An eventful ecological journey

Since its inception in 1980, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has played a significant role in pushing environment into the mainstream discourse. CSE’s policy interventions coincided with the growing realisation that the Nehru-Mahalanobis model had created ecological imbalances and deprived many adivasis and peasants of the fruits of development.

It was the time when IIT-trained engineers and others adopted the Gandhi-Schumacher template to devise inclusive and sustainable ways of producing and living — from the Vidhushak Karkhana in Madhya Pradesh to KR Datye’s innovations in appropriate technology in Maharashtra and Laurie Baker in Kerala, among many other innovators. Gandhians such as Anupam Mishra revisited traditional irrigation systems. In Maharashtra, a people’s dam, Bali Raja Smriti Dharan, was created without government involvement in Satara district. A social and intellectual churning was under way, and CSE became an observer-participant.

Vested interests

Today, nearly 40 years later, the CSE, now spearheaded by Sunita Narain, can take credit for impacting media debates on environmental issues. Yet, the environment is a subject of discussion also because the crisis around us has assumed alarming proportions — encompassing the food we eat, the water we drink and the weather. This book gives an overview of CSE’s key interventions and, interestingly, of the lobbying and manipulation that goes on behind the scenes. It is a revealing political economy account penned in an engaging way, without the pedantic prose that is usually the staple of such writings.

Narain’s book begins with CSE’s campaign to clean up Delhi’s toxic air. In the mid-1990s, CSE mounted pressure to ban diesel cars and shift the city’s transport system from diesel to CNG, flagging the toxic effects of fine particulate matter, called PM 2.5, in diesel. In doing so, it ran into a wall of resistance from the auto lobby, their case being argued before court by top politician-lawyers who are now on opposite sides of the political spectrum! Two decades later, despite Delhi’s buses and autos shifting to CNG and automobiles being subjected to higher emission standards, the air remains toxic as ever — because, as Narain points out, there are too many cars. She isolates cars from other factors such as stubble-burning in Punjab and burning of pet coke, arguing: “Cars ad to about 15 per cent of vehicle emissions but this contribution is much more when you take the impact of congestion on the road. IIT Kanpur finds that in certain congested areas of Delhi, cars, particularly diesel cars, add up to 60-90 per cent of the PM 2.5...”

However, while pitching for CNG and against diesel, Narain should have addressed the assertion of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research that CNG too is carcinogenic.

The book devotes considerable space to how vested interests took on CSE in its attack on cola giants on the issue of pesticide residues. It argues that a misinformation campaign based on manipulation of data and dubious surveys was in full swing. The trend, it says, repeated itself in the CSE campaign against aerial endosulfan spraying in north Kerala, which was linked to deformities at birth. Narain portrays with clarity the ways of the scientific establishment, drawing parallels with how science serves the interests of business in the US. We should be mindful of spin masters in the context of the debate on GM crops.

Sensible positions

The book takes a nuanced view on pesticides, conceding that a permissible level of use is inevitable in the interests of securing a high level of output, but monitoring is crucial. Since soft drinks are not essentials, there can be no case for allowing them a threshold level of pesticide use, it says.

CSE’s position on ‘Tigers and/or People’ is praiseworthy. By distancing itself from the conservationists who favoured shutting locals out of forests altogether, as the British did, it sided with those who favoured a new conservation paradigm.

The book rightly says that local populations’ interests should be protected so that they become collaborators and not antagonists in conservation efforts. It could have cited the case of Tawa Matsya Sangh, where local adivasis were making a livelihood by selling fish in the Tawa reservoir, only to be disallowed once the area came under the Satpura Tiger Reserve. Wildlife’s enemy, as the book says, is organised poaching and irresponsible, high-end tourism.

Some questions

Narain describes succinctly the course of climate negotiations since the Kyoto Protocol, showing how the developed world led by US craftily turned the tables on the developing countries and wriggled out of their obligations to cut emissions, as a result of which we ended up with a wishy-washy Paris pact. But while arguing that developing countries such as India have a certain right to atmospheric space because they are not historical polluters, the book makes a debatable assertion. It says: “My colleagues analysed income distribution and income elasticity of emissions data to see if rich Indians emitted more or as much as rich country counterparts. The study found that per capita emissions of the richest 10 per cent of India’s population was the same or slightly less than the per capita emissions of America’s poorest 10 per cent and it was less than one-tenth of America’s richest 10 per cent.”

This argument is flawed, as India’s top 10 per cent are nearly half the US population, so their supposedly low per-capita emissions are offset by the sheer number. If the carbon footprint of the world’s elite cannot be condoned, there is no reason why India’s elite should be let off the hook.

Narain’s silence on the European Union, given its centrality in environmental debates, is baffling. The book does not adequately acknowledge the role of numerous movements in creating a collective consciousness on the environment. CSE inhabits that space and cannot project itself as a cut above the rest.

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