Governments change, a few policies don't

Whichever coalition is to share power for the next five years, mindless plunder of natural resources will continue unabated

NEW INDIAN EXPRESS, 15 May, 2009

PSEPHOLOGISTS and punters may burn their fingers trying to predict the results of this Lok Sabha election and the nature of the subsequent political realignments, but I’m not giving away any prizes for guessing the next government’s stand on certain issues. Whichever formation comes to power, the defence budget will go up. No government can significantly alter India’s foreign policy. No finance minister dare slash self-defeating subsidies. Corruption will stay institutionalised. And mindless plunder of our natural resources will continue.

I understand that the demands of development will always make a few sacrifices necessary. In an informed, responsible society, such decisions are made in the absence of an alternative. In India, successive governments have cleared projects that allow destruction of forest, riverine or marine ecosystems in amazing hurry and without any economic or scientific justification.

What helps this tradition of official plunder is a general atmosphere of mistrust that dismisses even the most logical voices as anti-development ranting. Every time activists and experts object to development projects, we reduce the case to a petty growth-versus-green debate. Surely, neither a blanket approval nor ban on such projects makes sense. But why cannot the authorities decide every case on its merit, relying on an objective cost-benefit analysis?

Take a highway project cutting through a sanctuary. To calculate the cost involved, the authorities need to formulate a standard mechanism for computing, in monetary terms, the value of the ecological loss in question. The benefit is easier to calculate: how much will be saved on construction expense by avoiding a longer alignment outside the forest and how much time and fuel will be saved by vehicles avoiding such a detour. Unless government agencies derive such concrete cost-benefit comparatives project by project, their decisions will continue to be arbitrary and leave room for manipulation.

Why only highways, most government approvals for destroying forests through mining or construction fail to justify the need for such drastic measures. Consider the infamous example of Kudremukh Iron Ore Company Limited which was ripping apart one of India’s best forests for opencast mining even though the quality of iron sludge there was so inferior that the same could be obtained from hundreds of other places in the country.

Take our dams. Still considered a great symbol of development, most dams are not only harmful, they are unnecessary. For example, Gujarat boasts nearly 400 water bodies, other than the rivers, and a total water surface of over 2,000 sq km. Still the state’s overdrive for irrigation has led to construction of more than 200 dams with a total inundation area of about 1,400 sq km. Apart from submerging hundreds of hectares of forest land under reservoirs, so many dams and their massive irrigation network are destroying river ecologies and fast turning large areas saline.

Unfortunately, our governments do not desist from quick-fix measures even when they bring disastrous consequences. Consider the tragedy of the Kosi, notorious for devastating floods in north Bihar. Embankments stopped the river’s natural dispersion of sediments on the floodplains, making the riverbed rise by 12-15 feet with silt. Modern hydrology says that a meandering river with heavy silt load, like Kosi that has drifted 160 km in the past 250 years, cannot be stifled to equilibrium. Such rivers need to be tackled with spatial flood protection measures, allowing room for moderate flooding. But even after thousands of lives have been lost, the government is again trying to build embankments on Kosi and, in the process, setting the stage for another flooding disaster.

Let alone forests and rivers, something as basic as water supply can lead governments to seek outlandish solutions where simple correction of the system will do. Delhi Jal Board (DJB) has revived the 15-year-old Renuka dam project in the name of meeting the Capital’s water shortage.

Ironically, Delhi wastes more than 40 per cent of its supplied water due to distribution losses, largely due to old, corroded pipelines. While the Renuka project earmarks 275 million gallon water per day for Delhi, DJB can save up to 268 million gallon per day by fixing the distribution network. This should not be a tough task if DJB diverts the Rs 3,000 crore allocated for construction of the Renuka dam to modernise its distribution and regulatory network.

Instead, the authorities have decided to inundate 2,000 hectares of forest and agricultural land in an eco-sensitive lower Himalayan landscape. The plan includes denotification and submergence of the Renuka Wildlife Sanctuary and displacement of at least 700 families. Moreover, no assessment has been done of the impact of the proposed dam on the nearby Renuka Lake, a wetland that was declared a Ramsar site (under the International Ramsar Convention) in 2005. But of course, it is easier to dam a river than fix leaking pipelines or rein in rich Delhiites who still love to use garden hoses to wash their cars.

As long as this mindset determines policy making, I have little hope that the next government, whatever the unique arithmetic of the Lok Sabha, will do anything different to secure the country’s precarious ecological future. True, none of our politicians ever sought mandate on the environmental plank. But can we not expect a little common sense from our governments though it never figures on any list of poll promises?

(The writer is an independent journalist and filmmaker. E-mail: mazoomdaar@gmail.com)