September 20, 2010

by Praful Bidwai

In his September 6 interaction with newspaper editors, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hinted that he might soon reshuffle his Cabinet. Given that he made only two changes in his first Prime Ministerial term—dropping Home Minister Shivraj Patil after 26/11 and taking Petroleum away from Mr Mani Shankar Aiyar—it’s hard to predict the new team’s composition. But one thing is near-certain. If Dr Singh prevails, junior minister in independent charge of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) Jairam Ramesh will probably be told to make way for someone more pliable and pro-industry.

A turning point in the Singh-Ramesh relationship was the Bt Brinjal case in which Mr Ramesh set a new precedent by holding public hearings in 7 cities, in which an overwhelming majority of the 8,000 participants opposed field trials of the vegetable. No less significant was the MoEF’s refusal of a mining licence to the Vedanta group in Orissa’s Niyamgiri Hills following the NC Saxena report, which highlighted the vulnerability of the Dongria Kondh tribals and violations of the Forest Rights and Forest Conservation Acts.

Mr Ramesh is no green zealot. He has consciously distanced himself from jholawalas, as social activists are derogatorily called, and stuck by the rules. It’s useful to remember that he’s an engineer-turned-manager-administrator with a World Bank background.

Mr Ramesh’s latest “offence” was his reluctance to clear the new Navi Mumbai airport project, which will destroy 400 acres of mangroves. Mangroves cannot be trifled with. They are sturdy saltwater plants which sink deep roots and uniquely protect the coastline against sea-storms and tidal waves. There is a strong case for looking for another site for the airport. Dr Singh is pressing the MoEF to clear the present site—a demand as dear to Maharashtra’s politicians as to builders, all of whom will make billions from contracts and kickbacks.

Dr Singh specifically targeted Mr Ramesh when he said that environmental concerns should not “perpetuate poverty” and bring back “the licence-permit raj”. The Prime Minister’s Office is doing its utmost to push large mining and industrial projects promoted by South Korea-based multinational POSCO, the Tatas, the Mittals and the Jindals.

The POSCO steel project has been found by a sub-committee under Mr Saxena’s ambit to have violated the Forest Rights Act and Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, which mandate the consent of the entire Gram Sabha in a tribal village for any land transfer. But under pressure from global multinationals, Indian business and South Korea, the government has created yet another committee under former MoEF secretary Meena Gupta, with a pro-business bias, to countermand the earlier report.

Dr Singh would be ill-advised to trivialise environmental concerns on the premise, which he seems to have accepted since the 1990s, that India’s environmental regulations are far too tight and will discourage badly needed industrialisation. Nothing could be further from the truth: India has a low Environmental Performance Index rank, calculated by a Columbia-Yale university project—123 of 163 countries. It is one of the least regulated countries of the world, with a deeply flawed environmental impact assessment (EIA) process, hardly any enforceable standards (on safety, or permissible pollution levels), and no worthwhile penalties.

The EIA process has been so diluted over the years that 92 percent of all projects go through virtually without scrutiny. A cottage industry has sprung of consultants who write a made-to-order report for the promoters after merely changing the project name.

As a former member of an MoEF Expert Committee on River Valley Projects, I can vouch that most EIA reports are doctored or fraudulent. Yet, the MoEF accepts flawed or incomplete applications, without clearances from wildlife wardens, hydrologists and other authorities. Until recently, it was approving 4 to 5 project applications a day—a sign of cavalier, sloppy and mindless decision-making!

Two major laws enacted to protect fragile ecosystems, the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 and Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 1991, have been cynically manipulated for their exception and exemption clauses to transfer forest land to industry, and permit construction dangerously close to the high-tide line.

India keeps losing prime thick-canopy rainforest year after year. Although trees are planted over 1-1.5 million hectares a year, these plantations are not natural forests with all their biodiversity. Although the forest land transferred to non-forest uses decreased from an average of 140,000 ha a year, it’s still alarming at 27,000 ha a year. The CRZ Notification has been reduced to a farce, much like the replacement of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act with the toothless Foreign Exchange Management Act.

India is witnessing alarming environmental deterioration. The last two decades have accelerated the degradation of land, pollution of major rivers, plummeting of air and water quality, all with terrible effects on the quality of life of the people.

According to the MoEF’s State of Environment Report—2009, 45 percent of India’s land area is degraded due to deforestation, poor agricultural practices, mining, water and wind erosion, waterlogging and salinity. All of India’s 14 major river systems are heavily polluted. More than half have turned into sewers as industrial and municipal waste is dumped into them. Total coliform bacteria count in the Ganga rises vertiginously along its length in India—from 1,600 per 100 ml in Haridwar, to 17,000 in Allahabad, to 240,000 in Kanpur, to 500,000 in West Bengal. Drinking water should have a count of less than 50 per 100 ml.

Potable water is becoming a rarity. There’s widespread contamination of water with chemical fertilisers and pesticides, industrial effluents, municipal waste, and animal and human excreta. Heavy metal and arsenic pollution is increasing alarmingly. People have to spend a significant 5 to 10 percent of their household budgets to filter and boil water, or buy treated water.

Plastic is playing havoc in India. Discarded wrappings, carry-bags, soft drinks bottles, and “disposable” plates are choking rivers, springs and stormwater drains, spreading toxicity. It is impossible to walk 50 yards in any Indian city without noticing plastic littering.

Ambient air quality in Indian cities is poor and falling. Concentrations of respirable suspended particulate matter are two or four times higher than the national ambient air-quality standard in a majority of states. A grey haze of suspended particulates, oxides of sulphur and nitrogen, lead compounds, soot from the incomplete burning of coal and biomass, and industrial emissions, constantly hangs over most cities. The vehicle population is rising at 25 percent-plus a year, choking roads, poisoning people, squeezing out pedestrians and bicyclists, and killing 120,000 people a year.

Another worrisome phenomenon is indoor air pollution. The use of wood, animal dung, crop residue/grasses, coal, etc. for cooking exposes people to high levels of toxic air pollutants, with serious health consequences. Seventyfour percent of India’s urban households and 91 percent of rural households use such fuels. Prevalence of tuberculosis among them is as high as 924 per 100,000. Indoor pollution also causes acute respiratory infections, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, lung cancer and heart disease.

These processes, along with the global phenomenon of climate change, are accelerating the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers. These provide meltwater to seven of Asia’s greatest river systems (the Indus, Ganga, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Huang He) and constitute a vital resource for 1.3 billion people. The Greater Himalayas are warming at a rate that’s two to four times higher than the global average.

India is following China’s trajectory of ecological destruction. In 2006, an official at China’s State Council estimated that “environmental damage (everything from crop loss to the price of healthcare) cost 10 percent of its GDP—all of the economy’s celebrated growth”.

The Energy and Resources Institute—no radical think-tank that—estimated in 2007 that the total environmental damage to India amounts to 7 to 10 percent of GDP—a little higher than the GDP growth rate. Even if these estimates are only halfway right, they raise nagging questions about the sustainability of India’s growth path.

Clearly, India must tighten its regulations to protect land, water, air, forests and coastline. This is a top priority related to the survival and well-being of the people. Dr Singh is sending out the message that the environment is dispensable. We can allow it to be destroyed to promote growth.

Dr Singh is wrong to counterpose poverty to environmental protection. Healthy, sustainable industrialisation demands strong environmental safeguards which protect natural resources and peoples’ access to them. Reckless industrialisation and predatory mining cut off people from their resources base, uproot them and turn them into paupers.

“Licence-permit raj” is a term of abuse which detracts from a primary responsibility of governance. Surely, Dr Singh doesn’t want a free-for-all situation, where precious resources are exploited and defiled at will by profiteering corporations. Or has he learnt no lessons from Bhopal? He must revise his views on environmental deregulation. Or we’ll all have to pay the price for his myopic obsession with GDPism and pampering of Big Business.