As the government prepares new policies for a better, more prosperous India, it would do well to take a look at a small report brought out by The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) on the costs of environmental inaction.
It puts numbers to the cost that the nation bears on account of air pollution, unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation, and to the scale of the problem of solid waste management as India urbanises. The cost of outdoor air pollution is estimated to be Rs 1,00,000 crore.
The World Bank estimates the cost of inadequate sanitation, working its way through contaminated drinking water, parasites that induce malnutrition, higher morbidity and mortality, lost days of work, lost education and productivity and forgone tourism earnings to be 6.4 per cent of GDP (evidently, the cost of girls getting abducted, raped and hanged has escaped the World Bank's calculations on inadequate sanitation). That is a whopping Rs 6,70,000 crore.
Given these kinds of costs, investing in, and tailoring policy for, reducing and mitigating water and air pollution would be an obvious choice. In rural areas, treatment of sewage is hardly ever seen as a problem.
It must be seen as a public health engineering challenge. The ongoing Nirmal Gram Yojana to rid the country of open defecation must be enhanced. As the Teri report serves to highlight, a whole lot of pollution control policy has to do with better urban planning and design.
Mixed land use can minimise commutes, extensive deployment of efficient public transport can save a whole lot of energy, as can green building norms. Stepping up the share of renewables in overall energy generation and clean coal technology will address air pollution. Traditional stoves can be redesigned to reduce indoor air pollution. The point is to summon political will to do the eminently doable.
