India empowered to me means a country that has succeeded in reviving and restoring its badly depleted ecological and natural wealth. India’s record of managing its natural resources leaves a dismal trail of serious degradation and damage, which affects the livelihoods and economic well-being of all its people. All our rivers have been polluted to a level that does not even permit washing of clothes.
It was not too long ago that one could drink water flowing in a river without any threat of serious disease or toxic effects. Today, we have a large industry that produces bottled water, the value of which counts as part of our GDP. Indeed, it is sad that we carry out a number of economic activities, all of which are accounted for in the measurement of our economic output, while imposing a huge social cost on our natural resources.
Restoring India’s natural wealth is not the wild-eyed dream of environmental idealists. It is an economic imperative. Nature provides us with a flow of services on which all economic activities depend critically. TERI carried out a major project, which was completed in 1997 on the eve of celebrations for 50 years of independence, in which a rigorous estimation of the damage and degradation of India’s natural resources in the first 50 years of independence was attempted.
In economic terms, this amounted to over 10% loss of the country’s GDP, including high levels of sickness from air and water pollution. Air pollution, for instance, results in high levels of sickness, which lead to absenteeism and loss of productivity, which can be estimated. To these can be added the cost of medical treatment and health care resulting from the effects of air pollution.
Unfortunately, in this country there are very few organizations, which carry out detailed natural resource accounting. If this was to become a regular feature of our assessment of economic activity, we would find that in actual fact, because of the negative impacts of the production and consumption of some goods and services, we are actually limiting economic progress and welfare. A major question that arises in this context is related to the equity effects of production and consumption in an economic system.
The depletion and degradation of natural resources imposes the worst impacts on the poorest sections of society. One estimate indicates that about 1/3rd of the goods and services used by poor people come directly from services provided by natural resources. These would include food, fodder, fuel, drinking water and material for construction of dwellings and shelters, as is the case typically within tribal societies. Economic policy should target as much the reduction of our natural debt as it does the national debt.
