We are looking at an India with an ailing population, with one form of ill health (including respiratory and water-borne diseases and cancer) or the other due to a toxic environment. Yet, we fail to wake up and take effective measures
It’s that time of the year again — June 5, the World Environment Day, celebrated all over the world for ‘positive environment action’. Time to dust our consumerist conscience, step out of our climate-controlled bubbles of air-conditioners and heaters, to plant (but not nurture) a tree, vow anew to shift from plastic to recycled paper, and such like — before we go back to business as usual. Forgive the cynicism, but that is what such tokenism, doled out routinely on each such ‘day’, merits.
Most of us are aware of the state of the environment: Our mighty life-giving rivers are being killed by the very civilisation they nurture — reduced to toxic soups. Even the holiest of the holies, the Ganga, is dammed and doomed by a series of hydel projects that threaten to reduce her flow to a trickle. Mining has laid to waste swathes of the pristine Western Ghats across Karnataka and Goa, and rich tiger habitat in central and eastern central India; villages are buried under the waste of urban India. Punjab, India’s grain bowl, is afflicted with cancer owing to the intensive and extensive use of pesticides; our water has mercury, the air is loaded with lead, our food is laced with carcinogenics — all of which have imperiled public health.
We are looking at an India with an ailing population suffering with one form of ill health (including respiratory and water-borne diseases and cancer) or the other due to a toxic environment. Yet we, Governments and people alike, make the collective and convenient choice to behave ostrich-like, ignoring the elephant in the room.
While not dwelling too much on history, our contemporary environment movement can be traced broadly to two main incidents: A people’s movement, Chipko, in the Himalayas in 1973 to stop the felling of trees and, born in the same year, the biggest conservation initiative of its time: Project Tiger. The movement was strengthened by policy and legislation — the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, to be followed later by the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, and the Environment Protection Act, 1986.
The willful destruction of the environment and the dilution of protectionist laws — particularly the EPA and its notifications, Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 1994, and the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 1991 — run parallel to our growth story, essentially with the liberalisation process that began in the early 1990s. India’s economic growth has come at a huge environmental cost — so much so, that the rate of growth itself is undermined, and questioned.
For instance, a paper, authored by Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta, among others, calculates that in the period 1970-2001, the estimated growth of India’s per capita GDP of 2.96 per cent drops to 0.31 per cent per year after taking into account environmental costs. This, of course, is a global phenomenon. The cost of environmental degradation in China was estimated in 2010 to be 3.5 per cent of the nation’s GDP, according to an official Chinese news report. According to a United Nations study, global environmental damage from human activity cost the world $6.6 trillion in 2009 which is roughly about 10 per cent of the global GDP.
Another disquieting thought: Who has benefited by ‘development’IJ Has ‘growth,’ as we understand it, enriched a few and impoverished many othersIJ This is the subject of a separate debate. But the level of disquiet and agitation across the country against projects, be it mining at Mahan, Chhattisgarh, Posco in Odisha, dams in Arunachal Pradesh or the thermal power projects in Konkan region, and their increasingly violent suppression by the Government raises questions not just on the inequity of growth benefits, but more seriously on the subversion of the basic tenets of democracy.
Most such projects ignore the law of the land, prompting the former Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh to say, “We have taken these laws and the discipline they enforce for granted. Industry has assumed that somehow these laws can be ‘managed’ and Governments too have not insisted that the laws be implemented both in letter and spirit.”
Have there been any studies to understand the ecological, social, livelihood and even health impacts of mining, thermal projects or the series of mega dams (over 200, just in one State of Arunachal Pradesh) across the countryIJ The environment impact assessment of projects, in the words of the same Minister, “is a bit of a joke.” He is right. Take the case of JSW Energy’s 1,200 MW thermal power plant in Jaigad along the Konkan coast. Its EIA ignored the existence of reserve forests, mangroves and corals, and the myriad, unique flora and fauna of this biodiversity hotspot, and listed “dog, cat, pig, cow and buffalo” as species endemic to the region.
It’s not funny; it breezed through the portals of the Ministry of Environment and Forests and also the National Environment Appellate Authority. Worse, EIAs are authored by the project’s proponents themselves. Nor do we have the systems or the manpower to monitor the compliance of conditions laid down to safeguard the environment.
The most disturbing fact in a democratic India is the suppression of voices of dissent — force, and a crackdown, on the people and environmentalists who protest or ask inconvenient questions. One such tragic instance was the death of two people, who were killed in Andhra Pradesh’s Srikakulam district in protests against a thermal power plant which would destroy the Naupada wetlands, which supported their livelihood as fishermen. Incidentally, the EIA of the plant failed to mention this fragile wetland area, rich in birdlife.
One reason for the environmental catastrophe is the lack of vision or an environmental consciousness among our political leadership, be it at the State or the national level. The Prime Minister has made his views on environment regulation clear, calling it the “new licence raj”. He believes that “saving the environment cannot be at the cost of development.”
But will there be development at all, if our environment is in shamblesIJ I will let that be answered in the words of another Prime Minster, the late Rajiv Gandhi, “We have learned to our cost that development which destroys the environment eventually destroys development itself.”
The fault, however, lies not only in the political class, but also the masses. The political class is a mere representation of the mindset of the vast majority of the people. As citizens we have failed to understand and appreciate that a healthy environment — safe, clean drinking water, air, soil, healthy forests and species diversity are the key to not just a better quality of life, but life itself.
In a recent essay, eminent historian and author Ramchandra Guha called India “an environment basket case”. It is true, and it doesn’t bode well for the future. Think beyond your token contribution, of shifting from conventional bulbs to lED, from plastic to paper. Think beyond June 5. Treat every day as World Environment Day. Conserving the environment and reducing our footprint should be a way of life, not a day’s fad.
(The columnist is senior consultant, WCS India, and founder-director of ‘Bagh’. She is also a member of the National Board for Wildlife)