What is the issue?
- India ranks 177 among 180 countries in the Environmental Performance Index 2018.
- A drop in the index from previous year calls for a relook at the country's environmental policy.
What is the Environmental Performance Index?
- EPI is a biennial report by Yale and Columbia Universities along with the World Economic Forum.
- The report ranks 180 countries on 24 performance indicators.
- It is spread across 10 categories covering environmental health and ecosystem vitality.
- Switzerland leads the world in sustainability, followed by France, Denmark, Malta and Sweden in the recent EPI.
What is India's status?
- India is among the bottom 5 countries on the index, at 177th place.
- This is a drop of 36 points from 141 in 2016.
- Emerging peer economies, Brazil and China, ranks 69 and 120, respectively.
- In the environmental health category, India is at the bottom of the list.
- And in terms of air quality it is placed third last.
- The overall drop is attributed to poor performance in the environment health policy and high pollution related deaths.
- Pollution from solid fuels, coal and crop residue burning, and emissions from motor vehicles are the major causes.
- Population growth, industrial production and automotive transportation continue to increasingly degrade the air quality.
Why is environmental degradation a serious concern?
- Environmental degradation is beyond being seen as just a cost of development.
- Health - The report highlights air quality as the leading environmental threat to public health.
- In India, deaths attributed to ultra-fine PM2.5 pollutants have largely risen over the past decade.
- Air pollution is causing an estimated 1.4 million premature deaths in India.
- Economy - The above rate translates to a welfare loss equivalent to around 8% of India’s GDP in 2013.
- In addition, the cost of lost labour productivity was nearly 0.8% of GDP.
- Even these estimates do not reflect a true picture of the impact.
- This is because the lack of scientific understanding of several other key ecological impacts limits the impact assessment.
- Sadly, the poor are affected disproportionately because of environmental degradation.
What are the measures in this regard?
- The government has set some ambitious targets for environmental protection in the recent years.
- It includes:
- strict environmental standards for coal-fired power plants
- target to implement Bharat Stage VI emission norms from April 1, 2020
- efforts to produce and sell electric vehicles in the country by 2030
- revision of National Solar Mission, accelerating transition to renewable sources of power
- accordingly, revising the target for setting up solar capacity from 20 GW to 100 GW by 2021-22
- assurance to clean up highly polluted Ganga by 2018
What are the shortfalls?
- Unfortunately, there appears to be a big gap between policy goals and action.
- India seems to be moving in the right direction on solar targets.
- However, balancing it with other goals is seriously lacking.
- Evidently, the promise of implementing strict power plant emission norms by December 2017 has been relaxed.
- Annual electronic waste collection target for electronics manufacturers was set at 30% of the products sold in the market.
- However, this has now been relaxed to 10%.
- The automobile industry has stated that full conversion to electric vehicles was realistically possible only by 2047.
- This is in contrast to the government's targets.
- CAG, in a recent report, highlighted the lag in developing an action plan and poor fund utilisation in the clean-up of the Ganga.
What should be done?
- The environmental costs of development should be duly recognised in addressing environmental problems.
- Transition to renewables, especially solar energy, should be accelerated by offering subsidies.
- On the other hand, the more polluting fuels should be priced higher.
- Strict environmental standards for coal plants should be put in place.
- Similarly, the transition to electric vehicle use should be aided by higher pricing of petrol and diesel.
- Existing environmental laws and regulations should be implemented properly with more political will.
- The country's poor environmental performance calls for taking forward the environmental targets more seriously.
Source: The Hindu
