High concentration of economic activities and consumption patterns in post-liberalisation period has led to the failure of environmental movements in India. Elucidate.(UPSC CSE Mains 2022 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- In 1991 the Indian economy started to liberalise. The dismantling of state controls was in part welcome, for the licence-permit-quota-Raj had stifled innovation and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the votaries of liberalisation mounted an even more savage attack on environmentalists than did the proponents of state socialism.
- The regulations of the industry, commerce, textiles, and other such ministries had to be dismantled — and they mostly were. But the regulations that popular struggles had forced on what was now the ministry of environment and forests remained even more important than before. For, as many studies have shown, it is in the economic interests of private firms to pollute the environment. Nature is an ‘externality’; owned not by the firm but by society at large. So, in order to increase profits, it is perfectly ‘rational’ for entrepreneurs to pollute rivers, destroy forests, damage soils, etc, in the process of producing or marketing products for sale.
- The environmental regulations so painstakingly put in place in the 1980s remain, but politicians of all parties have allowed them to be wilfully and ubiquitously violated. Meanwhile, newer environmental problems, such as those associated with rapid urbanisation and with climate change, have not generated the necessary legislative or institutional response. So India today is a veritable environmental basket-case; with alarmingly high rates of air and water pollution, the ongoing depletion of aquifers and decimation of forests, and pervasive contamination of the soil.
- The guilty men of India’s multiple environmental crises are corrupt politicians and amoral entrepreneurs — in that order. Yet the media cannot escape censure. In the 1980s it did excellent work; from the 1990s, swayed by the prevailing winds, it succumbed to the canard, assiduously promoted by industry lobbies, that environmental regulation was ‘setting India back’. Some leading columnists, either out of ignorance or malevolence (or possibly both), have carried on a vicious campaign against some of our most courageous and public-spirited environmentalists.
- According to one scholarly study, the economic costs of environmental degradation in India amount to as much as $80 billion a year. Ironically, even as the media has largely abdicated its role as a watchdog, scientific research has developed impressively. The CES, ATREE, Prayas in Pune, research departments at the Jadavpur, Delhi, and other universities — all have excellent scientists whose inputs can greatly help to mitigate these problems. Tragically, this reservoir of scientific expertise has been shamefully neglected by our political class, even though it is entirely Made in India. It is past time that our leaders look to scientists rather than ideologues to forge a path of sustainable development that can safeguard our future as a society, a nation, and a civilisation.
- Environmentalists were attacked because, with the dismantling of state controls, only they asked the hard questions. When a new factory, highway, or mining project was proposed, only they asked where the water or land would come from, or what the consequences would be for the quality of the air, the state of the forests, and the livelihood of the people.
- The prime victim of economic liberalisation has been environmental sustainability.
- A wise, and caring, government would have deepened the precocious, far-seeing efforts of our environmental scientists. Instead, rational, fact-based scientific research is now treated with contempt by the political class. The Union Environment Ministry set up by Indira Gandhi has, as the Economic and Political Weekly recently remarked, ‘buckled completely’ to corporate and industrial interests. The situation in the States is even worse.
- India today is an environmental basket-case; marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water-tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests. Meanwhile, tribal and peasant communities continue to be pushed off their lands through destructive and carelessly conceived projects. A new Chipko movement is waiting to be born.
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