In his 1994 book, The Age of Extremes, the celebrated Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, wrote: “It is no accident that the main support for ecological policies comes from the rich countries and from the comfortable rich and middle classes (except for businessmen, who hope to make money by polluting activity). The poor, multiplying and under-employed, wanted more.”
More of what? Hobsbawm’s construction made it clear that he thought the poor wanted more material goods, more economic growth, in the realisation of which ecological politics were apparently a barrier and a hurdle.
When I first came across these words, I had spent the past two decades studying what I was now being told was a conceptual and practical impossibility – namely, an environmentalism of and by the poor. I had written my doctoral dissertation on the peasant protest movement in the Himalaya, known as Chipko, which blended a concern for social justice with an interest in the restoration of ravaged forest landscapes. The Chipko movement began in 1973; it catalysed a wave of similar movements across India in defence of community rights in forests, water, and pasture.
My work on Chipko brought me in touch with the ecologist, Madhav Gadgil, who combined a sharp analytical mind with deep field experience in peninsular India. Gadgil’s scientific research confirmed the intuitions of grassroots activists that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, countries like India had even more reason to be concerned with environmental sustainability. With its higher population density, its history of colonial subjugation, and its more fragile ecologies, India could not merely mimic the energy-intensive, capital-intensive, resource-intensive model of industrialisation pioneered by Europe and North America.
Ever since Chipko, India has witnessed a vigorous debate on whether the country needed to forge an alternative, more environmentally responsible, pattern of economic development. Scientists, social scientists, journalists and activists have all participated. Notably, the debate is conducted not at the level of high theory but is broken down into sector-specific questions.
Would community control of forests lead to more environmentally benign and socially just outcomes than the existing model of state ownership over woodland? Should peasants and tribals displaced by large infrastructure projects such as highways and dams merely be given monetary compensation, or should alternative forms of livelihood and employment be provided to them? Would ongoing processes of urbanisation lead to an excessive resource exploitation of the countryside by the city? Has wildlife conservation focused too narrowly on large, charismatic species such as the tiger and elephant at the expense of wetlands, shrub forests, and other endangered habitats?
While these, and similar questions, are actively discussed in scientific journals, popular websites, and activist fora, the fallacy that countries like India are “too poor to be green” remains widespread among influential and powerful circles within India. When I was young, Marxist historians claimed that environmentalism was a bourgeois deviation from the class struggle. Now that I am old, I find that it is free-market economists who most actively disparage environmentalism as allegedly irrelevant to the country’s present and future.
If at all environmental matters figure in the Indian public square, it has to do with climate change. Here too, the matter is swiftly set aside through claiming that richer nations have no business preaching to us about abandoning our reliance on fossil fuels and shifting wholesale to clean energy. It is of course true the nations of Europe and North America have been noticeably hypocritical in this regard. As the first industrialisers, they have contributed disproportionally to global warming. Having built their wealth on fossil fuel extraction and use, they now ask the poorer countries of the Global South to shut down oil fields and coal plants, while declining to provide adequate financial and technological support to allow them to move to cleaner sources of energy.
However, climate change is merely one, and perhaps not even the most important, of the environmental challenges that confront India today. The levels of air pollution in Delhi and other North Indian cities are among the highest in the world. Most Indian rivers are biologically dead, their water undrinkable by humans and domestic animals alike. Groundwater aquifers are depleting at an alarming rate across India, including in states like Punjab, long considered the country’s “bread basket”. The chemical contamination of farmland is well beyond permissible levels. Natural forests everywhere have witnessed the large-scale invasion of exotic weeds, such as lantana, leading to a rapid shrinkage of biodiversity.
There are four crucial things to understand about these varied forms of environmental abuse in India today. First, they have nothing to do with climate change; rather they are the product of badly designed economic policies, made worse by state corruption and corporate greed. Second, though they have occurred independently, climate change makes these problems even more deadly in their effects. Starkly illustrative here are the increasing intensity of landslides in large mountain chains such as the Western Ghats and the Himalaya, each an invaluable reservoir of water as well as of biological diversity. These landslides are caused by unregulated mining, the reckless extension of tourist resorts, and badly designed roads. However, their impacts are made far more serious by unprecedented weather events such as excessively heavy and altogether unseasonal rainfall.
Thirdly, the brunt of this pollution and degradation is borne disproportionately by the poor. The elite of Delhi have high-tech air purifiers at home; it is the slum-dwellers who breathe the city’s noxious air directly. Open-cast mining degrades adjacent lands cultivated by small farmers, while benefiting urban consumers and shareholders far away. The wealthy have access to water purifiers attached to their household taps; it is the working classes which have to depend on the polluted river, spring, or well. The degradation of forests by weeds means that pastoralists are deprived of fodder and artisans of useful material that the previously lush undergrowth offered them.
Finally, there is now a vast reservoir of scientific and social scientific expertise available within India itself, that can help mitigate the human costs of such environmentally insensitive development. The country’s universities and research institutes have ecologists, social scientists, agronomists, hydrologists, urban planners, transport and energy experts and so on who combine professional competence of an international standard with deep field experience of social and environmental conditions within India itself.
Sadly, indeed tragically, these domain experts are rarely, if ever, consulted by politicians in power, and if they are, their proposals are never implemented. The disregard for environmental sustainability of Indian politicians is ecumenical; it operates across parties. It is the product of ignorance as well as malevolence. On the one hand, these politicians are, to invoke John Maynard Keynes, slaves of the ideas of out-of-date economists, who themselves have no understanding of ecology at all.
On the other hand, Indian politicians are beholden to the mining magnates, infrastructure developers, and factory owners who fund their election campaigns. It must also be acknowledged that the seductions of unending economic growth and ever-increasing consumerism have captured the imagination of the Indian middle-class. From their perspective, environmentalists are not merely meddlesome busy-bodies, but possibly also agents of Western powers, paid to keep India underdeveloped.
The academic expertise on offer in India and its wilful disregard by politicians and bureaucrats are showcased in a recent issue of the Economic and Political Weekly (dated January 11, 2025), which contains a set of excellent papers by leading scholars on a variety of vital subjects – wildlife and forest management, energy and water policy, pollution abatement, climate change, among others – with particular reference to Indian conditions.
In their introduction, the editors of this special issue of EPW on “Environment and Development”, Sharachchandra Lele and Geetanjoy Sahu, write: “Notwithstanding the booming renewable energy sector and the rising tiger populations, the country’s ecological integrity and the livelihoods of the most marginalized millions are being compromised. The exclusive focus on luxury consumption of the privileged few, leads to a dilution of regulatory capacities, openly partisan easing of laws, bypassing of rights, and bolstering of exclusionary conservation. In the meantime, climate change threatens to aggravate our environmental challenges and will further strain institutional capacities and challenge us to deploy new technologies in a socially sensitive manner.”
In the short-term, India’s environmental crises will only get worse, with greater negative consequences for the health and livelihood of the country’s less privileged classes. It may however be that the younger generation, unburdened by the prejudices and preconceptions of the past, could in time perhaps gather their energies to take their country down the path so bravely laid down by the Chipko pioneers half a century ago – a path that seeks to combine sustainability with social justice.
This article first appeared in The Telegraph.
Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.
