Tag: India

Environmental Governance as inclusive Developmental Architecture: Time for action

There are a few issues with the public discourse on Environmental issues.  Environment matters are essentially political as they are backward integrated in to public values. Environmental issues are livelihood concerns for native communities off the economic grid. The retinue of ‘Quality of Life’ Indicators is contingent upon the environment. Free Market Capitalism and Environmentalism since the days of Rachel Carson,  are always at odds. As the pioneering Environmental economist Herman Daly once quipped that what will a saw mill be worth without a forest captures the paradox of the relationship between the scent of money and the fresh breeze of the forest.  Robert Costanza’s 1997 paper on Valuation of Ecological Services was a watershed moment, in academic circles but incorporating these lessons in mainstream policy frameworks is all together a different cuppa. Valuing and taxing Greenhouse gases through CDM and other market oriented vehicles have resulted in a mixed bag. These instruments have been appropriated by neo-liberal forces to extract money out of multi-lateral institutions rather than catalyze foundational transformations which take longer timelines. My environmental policy professor at grad policy school at the National University of Singapore was right when he meant that it is only money that prompts people towards normative ends and not good intentions alone.

The real issues regarding the metastructure of Environmental Governance get drowned in the cacophony of the rhetoric between Growth Fundamentalists and Ecological Activists. The price here at stake is usually quite basic; clean air and water. Investment Bankers drinking beer on a Friday evening at a South Bombay Pub will like to breathe cleaner air, as a person cannot buy clean air in a can. The Bottom-line matters but the biosphere does count slightly too.

This seems very simple but political will backed by resources along with active community engagement is the key. I can visualize another pitfall. The policy community is good at theorizing problems, but activating those ideas in to concrete action is the chink in the Developmental Architecture.   There is a slip between the cup and the lip. Civil Society, Industry and Government all have their own agenda and there is no synergy in thought processes for concrete action.

The National Advisory Council of celebrity academics and activists are bent towards entitlement welfare legislations. Environmental and Social Justice go hand in hand, and the writer of this post would suggest the esteemed body to focus on incorporating Environmental issues while designing welfare mandates. The Environment Ministry has been tainted with the tag of being the fore-bearer of a new Green Tape License Raj regime. While the perception exists, statistically it’s in correct.

Our focus ultimately needs to be re-calibrated to solve real issues, and embedding environmental drivers in to policy design is a good way ahead.

Is Cosmopolitan, a ‘new’ identity for India?

The Cosmopolitan I am referring to in my post title is not of the international fashion magazine, but something far deeper and emotional. We are an emotional polity so anything remotely emotional borders on the political. A few months back a municipal school teacher on behalf of the National Sample Survey Organization knocked on my door for some data collection for the local body. Being a person trained in social research methods, I was enthusiastic to pitch in and participate as I then just relocated back to Mumbai. The survey administrator started off the brief survey by starting off in the local state language Marathi. Although I am fluent in Marathi, I opted to reply in Hindi for fear of making embarrassing grammatical errors in front of a native speaker.

The questions were fairly routine in nature which ranged from age to family income to education. The aspect which got me very uncomfortable and irritated was the questions regarding caste and religion. Those questions got me thinking about the fractured nature of India’s politics where the individual does not matter. He is nomenclaturized into narrow and disturbing sub divisions of caste, religion, and ethnicity. In the end, I am just a statistic for the State.  

Prof. Amartya Sen’s theory of ‘Plural Identities’ implies that one can be  culturally Bengali,  half Bihari by birth and a Christian by Faith along with being  Indian by political representation  all at the same time sans any contradictions. I am a product of a mixed marriage- My Dad is an ethnic Bihari born and bred in West Bengal and my Mum is an ethnic Bengali based in Mumbai. My Father speaks fluent Bengali and my Mum speaks fluent Marathi.  I was bred in the polarized Mumbai of the 90′s.  With stints of my childhood in Muscat, Oman, where my Father is an expat educator- grew up listening to Khaled and Cheb Mami along with Euphoria and Lucky Ali songs.

With traditional Rabindra Sangeet playing all day at home (With me listening to Bhoomi and Nachiketa-contemporary Bengali music), my parents tried their best to make me Bengali’ Bangali! Still I am labeled a Bihari many times around!

The Nation State has been poor to catch up with the blurring boundaries regarding cultural identities. People inter-marry between castes & languages and more commonly between faiths and hence their next generations do not have straight laced identities. Globalization and migration leads to love & relationships being fermented in an ‘out-of-the-box’ fashion. Purity of ‘Gotra’ is something Khap Panchayats will find hard to enforce as times move along. The Coercive influence of blatant brute force has its limits.  Arjun Appadurai in the book ‘Fear of Small Numbers’ elucidates the notion that minorities are manufactured as a totem for the majority community to feel good. Ethnocides are not organic, they are engineered.  A Hutu vs Tutsi Battle in Rwanda or a conflict in the Balkans are a classic example. People are not straight laced to be reduced to mere terms for analysts to play with.

A small anecdote from the Tiny Red Dot. The Singaporean Government’s efforts at maintaining effective multi-racial public policy efforts (such as an efficient HDB Allocation Policy) is made harder with greater number of mixed race couples earmarking their children as mixed race although the child has an option to re-categorize him/herself as Chinese, Indian, Malay or Eurasian later on in life. Arranged Marriages in the past have been a powerful social instrument of enforcing a pure blood line in the past. This social Institution is slowly withering away as well. Although there are websites such as community matrimony dot com to maintain the status quo. Films such as Vivaah and the Barjatya genre of films reinforce stereotypes too of caste in the grab of traditional values.

I have felt as much a Bengali in Kolkata as I have felt as a Mumbaikar in Mumbai and in the same breath felt as much at home in Muscat and Singapore where I have lived half my life.  But never felt at home or at ease with this politico-social construct of an ‘Identity’. It is a fluid mosaic with is dependent on the ‘Man in the Head’ in the words of Pico Iyer and not so much on biology or geography. In this age of globalization, we have fluid identities- every place that we live in, contributes a spec in to our soul and we transmit a vector of our emotions in to the place as well.

I would define myself as cosmopolitan rather.

Is the Green Tape killing Development: a pragmatic environmentalist’s take?

I prefer to read the pink papers as I feel they address more relevant issues of the day rather than the usual general papers which are prone to cover more Bollywood and Cricket than actual news for the people.  But the pink papers are so driven by financial data that they sometimes forget that the economy is not run in silos, but is dependent upon society and natural resources to run the economic growth engine. People and Ecology hold more value than sheer balance-sheet numbers. Capitalism runs on the ideological framework of ‘QSQT’ or Quarter se Quarter Tak. The Balance Sheet counts more than the Biosphere.

Well, India has massive developmental challenges too. We are short on power generation, and the coal which is needed to fuel the furnaces to rev up the turbines of growth is often not available. In Ruchir Sharma’s book ‘Break Out Nations’ an anecdote is shared that it is easier for Indian Mining Companies to procure coal in Indonesia than in India.  It is not available due to so called delay in regulatory clearances. This is the Green Tape which is blamed for the delay.  According to Public Intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta this is a perception as statistics show on the contrary, that India has a pretty lenient regulatory regime.

Cases from Orissa and Goa show that regulatory clearances are politically driven by motivation. The centre uses tribal rights as a whip to crack on the opposition lead Orissa government’s developmental agenda. Judicial Activism has lead to mining being banned in Bellary and Goa, although the BJP Government banned it earlier to the Supreme Court order. Environment is inherently political in nature as different ideologies with separate normative ends, conceptualize the utility of ecosystem services in a different context.

Recently, due to the negative criticism of the Green Ministry, the perception has been created that environmental clearances have been speeded up with Hydel Power Projects in Himachal and the North East given the ‘green’ signal. A recent incident of an environmental ministry official taking a bribe, does not help the reputation of the already over stretched body. The delays in clearances are due to the under-staffed employee roster of the Green Ministry, and not due to some malicious intent to derail the progress of the nation. The Single Window Clearance National Investment Board was a good idea in retrospect as the global investment climate is competitive. POSCO and Vedanta sites in Orissa illustrate this matter really well. In a rapidly urbanizing country with increasing living standards, such debates will be perennial in nature but we have to address them with rapid pace taking in to consideration the needs of the native community and the natural environment. This is a million rupee question, but we cannot afford to die from smog as the Middle Kingdom’s Forbidden City is now suffering.

Rubanised India: Changing Development Narratives

A lot of states in India are predominantly urban. Delhi NCR, Haryana, Goa, Punjab along with Coastal  Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat have urban landscapes. A large number of folks have moved on from agriculture to the service economy, given up their lands in lieu for SEZ’s and made an attempt to join the community of wage earners in the network economy. Four Lane Highways are built, new factories are set up- the marginal farmer now works as a gate keeper in on the same piece of land his farm land used to be on (Ala the movie Shanghai). This has made a few farmers rich who drive Pajeros in Gurgaon but the tenant farmers who are now landless move to cities to join the unorganized economy.

Urbanization and the proliferation of towns and new expanded cities are the locus of the neo middle class with global aspirations. He wants to send his kid to a public school and not a Kendriya Vidyalaya and works in a IT related job. The new workforce is tiny and has transitioned past caste or religion based affirmative action to find them work. This although has not changed basics: attitudes towards women, religion still plays a major role in our social fabric and the ills of caste still persist.

As cities expand in to the hinterland, the villages in the periphery of these cities demonstrate symbols of modernity such as a motor bike and a dth box on terraces. Sadly these same places lack clean drinking water and primary health centres that are poorly staffed.

Rubanization is a two way lane; the physical infrastructure will have to complimented by social software of cultural up gradation, medical facilities and maintaining natural social capital. Urban communities have a propensity to rediscover identities in their faith and exert a community centric politics. Delhi Sikh Riots and Gujarat 2002 are illustrations to make that point robust.

The politics of urban India is changing too. Manifestos proclaim the free distribution of laptops and slogans of India Shining and Bengal Leads flood the airwaves. This though has extremely limited political payoff. The mantra of Bijli Sadak Paani is commonplace in political discourse. Newer actors have entered the scene such as the Aam Admi Party and Team Anna, espousing Middle Class India’s grievances. The Shiva Sena and MNS base their survival on the Urban Vote, along with the BJP and the Congess in Delhi.

Narendra Modi’s victory for the third term has vital implications for the politics of urban development in our country. Modi won 80% of the urban seats in Gujarat to drive home his win. Dixit in Delhi is the three term CM of the Congress with a urban banner.

The down side of rubanization is the inability of our economy to create meaningful employment away from the land. The Demographic Dividend can tick way to a Demographic timebomb if proper environment and opportunities are not rendered to the youth. In this Web 2.0 globalised age of social media on our cell phones, expectations are rising and the demand is not being met by the education sector nor by the industry. Frustrations can leads to a politics of politics and parochialism if not checked in time. Structural reforms are needed to create jobs.Development is often all about employment. Youth are already angry with the inflation and the widening chasm between the have and the have nots. Not everyone can join the global economic mainstream. It needs a distinctive skill set. The MBA degree is now a mere pre requisite for a job of any sort.

This mega trend will accelerate in the coming decade and has a potential impact on politics and demographics beyond current estimates. Interesting times are certainly coming up.