India’s Environment Minister has, in a few busy weeks, vowed to knock down an illegally built, 31-storey Mumbai apartment tower that houses government bigwigs, tycoons and socialites, nixed a $1.7-billion (U.S.) bauxite mine and frozen a $31-billion planned city because its developers flouted regulations..
More related to this storyDivorce on the rise in India, but archaic laws leave women cast asideIndia makes a clean start with first laundromat Jaipur puts on the world’s best book partyJairam Ramesh, Minister of State for Environment and Forests, has India’s business community on edge and the citizens agog. His every pronouncement generates as many headlines as the doings of Bollywood performers and cricket stars.
The minister – who wears his grey hair long and favours ethnic-chic homespun kurta-pajama outfits – has, in the acid assessment of a senior mandarin who accompanied him to climate-change negotiations, “an unbelievable talent for the headlines.”
But the attention Mr. Ramesh is drawing reflects more than just sound-bite skills: With his sharply worded decisions involving the country’s biggest business names, the minister has opened up a vital debate about the ecological cost of the country’s roaring economic growth. “It’s just the right time for the ministry to have woken up,” said Vivek Sharma, program support director for Greenpeace India in Bangalore, “or all of this would have happened but there would be no debate.”
It’s a conflict that is coming to the fore in many emerging economies – the need to consider more than just growth rates in chasing prosperity. It is sharpest in China, where an environmental crisis generated by the creation of the world’s fastest growing economy is intensifying – and in India, where, Mr. Ramesh warns, ecological poverty could become the nation’s most serious problem. The new giants also face intense pressure from developed countries, including Canada, who insist they must do more to limit the ecological impact, particularly greenhouse-gas emissions, resulting from their growth.
The minister says he is an “equal-opportunity offence-giver,” critiqued by environmentalists and business interests alike. But this is not strictly true: While industry seems startled at the sudden stringency with which the law is being applied, environmentalists are cheered.
“He’s the first environment minister in more than a decade that anyone can even name,” Mr. Sharma said.
Mr. Ramesh takes pains to emphasize that his role is simply to make sure that the law is followed. “It’s only in India that implementing the laws of the land gets front-page coverage every day,” he said in a recent conversation.
India has tough laws on the books for conservation of ecological areas, particularly forests (which by law is meant to cover a full third of the country) and pollution control, but there is little enforcement. Many of the country’s larger companies use political connections or financial inducements to get past whatever regulation nominally stands in the way, and on-the-ground enforcement is so frail that they can act with impunity. Mr. Ramesh, for example, was fuming of late about an aluminum smelter that was approved to process one million tons a year, but was doing six times that amount.
Beginning last autumn, Mr. Ramesh froze or cancelled a series of projects that, in the assessment of his department, violated regulations – hence the planned demolition of Adarsh, the Mumbai apartment tower, built too close to a sensitive coastline, and the clampdown on the bauxite mine of Vedanta Resources PLC, which was planned for hilltop forests home to aboriginal people.
Those decisions have the business community – and its backers in Mr. Ramesh’s own government – howling.
Rita Roy Choudhary, director of environment and climate change for the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said that while most businesses take a positive view of a more pro-active Environment Ministry, she described a mood of “anxiety” from investors, both internal and foreign.
0 comments:
Post a Comment