You must be aware that despite all this legislative activity the state of the environment in India continues to be gloomy. The rivers and the lakes continue to be choked with sewage and industrial waste. The air quality in some major cities has gained the dubious distinction of being worse than that of the American cities like Chicago and New York.
Forests continue to disappear, and the consequent loss of soil has led to the scourge of floods with sickening regularly. What can the country do to reverse the process and restore a balanced state of the environment?
Although the legislative measures taken and the administrative set-up is sufficiently indicative of the Government’s concern, the implementation does not reflect a sound appreciation of the issue involved in eco-management and development.
Environment is a resource-perhaps the most precious of all the Earth’s resources. It should be treated as such. The measures adopted by the Government until now do not reveal an equal emphasis on the management and development aspects of this vital resource. Often these measures reflect a fire-brigade approach rushing to the spot of fire, after it breaks out. The strategy should lay equal emphasis on attacking the cause of fires. An ounce of prevention in the filed of environment is literally worth a gallon of cure.
Take for example the river pollution in India. It is well known that the major source of pollution of rivers is domestic sewage, which municipalities nonchalantly dump in the nearest rivers. Ninety percent of the pollution of Ganga stems from the 100-odd littoral municipal waste dumpings.
The colossal cleaning-up operation, Ganga Action Plan, will be an exercise in futility if it is not accompanied by a massive effort to prevent the municipalities from dumping their wastes in the river. Every one knows that the technology for treating municipal waste exists. But it costs money and most of the municipalities cannot afford it.
If the Environment (Protection) Act is taken seriously, all the municipalities abutting the Ganga will have to be prosecuted. The Act, rightly, makes no distinction between private and public polluters. But that would be taking a very restrictive view of the law.
The more modern view is that the law must guide and help people and establish a trend of acceptance. Environmental law has little chance of acquiring effectiveness unless accompanied by a whole set promotional measures, ranging from direct financial subsidies to cost sharing, for example, in installing treatment plants.
Litigation is an expensive affair. Environment litigation is more expensive than other types of disputes, since it involves expert testimony, technical evidence and so on. State Boards will-have to be able to afford the expertise and the administrative backing. Most of the State Boards suffer from inadequate expertise and funds to pursue their objectives. There is, therefore, a tendency to seek to exercise gentle pressure on the polluting industry and pursue settlements outside the courts.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with out-to-court settlement of environmental disputes. In fact, in some developed countries, like the United States, a preference is shown toward such a procedure. But in India, officially initiated and sanctioned out of court settlements may aggravate the perennial problem of corruption. Sharing the costs of anti-pollution measures taken by the industry seems to be a better strategy than state-sponsored expensive and length prosecutions.
Admittedly, the state of environment of the country is not rosy; the imperatives of development have sometimes come into sharp conflict with those of the environment; the administrative machinery set up to solve the problems of environment has often failed in its task; the laws enacted to meet the challenger have been generally inept. But these are the failings of a nation wresting with hundreds of problems on thousands of fronts. The water of survival, which is what the sorry state of the nation’s environment poses to the country, inquires first and foremost the will to survive. The Government and, more importantly, the people have demonstrated it in abundance. The rest is a matter of skill and experience, which we seem to be acquiring slowly but steadily.
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