Gag in India

Delhi has long been celebrated as a green capital, a haven for an astonishing variety of birds, and glistening with innumerable water bodies. This Delhi is on the decline. Today its air is poison. The Capital’s new normal is images of children going out to play wearing pollution masks. There is the occasional shocker too — the sight of a Sri Lankan bowler throwing up at a cricket match last December, when pollution was at its peak.

Delhi engulfed in smog is not just bad for India’s global image — air pollution and other environmental degradation costs India $80 billion, or about six per cent of its GDP annually, according to a 2017 World Bank report. Filthy air and water could drive away top corporate executives and deter investors.

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In its fourth year, the Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government is flaunting the country’s improved ranking in the World Bank’s 2018 ‘Ease of Doing Business’ report — a 30-point leap into the coveted ‘100 Club’. With elections looming next year, it has brushed some uncomfortable reports under the carpet, such as the country’s dubious 177 ranking among 180 countries — lower than neighbour Pakistan — in the 2016-17 Environmental Performance Index. There are many reasons for this steep 36-point fall from a year ago — over 63 million Indians don’t have access to safe drinking water, the Yamuna river is so polluted that it’s ecologically dead, and protected areas have been reduced to ‘paper parks’ as they continue to be decimated for highways and other projects. The worst catastrophe, arguably, is the deadly air: India has 14 of the world’s 15 most polluted cities. Every third child in Delhi has irreversible lung damage and every third Indian dies prematurely due to poisonous air, according to the Centre for Science and Environment.

Yet the Union environment minister remained unfazed. “There are no conclusive data available in the country to establish direct correlation of death/disease exclusively due to air pollution,” Harsh Vardhan had said.

The two starkly different reports are not unconnected — the government is systematically bending environmental rules to benefit private investment and industry.

For instance, the environment ministry in 2017 allowed existing and under-construction thermal power plants to continue to release, for another five years, their deadly cocktail of toxic gases and PM 2.5. This even after a Greenpeace India report pointed out that thermal power plants had during 2012-17 caused a nationwide spike in PM 2.5 (34 per cent) and sulphur dioxide (32 per cent).

The ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEFCC) also freed the construction industry, a major pollutant — contributing about a third of the Capital’s toxic air load — of pollution control laws, through a December 2016 notification. The stated reason was to improve the environment and ensure ease of doing business. “Another was affordable housing,” says environment lawyer Ritwick Dutta. “But the notification applied to multiplexes, commercial complex and hotels — and since when did they qualify as affordable housing?” Fortunately, this notification was quashed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in December 2017. No surprises then that the government is now unravelling the tribunal, which was set up to ensure speedy environment justice through an Act in Parliament in 2010. The NGT started with 20 expert members in its Delhi branch hearing 80-90 cases a day, but barely manages 10 currently.

Deadly dissent: The protest against Sterlite’s copper smelter unit in Thoothukudi left 13 dead

Public access to the regional benches has been cut off, with Bhopal, Chennai, Kolkata and Pune virtually shut down due to a lack of expert and judicial members. This when India has the highest number of environment-related conflicts in the world, at 271 , second only to Colombia’s 128, according to The Environmental Justice Atlas. Across the country, people are protesting against issues related to water, livelihoods, eviction and pollution. In May 2018, amid allegations of contaminated water and air, protests in Thoothukudi (Tamil Nadu) against the expansion of Sterlite’s copper smelter unit took a deadly turn, leaving 13 dead and scores badly injured,

To be fair, though, the unravelling had started even during the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime. Congress leaders Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi had, as Prime Ministers, established a strong legal and policy framework to protect the environment, forest, coasts and wildlife, but that political will was fast eroding by the 1990s. During 2004-14, the UPA government accorded environment clearances to over 90 per cent of projects. About 2.4 lakh hectares of forest were diverted for industry and other development. Yet, there were also a few proactive measures for conservation, such as a moratorium on industries in critically-polluted clusters and the stalling of the Neutrino Observatory project in the buffer of Mudumalai Tiger Reserve (Tamil Nadu). A landmark measure was the establishment of the NGT.

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One of the first things the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition did after coming to power in May 2014 was appoint a high-level committee to review key environment laws. The process itself was hasty and lacked transparency — it called for eliminating all government and independent monitoring, and allowing polluting industries to disclose their own violations — not unlike asking a thief to voluntarily proclaim his guilt. Were it to be enacted, stated the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science tasked with its review, “it would result in an unacceptable dilution of the existing legal and policy architecture established to protect our environment”. The BJP did not have the political muscle in the Rajya Sabha then to overhaul the laws, but the dilution of laws and institutions continues. Asad Rahmani, the former director of the Bombay Natural History Society, calls the plan to weaken these laws “insidious” and “...ostensibly to benefit industries.”

Through a series of measures, the MoEFCC did away with the moratorium on new industries in critically-polluted areas, and the need for environmental clearance for mining minor minerals such as sand and stones in a region measuring five hectares or less. The term ‘minor’ is misleading. Sand mining changes the geology of rivers, depletes groundwater, leads to the collapse of sandbanks and the extinction of aquatic wildlife.

The ministry also announced a general clearance for roads and other strategic projects within 100 km of the line of actual control, instead of a case-by-case assessment.

Clearances to such strategic areas are anyway fast-tracked, but such ‘auto-clearances’ can potentially lead to other threats, besides endangering wildlife such as snow leopards, wolves, red pandas, Bengal floricans, tigers and elephants. Indiscriminate blasting of mountains will destroy the virgin ecosystem in these remote areas. The trans-Himalayas feed the Himalayan rivers; the forests along the border nourish and nurture these perennial rivers, on which depend the lives and livelihood of a third of the country’s population.

The revised Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017, watered down the definition of a wetland, and the activities prohibited in it. The rules fail to cover 65 per cent of the identified wetlands. This even after a third of wetlands has been wiped out or severely degraded by real estate and other land uses. Wetlands play a major role in carbon sequestration, groundwater charge and flood control, especially in packed urban centres. The flood that battered Chennai in 2015, for instance, is attributed to the loss of a whopping 80 per cent of its wetlands.

At a time when India faces its worst water crisis — NITI Aayog estimates 21 major cities will run out of groundwater within two years — India needs to conserve wetlands and rivers more than ever.

The Waterways Act of 2017 proposes to channelise over 100 rivers for ships to carry everything from passengers to cargo such as coal and oil. The Wildlife Institute of India has warned that the plying of ships and dredging to improve navigability (in Ganga) will “do irreparable damage to biodiversity, including turtles and the Gangetic dolphin, of which fewer than 3,000 survive. The noise levels will especially disrupt the Gangetic dolphin’s ability to navigate using echo-location. Also at stake are the livelihoods of fisherfolk and farmers dependent on the river for irrigation. In Goa, there is strong opposition to the development of six river stretches as national waterways, as part of a road-rail-river corridor to transport coal landing at the Mormugao port.

The draft coastal regulation zone (CRZ) notification in April 2018 proposes to open up the ecologically sensitive coastline for more real estate development, ports, tourism and industrial activities. Kanchi Kohli, a researcher with CPR-Namati Environment Justice Program, explains the implication for about 3,200 fishing villages: “Any change in the notification impacts not just them but other traditional livelihoods such as salt production, grazing and agriculture.” The 10 amendments to the 2011 rules “have disregarded coastal conservation and livelihood protection... with no public consultations with impacted communities,” she says.

For example, an amendment in 2015 allows the development of memorials or monuments of “national importance” in CRZ IV areas, which are otherwise restricted to traditional fishing-related activities. This immediately paved the way for the construction of a gigantic Chhatrapati Shivaji statue, at a cost of about ₹2,500 crore, off the Mumbai coast. Besides a variety of marine fauna, the project endangers the livelihoods of nearly 15,000 fisherfolk, who got no opportunity to be heard, as projects of “national importance” can now bypass mandatory public hearings.

Similarly, the proposed National Forest Policy 2018 perceives the forest as an economic resource, unlike the National Forest Policy, 1988, which had conservation and ecological security at its heart. Nearly 12,166 hectares (the size of 63 football fields) of forests are being diverted every day. In an article published by The Hindu , Dutta writes that the main objective is to facilitate “mining, laying roads and building dams without any detailed scientific and legal scrutiny”.

Even the last refuges of endangered wildlife have not been spared. In its first meeting in August 2014, the National Board for Wildlife’s (NBWL) Standing Committee cleared 133 of 240 projects proposed in protected areas, sending a signal of its ‘clearance’ agenda, and setting the trend for the future. During 2014-16, the NBWL rejected 0.01 per cent of projects as compared to 11.9 per cent in the UPA years of 2009-13, according to CSE data. “The NBWL Standing Committee does not have a strong representation of conservation NGOs,” says Rahmani.

Among approved projects was a road through the Kutch Wildlife Sanctuary, the only known nesting ground of flamingoes in the Indian subcontinent. In January 2018, it cleared the expansion of a railway line that cuts through critical tiger habitat and the catchment of Tapi river in Maharashtra’s Melghat Tiger Reserve.

The Committee also cleared the Ken-Betwa river-linking project inside Panna tiger reserve, also a nesting site of the critically endangered long-billed vulture and the red-headed vulture.

Two non-official members of Madhya Pradesh State Wildlife Board — Belinda Wright, who heads the Wildlife Protection Society of India, and MK Ranjitsinh, former secretary in the ministry of environment and forests — wrote to chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan that the project would “dissect and disembowel” the park, affecting more than 200 sqkm of it.

“So, even as it routinely celebrates World Biodiversity Day, World Environment Day, Forestry Day et al, the government is not really serious about environmental protection,” says Rahmani.

“In the draft Forest Policy, even the term grasslands and wetland were removed... all this is very dangerous,” he says.

Easing environment norms for ‘the ease of doing business’ is bad business, something which the Prime Minister himself averred to at a tiger conservation event in April 2016. “Conservation of nature is not a drag on development,” he said, and called for “defining conservation as a means to achieve development, rather than considering it to be anti-growth.”

If only.

Prerna Singh Bindra is a conservationist, writer and journalist

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