What is the issue?
- Pollution is an inevitable challenge for developing countries that compromise their environmental regulations for achieving rapid economic growth.
- As pollution has increased massively in recent years, it has started to adversely impact both the economy and people’s health.
What is the larger pollution trend that is observed worldwide?
- Currently, pollution load in certain jurisdictions has increased considerably, sometimes beyond the carrying capacity of the environment.
- Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) – This is a hypothesis that maps environmental impact and per capita income.
- It suggests that environmental degradation increases with income growth initially, but reaches a maximum and then declines thereafter.
- Its logic is that in the initial phases, the demand for resources will force aggressive extraction and also generate more waste and emissions.
- But when a country has achieved a certain level of development, pollution reduces with greater technical advancements and better regulations.
- India – India’s developmental activities are over-exploiting the natural resources and indiscriminately discharging untreated waste into the open.
- India can be clearly said to lie on the upward part of the EKC curve and it needs to move to the 2nd stage to for achieving sustainable development.
- Considering the acrimonious impact that this trend of environmental apathy is already displaying, it is not prudent for India to simply wait for the 2nd stage.
- India should embrace tighter environmental norms and devote focus to the production and promotion of energy efficient technologies to curtail pollution.
What is the current situation?
- Though various measures have been adopted to manage pollution, significant progress has not been achieved in countries like India.
- Before 1980, U.K. and the U.S. played a vital role in textile production and export, but now, countries like India and China dominate the sector.
- Notably, in the last few decades, water-intensive and polluting industries like textiles and leather have shifted from developed to developing countries.
- Sugar and paper industries that withdraw huge quantities of water and discharge effluents without adequate treatment are also getting concentrated in the developing world.
- Hence, countries like India are now manufacturing products for the international markets at the cost of their domestic environment.
What is the economic cost of pollution?
- The economic loss on account of pollution includes the cost of treatment, loss of man-hours and negative effects on nature based businesses like agriculture.
- Pollution also tends to impacts the socially vulnerable and poor communities more due to their weak coping options.
- For example, if traditional drinking water sources get polluted, then one will have to switched to packaged refined water sources, which is a paid for service.
- While the better off could afford this transition, the poor would now have to pay a premium for what was freely available – which might strain them more.
- Consequently, they might have little option but to use the traditional water sources (even after contamination), which could lead to health complications.
What is the way ahead?
- Pollution is only a symptom of the larger malice of improper environmental regulations in place – which needs to be set right.
- Notably, Environmental Quality Objectives and Uniform Standards have been imbibed by most western countries in their political agendas.
- Such standards need to be emulated and strictly adhered to in the Indian context for the betterment of our environmental parameters.
- People will have to be made scientifically aware and politically conscious of their right to a clean and safe surrounding.
- Our policy makers need to give up their notion that environment needs to be bartered for economic growth.
- Rather, an understanding that environmental preservation and development are indispensible for each other needs to evolve.
Source: The Hindu
