Poison Floe

• Air pollution in India causes 5,27,700 deaths every year (WHO)
  
• 21% of communicable diseases in India are related to polluted water. In India, diarrhoea alone causes more than 1,600 deaths daily (WHO)
  
• Only 22% of the wastewater generated in urban India is treated, severely polluting rivers. The total wastewater from Delhi and nearby areas flowing into the 19 drains that connect to the Yamuna is around 3,296 million litres a day, of which 630 MLD is untreated.
  
• India’s getting about 5% less sunlight than it did 20 years ago because a cloud of tiny airborne particles released by its industries hovers above the subcontinent, preventing light from reaching the Earth. Results: less rainfall, reduced agriculturalproductivity and green cover.
  
• Unregulated dumping of old PCs and batteries is contaminating our soil, air and groundwater with highly toxic, carcinogenic chemicals. With over 2 million old PCs ready for disposal in India, that means 14,427,000 kg of plastics, 3,962,700 kg of lead and 1,386 kg of mercury.
  
• Large metros generate thousands of tonnes of solid waste every day, much of it not biodegradable. Delhi generates about 4,000 tonnes of solid waste each day. How long before there’s no space left to dump it?
  
• Fast depleting forest cover is threatening our fauna with extinction as their habitats vanish. In the 20 years alone, nearly 12,000 sq km of forest has disappeared with the government’s permission.
  
• Pollution costs India about 4.5 per cent of its GDP each year. The figure for China has been estimated at 2.6 percent of the country’s GDP, and less than 1-2% for industrialised nations.

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Growing middle-class concern about the fast deteriorating state of our environment is not restricted to Gurgaon alone, it’s reflected in our nationwide survey too, where people rated environmental pollution second to inflation in the list of problems they face living in cities. This awareness has come not a moment too soon: air pollution from growing vehicular traffic, the indiscriminate cutting down of trees to build expressways and flyovers and the hazards from industrial effluents have sharply increased the incidence of a range of diseases, from asthma to cancer to mental retardation, caused by increasing levels of lead in the bloodstream. Exactly how much, you can learn from the statistics(see Numbing Numbers). Our rivers resemble giants sewers, infecting our water supply with deadly bacteria and microbes. Our rapidly dwindling forest cover threatens much of our fauna with extinction. And while the world debates the likely impact of climate change, people in India are already battling it: in some parts of the country, thousands have been forced to leave their homes because of persistent drought, while in other parts they are being displaced by rising sea levels.

With booming economic growth has come accelerated environmental damage. As historian Ramachandra Guha, who has authored several seminal works on the environment, observes, "The green movement was strong in the ’70s and ’80s. But, in the ’90s when economic liberalisation set in, green activists were sidelined as party-poopers. Now, belatedly, we’re coming around to acknowledging that the greens may have had a point after all."

A new sense of urgency about India’s environmental degradation has compelled a number of ordinary individuals to make eco-conscious lifestyle changes. There is vocalist C.N. Mukherjee in Delhi’s nondescript Krishna Nagar area, who harvests rainwater on his rooftop. Mumbai engineer Sudhir Badami has stopped using his private car for his daily commute to work and switched to public transport instead. Calcutta chartered accountant Subhas Datta has replaced his generator with a solar-powered back-up. In Ernakulam, urban planner A.R.S. Vadhyar has started growing organic food on his terrace, while Calcutta sociologist Aruna Seal prepares the family meals in a solar cooker. Delhi architect Sanjay Prakash has built himself a "green home" that reduces his energy consumption by a third.

Thousands of middle-class householders all over the country have integrated green habits into their daily routines—such as segregating their garbage into recyclable and non-recyclable bags, switching to CFL bulbs, and reverting to the age-old Indian ways of taking bucket baths instead of showers.

But some environmental experts feel these measures, though well-intentioned, are too few and far between to make a real difference. They’re tailored mainly towards improving an individual’s immediate environment. "The middle class is increasingly self-centred and insensitive to the environmental consequences of what it does. The few concerned ones among them also have the same mindset, in the sense that they extend their concern just to the air they breathe or the food they eat," says Smitu Kothari, director of the Delhi-based thinktank, Intercultural Resources.

Meanwhile, national policies to reverse environmental degradation display either a complete lack of vision or a blinkered one. Thus, while the introduction of compressed natural gas for public vehicles reduced air pollution in many cities some years ago, the government’s unwillingness to tackle the unchecked growth of private vehicles on our city roads has pretty much negated those gains today. Apart from the Delhi Metro, there has been no real effort to improve public transport. For many states and cities, saving the environment today in India has largely come to mean planting trees and saving a few flagship species such as the tiger. But, as the late Anil Agarwal, founder of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), used to say, environment goes beyond "pretty trees and tigers". This lopsidedness, writes Cambridge University lecturer Emma Mawdsley in a paper titled ‘India’s Middle Classes and the Environment’ published in the journal Development and Change, is a result of the disproportionate influence the Indian middle class wields in shaping the terms of public debate on environmental issues, through their strong representation in the media, politics, the scientific establishment, NGOs, bureaucracy, environmental institutions and the legal system.

The urban development model in India, agree many critics, is largely dictated by the growing size and affluence of the middle class. The transportation infrastructure in Delhi is one such example, designed to keep out pedestrians and slower-moving but more eco-friendly modes of transport such as bicycles from roads (see BicycleDiaries). And whenever a different model has been tried, like the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Corridor in Delhi, there has been a huge backlash. A boon for public transport commuters with separate lanes for buses and cycles, the BRT project is overwhelmingly opposed by car owners—a fact confirmed in our survey.

While some environmentalists argue that environment-friendly policies benefit the poor as well as the well-to-do, others hold that many environmental measures are in fact discriminatory, and hit the poor. Examples of this contradiction abound—for instance, in the eviction of slum-dwellers from Yamuna Pushta in New Delhi in 2004 to make way for a "green belt". It’s a different matter that a Games Village is being built for the Commonwealth event in 2010 on the riverbank, adjacent to the Akshardham temple spread over a hundred acres. Mawdsley points out that "with a growing ‘wildlife’ sensibility, stronger efforts may be made to expel adivasis and other forest-dwellers from National Parks and other Protected Areas.... At the same time, some park authorities are willing to allow luxury hotels and more roads to be built in the same parks, servicing the demands of rich domestic and foreign tourists while displacing the poor."

This growing disconnect between the environmental priorities of urban Indians and those of the nation as a whole is a point that Kothari of Intercultural Resources also emphasises. He quotes as an example projects of dams like the Tehri, which displace thousands of people, deprive them of their livelhihoods, and cause environmental degradation in order to "generate power that is mainly consumed by urban Indians".

Despite the actions that many middle-class, urban Indians now take out of concern for the environment, environmental awareness is low among Indians as a whole. A recent study—Greendex—by National Geographic in May this year ranked Indians at the bottom of the list of 14 nationalities in environmental awareness. For example, only a fourth knew that nearly all plastic is made from crude oil. Guha gives a telling example of Indians’ lack of awareness about their ecological footprint. "They will drive 500 miles in a gas-guzzling SUV to see a tiger, and then feel that they are pro-environment," he says.

The middle class, Kothari adds, is "completely oblivious" to how its "criminally wasteful" lifestyle is causing disruption and social conflict elsewhere. For example, as middle-class Indians demand more and more construction material, rural folk are being pushed out of their homes to make way for steel plants to feed that demand, he points out. A recent instance was in Kalinganagar in Orissa, when 13 people were killed in police firing when they protested the construction of a steel plant.

And if things are to get better, says Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) will have to be a much better guardian of our environment and natural resources. Under the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, the MoEF must assess the environmental impact of development projects before granting them clearance. In reality, however, it rarely withholds such clearances. "The MoEF has become more of a ‘ministry of development’," says Narain. "Our studies show that very few projects have been denied clearance despite protests from local people." That the whole EIA process is a farce is evident from one instance where the MoEF granted clearance to Ashapura Minechem Ltd for bauxite mining in Ratnagiri in 2006, despite the fact that the data submitted by the company was copied wholesale from a Russian mining project. If the mining company’s data is to be believed, Ratnagiri has forests of "mixed spruce and birch!"

Most experts are agreed that saving the environment will get the required attention from the people only when it gets the same from the government. "That’s unlikely to happen as long as the government continues to subsidise energy prices and insulate the people from the supply-demand situation," says Leena Srivastava, executive director, The Energy and Resources Institute. "There is no incentive for the middle class to change its lifestyle," adds Deepti Sastry, an environment and development studies scholar at Birbeck College, University of London. "Any attitudinal change that takes place without policy intervention will probably be just a fashion statement, likely to be short-lived."

But, until far-reaching policy changes to save India’s environment come into effect, individuals must give more serious thought to the impact on the environment of their lifestyles, and make sustained and consistent efforts to reduce their ecological footprint (see How to GoGreen). And then demand that the government give them incentives for doing so. ‘Be the change you want to see around you’, environmentalists don’t tire of telling you. It may begin to sound like a cliche, but put it into practice and it could well usher in India’s green evolution.

By Debarshi Dasgupta with Jaideep Mazumdar