False dichotomy

By C. Rammanohar Reddy

WHILE THE planned closure of industrial units in Delhi because they have been guilty of pollution brought thousands of the owners and their employees on to the streets, half-way across the world at a United Nations conference in The Hague, Netherlands, billed as ``the make or break summit to save the planet's climate'', the Governments of the industrialised countries were showing their unwillingness to make the effort necessary to halt global warming.

Yet, the tensions involved in setting off economic growth against environment protection in the two cases are more imaginary than real. In dealing with both pollution in Delhi and climate change the obstacles have been more an inability to look beyond the short-term, administrative incompetence and a social and Government desire to pass the responsibility for action to others.

If steps are taken to halt the build up of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs), which contribute to global warming, what will be at threat is not so much thousands of jobs in the West but a certain lifestyle that is unwilling to acknowledge the consequences of abusing the environment. It is now more than two decades since the first warnings were made about climate change and a decade since the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) was drawn up. As each year goes by there is more scientific evidence - if needed - that human action is contributing to climate change, that the world's temperature is rising and that the consequences will be disastrous 50 years to a century later for people in small island and coastal areas, for agriculture in different parts of the world and therefore for the world economy as a whole.

Such enormous changes that are likely have not provoked Governments into action. In the 1990s, almost all the industrialised countries were pumping more and not less of the GHGs into the atmosphere. These countries gave themselves some more time in 1997 when they drew up the Kyoto Protocol of the UNFCC committing themselves to a five per cent reduction of emissions over 1990 levels by 2008-2012. However, to date not one of them has ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Instead of ratifying the treaty and going on to lowering discharges, the developed countries at The Hague conference have been more occupied with squabbling about which instruments are best suited for a reduction of emissions. Can they plant forests in developing countries and set off the atmospheric carbon dioxide these ``sinks'' will absorb against their emission of GHGs? Can they finance projects in the transition economies and earn credits? Can they trade ``emission credits'' so that countries discharging excess GHGs can buy permits from those which have stayed within limits?

It is apparent that all these mechanisms seek to transfer the location of emission reduction strategies from the domestic economy to the outside world. More than 60 per cent of GHG emissions takes the form of carbon dioxide, more than 60 per cent of these discharges comes from transport and oil-fired power stations and a full three-quarters of such emissions takes place in the developed countries. Clearly, if any substantial reduction of GHG emissions is to take place it must come first and foremost in transport. Efficiency improvements have gone a long way towards reducing individual emissions but in the aggregate nothing of significance will happen without a radical lowering of the dependence on the automobile. But it is not just that so many sectors of the economy in the West directly and indirectly depend on the car. An individual's personality is seen to be defined by the kind of car she/he owns and the entire lifestyle in the West revolves around the car. No wonder then that there is so much resistance to taking any substantive action on rolling back global warming, an opposition which is otherwise couched in terms of high costs of reducing emissions, a loss of jobs and slower economic growth.

The Government of India is always quick to blame the West, and rightly so, for global environmental degradation. It claims that in comparison India leaves no stone unturned in protecting the environment. But few Indians will go along with this holier-than- thou position. Whenever it suits the Government, it is quick to conjure up the false dichotomy between employment security and environment protection. This is what the Central Government has now fallen back on to justify its planned regularisation of most of the illegal small industries situated in Delhi. The issue exploded on the streets of Delhi earlier this week not so much because of the Supreme Court's four-year-old order to have polluting factories and units functioning in residential areas closed but because the Government of Delhi, whose senior-most official was slapped with a contempt notice, after doing little for four years to resettle the industries, suddenly woke up and started shutting down enterprises all over the Capital.

The history of the Delhi pollution case is not of an insensitive Court aiming to reduce pollution by judicial fiat but of an administration that has consistently turned a blind eye to illegality and one that is guilty of procrastination only to find the issue blowing up in its face. As Mr. M.C. Mehta, the lawyer who has been fighting Delhi's pollution in the courts since 1985, says the problems have been crying out for attention for close to four decades.

When the first Master Plan for Delhi was prepared in 1962, there were an estimated 20,000 household/small-scale units functioning in the Capital. The development of an industrial area to facilitate the shifting of these units could have taken care of the problem at that time. It did not happen then, nor in 1990 when the Master Plan (1981-2000) demarcated afresh the residential areas in the city. Although it is now made out that neither permitted the functioning of industrial establishments in the Capital, the fact is that both permitted non-polluting and household industrial units involved in manufacture of products such as agarbathis and weaving/stitching of garments. However, the availability and inexpensive pricing of inputs and low taxes in the pampered Capital as well as the lax regulations encouraged for decades a proliferation of all kinds of small industries, including many polluting units, in violation of zoning regulations. So much so that there are now more than 100,000 units of whom at least 40,000 directly contribute to the pollution of the air, soil and water resources of the Capital. The irony is that even after the Supreme Court in 1992 ordered the relocation of the ``non-conforming'' units, the Government moved slowly. Until recently it was even extending the licences of the existing units. And while it is made out that not enough land is available for relocation, Government officials had informed the court that there was enough land in the National Capital Region.

No large-scale industrial relocation is easy and with most workers usually living in the vicinity of the industrial establishments, the burden of resettlement falls more on them. It does appear that rather than take the issue seriously the State Government was hoping that the Centre would circumvent the 1996 judicial order by having the Master Plan modified. It has succeeded, in a manner of speaking, to have the regulations changed so that most units will continue as before. The final argument made on the streets and in Parliament was of course that the jobs of hundreds of thousands of workers had to be protected. But it is a false dichotomy to compare the jobs of these workers with the health of the 12 million residents of the Capital. The Government of Delhi first by turning a blind eye to zoning and pollution violations and then with its procrastination allowed the situation to develop to the present pass.

Without an urban planning regime that identifies and enforces zoning regulations, enforces pollution control norms, makes provision for an excellent public transport system and facilitates housing for all sections of a city's population what has happened in Delhi will happen (and is happening) elsewhere. No Indian city can now claim to have such an urban planning system that can give its residents economic opportunities as well as a liveable environment.

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