It is not enough to just focus on Gross Domestic Product and Per Capita Income alone. Sustainable development must be factored into the country’s prosperity narrative
After independence, achieving socio-economic stability was the most important challenge for India. In pursuit of it, the shift has been made from an agrarian economy to manufacturing of products and provision of services. While population has grown 3.5 times in last 60 years, the index of industrial production has risen 50 times. This has certainly improved per capita income and quality of life. India’s Human Development Index has gone up from 0.345 in 1980 to 0.554 in 2012, but India still ranks 136 out of 187 countries. Also, development has come at a price. Natural resources and environment quality have faced the brunt of it. Here comes the question: Is the current development model sustainable to ensure inter-generational and intra-generational equityIJ
There is possibility of an alternate model which balances social-economic growth with the preservation of environmental quality. The model is called sustainable development. It ensures a balance between the social, economic and environmental legs of sustainable development. The current trends of growth in India are skewed towards the economic leg.
The Gross Domestic Product, considered as the primary indicator of development, has grown at a rapid rate (7.7 per cent) in the last decade. Growing per capita income has fuelled the social uplift, however, not at the same pace, which raises serious doubts over equitable distribution of economic gains. For example, literacy, as an indicator of social development, has grown at a rate of 0.92 per cent annually in the last decade, much lesser than economic growth.
More importantly, environmental quality has shown a great decline and faced the brunt of rapid and somewhat unplanned growth. While the number of vehicles has grown by nine times in the last decade alone, residents of 80 per cent of Indian cities breathe air which is not breathable by any standards. Estimates of Global Burden of Diseases have attributed 6.2 lakh deaths annually in India to air pollution.
An Indian city like Delhi, which is making news for competing with Beijing on account of its bad air quality, is certainly not desirable. Growing population, consumptive lifestyles, inefficient industrial processes and domestic appliances have caused acute water and energy shortages. India could become a water-scarce country soon. Per capita water availability has gone down by 15 per cent in the last decade. Water quality in rivers is also questionable as most stretches show deteriorated quality which does not meet the designated water use criteria for bathing even.
In pursuit of growth, industries, residential and commercial complexes have encroached into agricultural and forest lands. Forest cover in India is currently about 23.8 per cent, much less than the policy target of 33 per cent. The implications of over-exploitation of resources have proven catastrophic. Disasters like the one in Uttarakhand should wake us up to shift our trajectories in the right direction.
India has an opportunity to leapfrog economically while looking out for a model of sustainable development that ensures socio-economic growth and environmental preservation, simultaneously. This model can ensure avoidance of irreversible environmental damages and expensive environmental restoration processes at a later stage. Therefore, it is important to develop sustainable development indicators and measure sustainability, rather than economic growth alone.
At the moment, India does not own an index which can measure the progress made by a region or the whole country towards sustainable development. There is a clear need of developing such an index, to be used alongside existing socio-economic indicators. The assessment of trends of sustainability indicators will help in taking proactive actions to ensure a good balance between the three legs of sustainability.