With the FDI in retail soon coming up, the allocation of coal blocks, even if stinking of misconducts and scams, already done, and the automobile industry booming, India seems set on its path to revamp its economy with plenty of reforms on its plate. But with these reforms, we almost forget the tacit compromises we make with the environment. The GDP we so desperately map today, measures productivity and inventories, but not resources.
India still relies on thermal power plants to satisfy a major portion of its power requirements. With the subsidies and externalities associated with the production of this energy, and the bureaucratic and maintenance hurdles associated with its solar equivalent, it seems coal shall remain the prime exploitable resource for the many decades. The coal reserves in India as per the latest Geological Survey of India are around 286 Billion Tonnes, of which 44 billion tonnes were allocated just in the period from 2004 to 2009 (not counting the de-allocations of coal blocks worth 6 Billion Tonnes before March 2011). With the data of pollution from these plants accrued with us, I do not even need to strain about the rapid coal resource depletion to exemplify the blotted inheritance we are leaving our future generations.
The Great Indian Growth Story runs concomitant to this depletion. As rightly put by economists, adherence to an environmentally sound policy might not augur well for our nation. Forget leaving the power generation to desuetude, with the way economy today is defined, even the prospect of de-allocation of these coal blocks has led to a decrease in the equity prices of these companies, and affected thousands of shareholders. Moreover, with the elevating energy requirements close on heels with the industrial growth, it becomes necessary to exploit the present resources to sustain the livelihood of the bottom billion, to reduce unemployment and to crawl towards the final goal of total poverty alleviation. Whether the path we tread on is apposite or the goal is achievable is a different question. Growth and resource exploitation seems central to any idea of poverty alleviation today.
The conflict thus in framing any climate policy, and the debates on the actions to be taken to mitigate the climate change risk, is how to pledge towards saving environment while uplifting those whose lives depend on the degradation of these resources. While many environmentalists advocate the radical changes in the functioning of the economy, and a primary focus on the resource utilization capabilities of the future generations, the question of whether it would be justifiable to the present one always arises. As Paul Krugman puts it, the market today does a balancing act. One can't develop without destroying the other.
Alas, even though this seems important, the main problem today is not development vs environment. It is skewed development vs poverty vs environment. Ramchandra Guha describes this with an ecological framework. There are three kinds of people today. The omnivores, who are the rich and the exploiters, the ecosystem people, who are the ones dependant on the local ecosystem to sustain themselves, and the ecological refugees, who are already facing the blunt of the escalated and assimilated destruction and have been displaced from their surroundings. The ecosystem people and the ecological refugees are the ones who suffer when the fisheries are over exploited, the wheat or potato is over produced, or the hurricanes and cyclones strike the coastal lands. But these still depend on the model of trickle down economy to live their life of hardship. If the present practices are continued, the future generations will suffer even more. We are facing a choice between the 2-3 billion people arriving on earth in the next 50 years, who would also contribute towards emissions while being victims of our affluence, and the poorest of poor today, who are already bearing most of the damage that the omnivores have done. One of these two has to be castigated for the other. This is the sad part. Most of us live in the illusion that a poverty alleviation program today could work while we focus on climate risk mitigation. That cannot be so. The number of poor, even though the resource exploitation and development is at full swing, has not reduced for the past five decades. While this remains a debacle of dysfunctional policies and corruption in place, even if the said resources were to be used to abate poverty, it would leave our country bare by the time we are successful.
Chandran Nair, in his book 'Consumptionomics', says the situation today is primarily the result of the rampant and leisure-born consumption mania present in India. It is the dream of the developing world, led by India and China, to match the level of affluence of its US counterparts. While the earlier imperialist economies crouched on the resources of their captured nations, the developing nations today have started to follow their footsteps. The only difference in this exploitation is that with nowhere else to go, these countries are looking inwards and destroying themselves for greed. With the omnivores in Guha's model gaining the power to frame policies; their affluence is being paid by the health, climate risk, resources and lives of the ecosystem people. This model is explained even more clearly in the "Story of Stuff", a small animation of the consumerist society developed by Anne Leonard. The resources of the locality get trashed, and the locals with no other options have to be subservient to the demands of the rich. While their resources are exploited, they suffer the burden of the externalities of what they produce, sideling their own growth. The system in place today, even though being advocated as one of development, does not help in correcting this warped distribution of growth. This argument is bolstered by the crisis being faced by the fisherman of Chilika Lake in Odisha, and documented in the movie "Chilika Bank$" by Akanksha Joshi. Chilika is a brackish water lagoon, which means it has a unique mix of salt (marine) and fresh water suitable for prawn development. The salt water comes from the opening Chilika Lake has to the Bay of Bengal. The lake which boasts of being the second largest lagoon in the world had a plethora of Prawns which sustained the fishermen in the area. But with the identification of this rich resource, and the subsequent globalisation of the economy, the lake began to be over-fished. The tourism also developed, and with this started the 'development' of the region. The forest cover was substantially affected. The sand eroded, and silt starting flowing and got deposited on the shore of the Chilika. Its mouth to the Bay of Bengal was choked. A new man-made mouth was created, which imbalanced the salinity required for Prawn development. The fisheries of Chilika have exhausted today, and artificial cultures developed by encroaching the lake are the major source of prawns. The irony in this development story is, even though the fisheries were exploited, the fishermen didn't get the benefit of it. They are still poor, and their livelihood today is pitched against the future of Chilika and the millions she will sustain.
We have reached an impasse today over where to go from here. There are two sets of victims, the present poor and the future children, with our affluence and greed being the main culprit. With the resources of the earth limited, this present growth paradigm will itself be challenged once the resources are exhausted. On one hand we have the ephemeral resources, and on the other the proliferating population. The exploding population has put a tremendous stress on the resources. The carrying capacity of the planet is far past. Moreover, whatever development trickles down to the poor, is always engulfed by the growing families to support. It is an inverse relation between how much we exploit and how many we have to support. This rapidly growing population is what prompted China to follow its 'one child policy'. One may question the morality of the step, but with the omnivores of Guha still bent on increasing the affluence, it seems far suited to reduce both the future perpetrators and victims than to question values or principles. The only way we can hope to sustain the environment, and still uplift the masses is to control both our population and the affluence. Unless such an attempt is made, any development even if democratic and reaching the poor will remain inconsequential.
We do have to choose between the present and the future, but we can try to mitigate the damage that has been done and can be done.
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