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Environment: Ecological suicide -Ashish Kothari
-The Hindu

The growth-at-all-cost mantra has left a vast majority of people impoverished.

If the first year of the BJP government is any indication, its five-year stint may turn out to be the worst period for India’s environment and ecosystem-dependent people since the 1980s.

This is saying a lot, given that none of the previous governments has been particularly sensitive to issues of fresh air and water, productive soil, healthy forests and grasslands. The growth mantra has blinded every regime to the fact that no amount of money can buy these things that keep us all alive. But Modi’s government is taking this blind faith one step higher.

‘Make in India’ may seem like the shot that our economy desperately needs. Unfortunately, the focus is largely on investments for big industry and infrastructure. These need land, water, minerals, cheap labour and tax sops. So laws, policies and programmes safeguarding farmers, Adivasis, fisherfolk, craftspersons, workers — the vast majority of India’s population — are all up for amendment or clever bypassing. This will weaken the Land Acquisition law, the Forest Rights Act, and several environment and labour laws.

Simultaneously the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has seen severe budget cuts in both 2014 and 2015, and the Union Minister in charge has rapidly converted it into a rubber-stamping agency for industry (a process already begun by previous governments).

As a colleague, Kanchi Kohli, recently pointed out, MoEFCC’s recently released annual progress report is mostly about how it is no longer a hurdle for rapid industrialisation. The MoEFCC is going overboard to implement the BJP’s election manifesto that pledged to “take all steps … to make it easy to do business … create a conducive environment for investors.” It has become the Ministry for Ensuring Fast Corporate Clearances.

This attack on environmental policies is accompanied by something more dangerous: an attack on India’s democratic fabric. Examples: the proposal to remove landowners’ consent from the land acquisition law, and gram sabha consent for diversion of forest land from the forest rights law; and vicious targeting of civil society groups that expose the government’s ecologically suicidal plans, or its favouring of corporate over public interest.

The blocking of Greenpeace India’s bank accounts on frivolous charges of illegality — and calling such groups ‘anti-national’ — smacks of serious abuse of power by a government jittery about being challenged. Its hypocrisy is breathtaking; the current Home Minister in 2010 (then a BJP MP) attended demonstrations against Arunachal Pradesh’s Lower Subansiri dam because of its potential impact on downstream Assam. But when people’s movements make similar demands, his ministry calls them anti-national! When civil society activists question the Jaitapur nuclear power plant on grounds of safety, cost and environmental damage, they are called foreign agents; when Shiv Sena makes the same noises, nothing is said because the BJP needs its electoral alliance. MHA has rapidly become the Ministry for Hounding Activists.

In all this, it is forgotten that this growth-at-all-cost process has left several hundred million people poor (or worse, further impoverished them by snatching away their natural resources). It has failed to provide new jobs to any significant degree. Fortunately, there is a growing tide of mass resistance against ‘development’-induced dispossession and displacement (witness the mobilisation against the Land Acquisition amendments).

Simultaneously, there are thousands of initiatives in India that are in fact eradicating poverty, providing dignified livelihoods, making available secure water and food and energy sources, and achieving genuine well-being in ways that are ecologically sensitive (for a sample, www.vikalpsangam.org). Led by communities and NGOs and out-of-the-box thinking officials, they are not enriching the already rich, hence their neglect. The hope is that, as the resistance slows down the growth bulldozer, such alternative initiatives will catch people’s imagination.

Ashish Kothari is with Kalpavriksh, Pune.