Covid-19 has dealt a terrible blow to our economy. But there is a silver lining. The long shutdown has shown us what a lovely world of clear skies and clean rivers we can gift ourselves once this crisis passes over.

For that however, we need to consciously revise the model of growth we have adopted since liberalisation began in 1991 and which has been so destructive to our environment. For much less to show than China in the headlong rush to develop, we have a pollution level which is no less than China’s, and groundwater depletion that is as bad. The fragility of our social fabric has also been exposed by the mass flight back to the homelands of casual wage-earners.

One of the adaptations we need to make will therefore be in the very economic models we have followed since 1991, especially the single-dimensioned pursuit of ‘GDP’ growth rates and the whole complex of the open-borders free-market model based on the pre-eminence of the private incentive.

It is time we listened to those who have been warning us over the decades against purely market-led growth. One of those who set the ball rolling was EF Schumacher with his widely read but hardly followed Small is Beautiful . Amartya Sen has been especially vocal about a heartless economic model that is further marginalising the marginalised. The latest and most vocal is the economist Kate Raworth of Oxford University in her book Doughnut Economics , who makes a powerful case against neo-liberal economics, that seems to have caused much of the environmental problem that’s threatening the world today.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a successful actor in the very heart of the American political system, in his 1958 work The Affluent Society warned us of the fragility of economies that made production of consumption goods the only objective measure of success, and that looked to the market to adjudicate the prices and availability of all goods, even social ones like education and health.

In more recent decades, growing ecological and environmental stresses have underlined the need to leave space for our fast depleting and fragile eco-spaces, be it rainforests in the Amazon or Indonesia and Africa, or the natural habitats closer home in our Western Ghats and the Himalayas.

Public institutions

The case for strengthening rather than weakening the role of public institutions in these areas is stronger today than ever before. Correspondingly, perhaps we need to find new ways of reducing expenditures and funnelling what funds we have into areas, which make small but critical changes that make a positive difference to the lives of common folk in the countryside, Gandhiji’s last man and woman.

This, of course, will mean giving up our fancy for super-fast communications and prestige projects, and aiming at a bottom-up model where small players get precedence over the big ones in allocation of the resources that will be released under the economic recovery packages.

We must consciously allocate more of our resources to strengthen education, health and housing, and create infrastructure that will work for people everywhere, such as better rural connectivity, efficient storage and cold-chain systems that will store our produce better and reduce wastages. All these have been neglected over the last few decades.

Although we cannot reverse the destructive decisions of the past, the least we can do today is to do no harm: by bringing ongoing projects to a safe conclusion, but consciously avoiding ecologically and socially destructive mega-projects in future, that tear into the entrails of the earth, destroy more forests and wetlands, and disrupt poor communities across the countryside.

By paying more attention to consciously preserving what is left of our ecosystems and natural resources like freshwater, soil, vegetation, and biodiversity across the country, we’ll be laying the foundations of a state that is assured of survival even under the onslaught of the imminent climate change disasters. Covid is giving us a second chance to mend our ways and we must seize it for all it is worth.

Kumar is a former DG - Forests and a former ICSSR Fellow; Balakrishnan, a former senior civil servant, teaches at IISc, Bengaluru

comment COMMENT NOW