Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (35 page)

In March 2013, the environmental community worldwide (but especially in India) marked the thirty-ninth anniversary of the birth of the Chipko Andolan, a movement of Himalayan peasants against the clear-cutting of forests by timber contractors. Chipko was representative of a wide spectrum of natural resource conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s—conflicts over forests, fish, and pasture; conflicts about the siting of large dams; conflicts about the social and environmental effects of open-cast mining.

In the West, the environmental movement stemmed from a desire to protect endangered animal species and natural habitats. In India, however, it arose out of the imperative of human survival. This was an environmentalism of the poor, which sought to promote social justice with sustainability. It argued that present patterns of resource use hurt local communities
and
the natural environment. Thus peasants saw their forests being diverted by the state for commercial exploitation; pastoralists
saw their grazing grounds taken over by factories and engineering colleges; tribals lost their lands and homes to hydroelectric projects; artisanal fisherfolk were squeezed out by large trawlers.

Silent Spring
was followed by such influential books as E. F. Schumacher’s
Small Is Beautiful
; Chipko was followed by other articulations of the environmentalism of the poor, such as Chico Mendes’s rubber tappers’ movement in Brazil and Wangari Maathai’s tree-planting campaigns in eastern Africa. These books and struggles spawned a wider debate on the meanings and dimensions of what was now being called “sustainable development.”

In
Silent Spring
, Rachel Carson identified two reasons for the lack of attention to environmental abuse. “This is an era of specialists,” she wrote, “each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.” Carson (and Chipko) offered the integrative science of ecology as a corrective to specialized approaches, while outlining the costs to ordinary people of the state always privileging the demands of industry.

Back in the 1970s, when the state occupied the commanding heights of India’s economy, and the nation was closely allied to the Soviet Union, critics dismissed the activists of Chipko and other such movements as agents of Western imperialism who wished to keep India backward. Slowly, however, the sheer persistence of these protests forced some concessions. In 1980, the central government established a Department of Environment, which became a full-fledged ministry a few years later. The state enacted laws to control pollution and to protect natural forests. There was even talk of restoring community systems of water and forest management.

Through hard, even heroic, work, the Indian environmental movement had brought about a (modest) greening of public policy. Pressures from popular agitations such as the Chipko Andolan had made the nation’s forest policies more sensitive to local communities and to ecological diversity. A movement led by a professor-priest in Varanasi had committed the government to a Ganga Action Plan, which aimed to clean the polluted holy river as a prelude to the restoration of other water
bodies. The scientific and social critiques of large hydroelectric power projects had compelled a closer look at decentralized and nondestructive alternatives for water management.

Meanwhile, the environmentalism of the poor began to enter school and college pedagogy. Textbooks now mentioned Chipko as well as the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the likewise nonviolent, Gandhi-inspired struggle against large dams in central India that were displacing hundreds of thousands of villagers and submerging massive tracts of superb natural forest. University departments ran courses on environmental sociology and environmental history. Elements of an environmental consciousness, finally, had begun to permeate the middle class.

In 1991 the Indian economy started to liberalize. The dismantling of state controls was in part welcome, for the license-permit-quota raj had stifled innovation and entrepreneurship. In June 1992, exactly a year after the economy began to open up, then finance minister Manmohan Singh gave a speech titled “Environment and the New Economic Policies.” Singh urged “objective standards industry-wise for safeguarding the environment, asking industry to certify compliance with these standards, institution of an effective system of verification and industry audit, and heavy penalties for non-compliance with approved environmental standards and norms.”

Singh also expressed the hope that ending bureaucratic regulation of industry would “set free a substantial amount of scarce administrative resources which can then be deployed in nation-building activities like rural development, education, health and environmental protection.” The finance minister ended his lecture by saying that “I for one am convinced that the new economic policies introduced since July 1991 will provide a powerful stimulus to an accelerated drive both for poverty reduction and the protection of our environment.”

Singh’s optimism has not been justified: Environmental sustainability has become the prime victim of economic liberalization. Over the
past two decades, India’s lands, forests, rivers, and atmosphere have been subjected to a systematic assault. Time and again, the state has granted clearances for new industries, mines, and townships without any thought for our long-term future as a country and a civilization.

In a densely populated country like India, environmental issues have both an ecological and a human dimension. Programs to clear-cut natural forests and replace them with exotic species deplete the soil even as they deprive peasants of access to fuel, fodder, and artisanal raw material. Mining projects, if not properly regulated or carried out with state-of-the-art technologies, ravage hillsides and pollute rivers used by villagers downstream. In this sense, in India environmental stewardship is not a luxury but the very basis of human (and national) survival.

This was the key insight of the Indian environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s, which informed both scientific research and public policy. Since economic liberalization, however, environmental safeguards have been systematically dismantled. The Ministry of Environment and Forests has approved destructive projects with abandon. Penalties on errant industries are virtually never enforced. By law, every new project has to have an Environmental Impact Assessment. These, admitted then environment minister Jairam Ramesh in March 2011, are a “bit of a joke,” since “under the system we have today, the person who is putting up the project prepares the report.”

This undermining of India’s natural life-support systems is ignored—indeed, at times encouraged—by both state and central governments. Consider the official hostility to the comprehensive, fact-filled, and carefully written report on the Western Ghats, a natural treasure more precious even than the Himalaya, whose forests, waters, and soils nourish the livelihoods of several hundred million Indians.

The report was submitted to the government in August 2011 by a team of experts led by the world-famous ecologist Madhav Gadgil, urging a judicious balance of development and conservation, whereby local communities as well as scientific experts would be consulted on mining, tourism, and energy generation projects. However, its recommendations do not sit easily with those who would auction our natural resources
to the highest bidder or the entrepreneur with the best political connections. Chief ministers from many states have condemned the report without reading it. The union minister of the environment has refused to meet the distinguished authors of a report her own ministry commissioned.

Once, the mainstream media (in English and Indian languages) played a catalytic role in promoting environmental awareness. Through the 1970s and 1980s, journalists including Anil Agarwal, Bharat Dogra, Kalpana Sharma, Darryl D’Monte, Usha Rai, Shekhar Pathak, and Nagesh Hegde wrote extensively on issues such as deforestation, species loss, water abuse, and sustainable energy policies. But when economic growth began to accelerate in the 1990s, an antienvironmental backlash picked up. Influential columnists began to demonize people such as Medha Patkar, leader of the Narmada movement. They accused her of being an old-fashioned leftist who wished to keep India backward. Environmentalists were now portrayed as party poopers, as spoilers who did not want India to join the ranks of the Great Powers of the world. In a single generation, environmentalists had gone from being seen as capitalist cronies to being damned as Socialist stooges. Many newspapers now laid off their environment correspondents or perhaps sent them to cover the stock market instead.

Environmentalists were attacked because, with the dismantling of state controls, only they asked the hard questions: Where would new factories find the water or land they needed? What would be the consequences for air quality, the state of the forests, and the livelihood of the people if a new mine were built? Was the high (and seismically fragile) Himalaya the right place for large hydroelectric power projects? Was a system in which the Environmental Impact Assessment was written by the promoter himself something a democracy should tolerate? Was development under liberalization only going to intensify the disparities between city and countryside? These and other vital questions were brushed off almost as quickly as they were posed.

In 1928, forty-five years before the birth of the Chipko movement, Mahatma Gandhi wrote, “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialization
after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom [England] is today keeping the world in chains.” If India blindly followed the Western model of development, warned Gandhi, it “would strip the world bare like locusts.”

Two years earlier, Gandhi had remarked that to “make India like England and America is to find some other races and places of the earth for exploitation.” Since the Western nations had already “divided all the known races outside Europe for exploitation and . . . there are no new worlds to discover,” he pointedly asked, “what can be the fate of India trying to ape the West?”

The key phrase in Gandhi’s remarks is “after the manner of the West.” Gandhi did not glorify poverty; he knew the Indian masses needed decent education, dignified employment, secure housing, freedom from want and from disease. Likewise, the best Indian environmentalists—such as the founder of the Chipko movement, Chandi Prasad Bhatt—have been hardheaded realists. They do not ask for a return to the past, but for the nurturing of a society and an economy that meets the demands of the present without imperiling the needs of the future.

India, like China, is trying to ape the West, attempting to create a mass consumer society whose members can all drive their own cars, live in their own air-conditioned homes, eat in fancy restaurants, and travel to the ends of the earth for their family holidays. As their economies grow, will India and China indeed strip the world bare like locusts? This is a crucial, if rarely asked, question facing these countries and their peoples today.

There are three environmental challenges posed by the economic rise of India and China. First, at the global level, is the threat of rapid and irreversible climate change due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases. As the early industrializers, the nations of the West were the original culprits; that said, the two Asian giants are rapidly making up for lost time. Second, at the regional or continental level, the rise of India and China
will have environmental (and social) impacts beyond their national borders. The West has for some time worked to relocate its dirty industries to the south, passing on the costs to the poor and the powerless. In the same manner, the externalities of Indian and Chinese consumers will be increasingly borne by the people of other lands.

The third challenge is that posed to the environments of these countries themselves. Chinese cities have the highest rates of air pollution in the world. Rivers such as the Ganga and the Yamuna are effectively dead. India and China have also witnessed, in recent years, the large-scale depletion of groundwater aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of forests, and the decimation of fish stocks.

There are two standard responses to the environmental crisis in India. One is to hope, or pray, that in time and with greater prosperity we will have the money to clean up. The other is to see ecological degradation as symptomatic of the larger failure of modernity itself. The first response is characteristic of the consuming classes; the second, of the agrarian romantic, who believes that India must live only in its villages, that, indeed, the majority of Indians are happy enough to live there.

Both responses are deeply wrongheaded. Life for the peasantry can be nasty, brutish, and short. Most Indian villagers would cheerfully exchange a mud hut for a solid stone house, well water for clean piped water, kerosene lanterns for steady and bright tube lights, a bicycle for a motorcycle.

The living standards of the majority of Indians can and must be enhanced. At the same time, the living standards of the wealthiest Indians must be moderated. The demands placed on the earth by the poor and excluded are disproportionately low; the demands placed by those with cars and credit cards are excessively high. A rational long-range sustainable strategy of development has to find ways of enhancing the resource access of those at the bottom of the heap while checking the resource demands of those at the top. This strategy must then be broken down into specific sectors—for example, we can design suitable policies for transport, energy, housing, forests, pollution control, water management, and so on.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the finest minds in the environmental movement sought to marry science with sustainability. They worked to design and implement forest, energy, water, and transport policies that would improve economic productivity without causing environmental stress. They acted in the knowledge that, unlike the West, India did not have colonies whose resources it could draw upon in its own industrial revolution.