and that just because there are forest officials who come and tell them that they need to leave does not necessarily mean that they need to leave. They have rights over these areas. So it was very interesting to spend some time with these villages which are really tough places to live. It's a dry, arid landscape. But these communities and these designated tribal communities under Indian law, how they are living, how they work together to develop resource management practices, how they have been practicing all sorts of conservation, agriculture, which is a thing we look at nowadays. But these tribal communities have been practicing these kinds of sustainable norms for a very long time.
07:50
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So it's kind of established to them. At the same time there is a concern that, you know, there is deforestation happening often to agriculture and populations are increasing. So what is the best way to balance forest conservation with both interests of communities, but also interests of development and roads that feed into the program, the funding for the program. So it was a journey and it continues to be as these communities try to claim their rights. And new afforestation projects have been coming up in the area. So I hope to visit again and learn about what the developments are unfolding.
08:32
Kendall
Yeah, definitely. That sounds like a really cool experience. Do you mind like going in what was like a. The day to day kind of life that you experienced there? What was that like?
08:41
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
I spent, I've spent a few weeks there all together. It usually involves following these different activist groups. They call themselves the Sanghatan, which means the collective. It's a bottom up organization. And we would start the day usually by going driving out deep into the village areas. And these are, you know, from the nearest airport. This is maybe like 10, 12 hours of driving, often on dirt roads. We would then have these organized meetings in schools or just outside under a tree. We would get little cups of tea sometimes and small paper cups which the village leaders would serve us, which very kindly. Sometimes it would be in somebody's backyard and these attached homes, often they're surrounded. We're surrounded by various kinds of agricultural fields.
09:47
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
And then in the distance you'd see some forests which is, you know, where the boundaries of the village end and the forest, which is under the protection of the forest department india. That's where the controversy start. Sometimes you'll see that there have been boulders and bricks laid out more concretely to mark these divisions between the village and the forest boundaries. Sometimes I've, you know, as we pass through, people tell us that, you know, this used to be a little empty ground where we used to play cricket and now it has been designated as a forestation site. So you know, in those little ways, communities are telling us that some of our common lands are being lost. At the same time, when I go talk to forestry officials, I try to understand their perspective as well.
10:45
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
And there's a long history of the forestry, the service being a little concerned that there are encroachments by villages which slowly creep into the forests. And that needs to be addressed. India has a mission to be 33% under forest cover. That's only about 23% under forest cover right now. So it's an ambitious goal. It though, masks what type of forests are being counted under this cover. And some people say that we need to think about the deep primary growth, long standing forests rather than newly planted plantations with monoculture. So there's another ecological debate happening on that end.
11:32
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
To be on the ground is then to experience what these kind of broader political and theoretical data debates look like and to view them from the perspectives of both the communities and villages who feel that their rights are being taken away from them, their lands are being taken away from them. And then also to learn from officials, street level bureaucrats, we have a term for that in public administration, folks who have to spend these millions of dollars, make plans and the kinds of work that goes into setting up plantations, choices of what species to plant, how to plant them, how to manage them, how to monitor them.
12:20
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
And ultimately that is a bigger question is, you know, what is the role of communities in managing forests when our communities an effective resource forest management and when a community is detrimental to larger goals of forests, but also wildlife conservation.
12:40
Kendall
Yeah. And what options do like the villages have when they are placed in the buffer zone, as you mentioned earlier, what are their options? Like how often then are they pushed out of their community that they lived in and then how often do they actually get to stay? Do you know, like in your experience,.
12:56
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
The data on this is a little unclear. A lot of stuff happens without fully being documented. People often leave themselves when they are seeing their lands being surrounded by plantations and their worries about wildlife entering their villages and destroying their crops. For over the entire history of Indian forest conservation, this has been a dominant theme is that in the name of nature conservation, communities are being displaced. And that's not just india. You know, if you think about the national parks in the US Too, there's a long history that people who lived in the parks no longer are seen as residents of these areas and they're displaced. So the numbers are somewhat murky. In this case, around 50 villages are under the buffer zone.
13:51
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
Some villages have Successfully claimed or the pause the forest department starting to take over some of their village lands, both the agriculture fields as well as community forest. So community forests are often very important to the villages for accessing timber. Not timber, but firewood or basic non timber forest products which they can use. Things like there's a fruit called mawa or a flower called mawa which they used to make a kind of alcohol which is very popular in the area. There is a leaf from a tree which is used to make a something called paan which is very. It's a kind of a digestive that is consumed india. Very popular. And these are products that communities rely on to support their livelihoods alongside agriculture. India has increased number of tiger reserves over the years.
14:57
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So tiger conservation has been a major success story measured in terms of the number of tigers protected. The story on how communities have been displaced and whether or not these displacement activities have been carried out voluntarily as well as with adequate compensation is a tougher story to tell. There's no doubt that there's been a lot of displacement. It's unclear whether it is all been to the detriment of the community. Questions of voluntariness can be kind of murky because sometimes on paper people leave voluntarily. They get a few thousands of rupees to move and these are stipulated under various legal principles. But you know, some people would say that money cannot compensate for our loss of our land. And even though they get paid some compensation, they have to now move to a city. They don't have access.
16:02
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
They can't really buy new land with that money. They have to find day labor jobs. It often disrupts the social structures of the village because now the community spread out. In some cases they have been displaced and replaced in certain nearby areas. And that can work sometimes. But there is a worry also that as communities become less attached to their land, they're more willing also to be encroachers and not actively and sustainably manage their resources because they don't have as much long term interest attached to the land. So it's a question that is harder to have a pin down answer to because there are ethical questions here. There are political economic questions here. There are deeper power dynamics here. There's also corruption where money is allocated from the central government or the state government towards supporting voluntary relocation of communities.
17:15
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
But a lot of the money then is absorbed in the bureaucratic chain and doesn't quite get to the community and villages. There are multiple issues here. It's definitely a concern that led to the passing of the Forest Rights act in 2008, which recognized forest rights of forest communities. But it is also, you know, any kind of engagement with the government requires a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy. And that's been a limiting factor for the Forest Rights Act.
17:45
Kendall
Yeah, definitely. And do you mind going into like your background and your personal story? How did you get involved in this and why does it matter to you?
17:54
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
I grew up in New Delhi, which is a tiny little city india. I observed the city changing in front of my eyes. You know, I used to live in South Delhi or my parents still live there. And the city was growing areas we used to call the Ridge, which was this part of a mountain hill chain which ended up ends in Delhi roundabout. And this beautiful kind of barren, hilly landscapes, shrubby landscapes, were previously considered no go for development. They were seen as the lungs of Delhi, helping regulate air and temperature and oxygen. But over time there was so much pressure that we lost a lot of these to new malls and hotels and office complexes. Seeing that and thinking about land and conservation and development, these are tricky themes.
18:53
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So I worked as an economist for many years and then turned to think about how we can use ideas of economics to address environmental problems. With that theme, I did my dissertation and PhD work on the role of incentives in agriculture and conservation programs in the US I moved from fields of economics to fields of sociology and political economy as I think a lot of what we think as environmental markets, like carbon offset markets or biodiversity credit markets, are not really not best understood by the tools of economics, but the tools of political science and sociology. So I am deeply committed to thinking about how we can blend the best of our private sector and the best of our public sector and the best of our community and NGO worlds to address environmental problems, keeping in mind that each has its weaknesses.
20:01
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
But the goal is that we are facing series of environmental challenges, from climate change to biodiversity loss to land degradation to all sorts of pollution, plastics related pollution. We have a number of different solutions which are all somewhat short of really addressing these issues. And there are really tricky and difficult problems. And so I see my role is trying to integrate across these fields and trying to think about what are effective, scalable, replicable governance models that may look different for different places. For example, india and in this area in Madhya Pradesh versus in North Carolina or in the hinterlands of the us. Some of my work is in Oklahoma and North Dakota and Texas. And solutions will look different in different places. The engagement of different communities, the role of property rights, the role of science and technical assistance programs. Will look different.
21:15
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
But it is important to think about these kinds of intricacies when we develop solutions and not approach them as like one size fits all kinds of environmental solutions.
21:25
Kendall
Definitely. And what differences have you faced in the environmental landscape based on all the places that you've been? Because I know in your undergrad you were in Singapore and then you were at University of Denver, which is funny because I'm actually from Colorado. So I saw that. I was like, wooo, but what kind of challenges did you face? Like addressing the differences in the environmental landscape and all the different places that you did your, you know, academics.
21:54
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
I've had a fun journey since being in the US Where I did my graduate studies. I spent a lot of time in upstate New York, in New York City, in Michigan and Arizona and Colorado. And here a lot of my research has been in places in rural countryside. So that's also been quite interesting and enjoyable. There are, you know, nature itself can dictate solutions and when we have, you know, a particular type of agricultural system or land use system, different natures of environmental extreme weather changes that we are seeing nowadays. But besides nature, communities and societies are different. Whereas in some of the rural areas you have, you know, they're very far from cities. There is a different set of cultures there. There is a sense of being a part of the land which can determine your conservation actions, as opposed to, say, in.
23:16
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
When I was in New York City, there was some work on developing metrics for the benefits of trees and in order to create some kind of case for more tree planting in the cities, urban forestry kind of stuff. You have a very different kind of cultural mindset that comes with city and urban conservation. And then you have different forms of laws that different countries have. So I have some work on, you know, try to compare conservation programs in the US and other countries, like india, but also in France and other parts of Europe, Australia as well. And the legal histories matter, the political, cultural histories matter. You know, there's a bureaucracies get constructed around environmental laws which can be very tricky and hard and obdurate. So you can't just come up with new environmental policy ideas and expect bureaucracies to just rejig themselves.
24:21
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So they have this very strong inertia which we should keep in mind as we develop new solutions. So I look at this intersection of nature, law, culture and bureaucracy and how they together determine what kinds of policy actions can take place in specific places. Always in the context that there are power imbalances that can really affect who gets to say and enjoy the benefits of environmental conservation initiatives and who has to bear the burden of the challenges, the costs of advancing environmental problem solutions.
25:06
Kendall
Okay, kind of switching topics back to the photography here because I feel like we didn't really touch on that. How like, because that photograph was like awesome. I really liked it. How did you get into photography? Is that just like a hobby or what do you do outside of this environmental and governmental policy?
25:26
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
I got into photography as a, back in college though. This photograph is taken by, you know, a simple phone camera. I did kind of invest in getting myself cool DSLRs and stuff and I really wanted to do a lot of wildlife photography when I was a kid. But it's. I have slowly, you know, just started thinking about photography more as documentation for some of my ethnographic community based research. When you take this big DSLR cameras and go into villages and communities, you draw a lot of attention. So best to avoid that. Or maybe in some circumstances you want to have that image of yourself. In some circumstances you want to keep a low profile and a big camera is not the best. To me, the evening light is just the most beautiful light for photography.
26:23
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
And whenever I get a chance with that kind of angular sunlight coming through often through windows and creating cool dimensions on the floor and the ground, I just want to start taking some pictures. But I wouldn't call myself like a great photographer. I think this picture, I got lucky. But yeah, I think photography to me has increasingly becoming a tool for documenting my life and the lives of people who I try to study and work with. But hopefully do it in a aesthetically pleasing way.
27:00
Kendall
Definitely. I mean, you won first place, so I would say more than I just found aesthetically pleasing. And I guess if you want to talk about what you think about the shape of the future and then kind of like your mental state, because I feel like working in this climate that has to do with so much resistance when, you know, working with climate change and kind of so much not depression, but like, you know, I feel like there's a lot of negative ways to look at the situation that we've been given. So I can't think like, how do you balance the outlook on the future with what you're trying to combat today?
27:35
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
Yeah, that's a good question. I do hear a lot of people, you know, depression or maybe just losing hope about addressing so many issues. You know, I think there is reason to be concerned in that we are really falling short of, you know, addressing our environmental problems, particularly around land degradation. And you know, we just changed every. There's all parts of the earth are now touched by human influence in such deep and problematic ways. Continuing our extractive economies without some reflection. I think, of course, we need some amount of economic development and growth, particularly to help people out of poverty. So I think there needs to be a moment of reflection. But I also feel that I haven't seen so much interest in environmental and climate and biodiversity issues as I've seen in the last few years.
28:40
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So there is a lot of interest, a lot of concern. I would just say that the, you know, losing hope is not the effective strategy because all we have is try to create new plans, find new ways to address these. I don't think we can totally come together as a globe. Rather, we need to think about both small scale solutions that we can do in our lives and we can ask our governments or demand rather our governments to take better action. Some of it would come down to us consuming less as a society, and that's not as appetizing to think about. But maybe that is a conversation we need to bring on the table because we might have run out of the win solutions.
29:32
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So the ones which allow us to grow and prosper and live bigger and richer lives and address land use changes, climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution. Technology is often seen as the main pivot, the solution for these, and maybe it will be for many things. But the scale of the problem is becoming bigger than we can wait for technology to solve. And, you know, various kinds of technologies that have helped us solve environmental problems have also had unintended consequences. So it's not that the technology will be a complete. It will clear the problem of our desk. It will create some other problems that will require attention. You know, in agriculture and land use, we have, you know, we managed to produce food for the entire population, which many people thought is impossible in the 1960s. Populations are growing too fast and Earth is limited.
30:39
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
Arable land is limited. We cannot produce enough food for this population. But we are in 2026 right now, and there's more than enough food for a population about three times the size of the 1960s population. That's come on the back of innovations in seeds, innovations in fertilizer, more land being put under agriculture. But it has also come with the costs of nutrient pollution, deforestation, loss of soil health, and biological diversity in our farming and ecosystems. And as a society, we need to come to terms with where we want that balance. And some changes will happen at the level of individuals, so that each of us as individuals need to take full responsibility about environmental problems is maybe Too much to ask of individuals. Some of it will come at the level of our communities working with corporations and private actors.
31:41
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
And some of it, a lot of it rather will come from our governments because these are collective action problems and cannot be solved purely by individuals or private actors. I kind of hopeful it is, you know, even something like climate change is something we've known for about 30, 40 years now. We made few changes, but there is a rising and there's some momentum to address these. And if it is so existential for humanity, then maybe 30 years is not that much. It may require centuries to address. So patients who are hope action in that order, maybe.
32:22
Kendall
I like that. And then for our closing questions, I always like to ask people that I talk to. What is one thing that you've learned and one piece of advice that like working in environmental policy that you've kind of dealt with?
32:36
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
Oh, I've learned so much working in this landscape in Madhya Pradesh. Just go from there. I just learned how much these activists are doing in the ground. They go through the whole day without really eating any food because they're just going on their little scooters. We were in a car, but they would, in this blistering heat, sometimes would just go their whole day going from community to community, explaining to them what rights they have and not to give up hope, but to assert themselves. And that democracy can only work if people claim to be a part of the democracy and not accept somebody coming and telling them you don't have any rights.
33:24
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
So it just, you know, to see so many incredible people across the country india, but also here, from farmers to officials in various local bureaucracies doing their part, is something as an academic, I get to learn from them because they're, you know, I teach and study environmental policy and governance. They, in their own specific ways, practice it. And the practice is what we need to really pay attention to and learn from it. So I learn a lot from the professionals who I engage with and study. What was the second question?
34:03
Kendall
Piece of advice?
34:05
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
Piece of advice, I think in general, I tell my students as well, is don't be somewhat critical about solutions that seem like they'll completely solve a certain environmental problem, whether it's a technological solution, you know, like whether it's renewable energy in some way or some new genetic modification. I just approach environmental problems knowing that these are what I think we call wicked problems. They have multiple dimensions, and any solution can take us down another set of problems. And, you know, be careful of the language of win. There will be some wins, but there can't be complete wins. There'll be some sacrifice needed at some point and it's important to keep that in the back of our mind as we think about environmental issues. So I like that so many of the younger generation is so excited and so motivated to address environmental problems.
35:22
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
It's really in the front of people's minds nowadays. I also advise them that channel that energy towards solving or to addressing and towards maintaining and a certain push to address these problems and not be distracted by one off solutions. It will take a while and will take concerted long term commitments rather than short term gains.
35:52
Kendall
Definitely. I mean, I think what you're doing is really important work and I think people should be talking about it more. And I also am excited for the hopefulness of like the younger generations and then we can learn, you know, everything that the older generations have paved the way for. But I appreciate you coming into chat. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about?
36:11
Dr. Ritwick Ghosh
No. Thank you very much for having me.
36:13
Kendall
Of course. And again, thank you all for listening today. Be sure to check out our other interviews@wknc.org podcasts and click on Off The Record, this is Kendall and Dr. Ritwick Ghosh signing off. Have a great day.
Transcribed by https://fireflies.ai/