How To Be Green And Prosperous Too

How To Be Green And Prosperous Too

Another World Environment Day will roll around on June 5^th . It will witness an ever more populous India, with major air, water, flooding, drought, avalanche, earthquake, forest cover, flora ,fauna, piscine, and waste management problems.  

The developed world, measuring these things in tradable green ‘credits’, may well focus on India’s shortcomings, having   already tackled many such red-letter issues  for themselves.

Nevertheless, it cannot evade culpability for the complex phenomenon of global warming, the cumulative bill for environmental ravages and neglect since the beginning of the industrial revolution; long after the apparent wounds have healed.

But for us in India, the causes of environmental degradation are not emanating from just industry and infrastructure development, but the pressures of a huge subsistence level population desperate for cheap water, fodder and fuel. Still, an emerging nation, cannot afford to be stymied.  We cannot stay backward paradoxically, because the developed world has gone too far forward!

Most people who champion the environment today, tend to take an adversarial attitude, with a blinkered view. They advocate putting a complete stop to anything that could damage the environment further. But, they rarely succeed in seeing this through, because there is no marriage of developmental aims with environmental objectives.

Besides, much of the alarming statistic and argument used by such organisations incite and outrage irresponsibly. Their conclusions tend to extrapolate too wildly from sample data, and are sometimes based on inaccurate hypotheses.

For example, even though nuclear power is clean, some militant environmentalists use the few leak or accident instances globally, to oppose further nuclear power plants anywhere, no matter how advanced, and how much better secured against accidents.

And again, a country like India with ample coal cannot wilfully ban its mining and use to generate much needed electricity. But modern mining techniques and scrubbing technology have come a long way, and can, if used, largely solve the problems.

Top end automobile companies too have improved their engines to drastically reduce fuel consumption and pollutants. So much so, that they have put a crimp in the commercial viability of the new-age battery operated vehicles, still in the early days of their own technology cycle.

India’s forest cover, after going downhill from 1947 to 1995, has started to reverse the trend. It has improved some 7% since 1995.

There is also a renewed emphasis on solar, hydro and wind energy. In myriad small ways too greater awareness and legislation is playing its part. There is mandatory water harvesting, ground water recharging and the like. Our garbage management is still poor but improving slowly.

And this Government, with its toilet building programme, and Swacch Bharat campaign, is also determined to finally stop polluting the arterial and culturally potent Ganga. It also plans to dredge it for use as a thriving inland water way.  There are also advanced plans to link up the major rivers to provide more irrigation and prevent floods. Implementation, of course, is the key.

The current Environment Minister Prakash Javdekar has been frenetically declogging many projects held up for want of environmental clearance under the UPA. Some involve national security, others are vital to the nation’s infrastructure or commercial needs, but these fly in the face of environmental orthodoxy. But surely, where a road, a port, an aerodrome, an industrial corridor, or one for railway passengers/ freight must go through a certain execution path, it must.

The damage to the environment, precious as it is, must be compensated by turning a corresponding, or larger, amount of wasteland or desert into an appropriate sanctuary. Every state could build new protected wildernesses covering thousands of square miles in aggregate under such programmes. 

We are by no means doing all we can for the environment, but it cannot be used to act as a developmental road block.  And so, as the impresario said to the songstress, filthy or clean, the show must go on.  

For: The Quint

(647 words)
May 25^th, 2015
Gautam Mukherjee