The environment of elections

Water for urban areas is brought in pipelines from further and further away as water distress grows, compounded by pollution. This “appropriation” by cities and industries further hits rural India, where after 55 years of Independence clean water remains a distant dream and dirty water is the biggest child killer.

The way of the present is to build pipe dreams. The government’s accelerated rural water supply programme has spent Rs 10,000 crore in the past five years, with Rs 1,700 crore allocated for the current year. But only about 30 per cent of the villages targeted for this fiscal have been covered. The bigger problem is the village “covered” under the programme finds soon enough that its water source has dried up, its pipeline has broken, its handpump is not working or coughs out dirty water. The end result is the number of “problem villages” — without a source of water in their vicinity — do not go down but up. The mathematics in this case is: 200,000 problem villages, minus 200,000 problem villages, is still 200,000 problem villages.

This terrible want has rendered the situation critical in another area: electricity. We do not often realise that electricity shortage is linked to water shortage. Electricity is not only needed for industry and households, it is most urgently needed for agriculture. Over 80 per cent of agricultural productivity in India is irrigated by groundwater. With water tables falling precipitously across the country, farmers need electricity to run the pumps to irrigate their land. More importantly, they need assured electricity at the right time — when crops need water.

Unemployment is not directly linked to environmental degradation. But the answers to employment lie in the better management of natural resources — land, forests, water. The formal industrial sector has never been the provider of employment in the country and in the years to come its contribution, with scale and mechanisation, will decline even further.

The service economies — outsourcing included — will grow but cannot really absorb job-seekers in a country the size of India. The key to employment lies in building productive and sustainable livelihoods based on natural resources. The potential is enormous — from planting trees for pulp to rearing animals for dairy farming to rearing worms for silk and growing medicinal plants for pharmaceutical industries. These are but a few, among many, options to break the India shining’s growth-without-jobs syndrome.

But even if we agree that these are election issues, the question is: Do they determine results? That is difficult to say. Politicians are fast learners. And even if the pre-election rhetoric is full of the “development” word, I would argue development is still not on the agenda. What is on the election agenda is to sell, hard, the “idea” of development as a dream. What is on the agenda is projects as ideas, big and grand enough to be visible in the electronic and print media. So the answer to today’s serious water crisis, for instance, is a futuristic and unplanned river-linkng project.

Real development will require serious reform of the way in which we do business — not the business of running industries, but of running the country. Politicians know they face a serious governance crisis. The abilities of the state to deliver meaningful change have been consistently and successfully disabled. Politicians also realise they don’t have the abilities to handle our rigid and won’t-do bureaucracies. It is clear the only way this environment-development agenda can work is through substantial change.

Water, for instance, will require policies and practices to optimise the rainwater endowment of each region, so that water management at the level of each settlement is organised to harvest the most and to use it in the least wasteful way. This requires building local interests and institutions that can take decisions about resources. Therefore, the system is planned to optimise on the local and immediate resource, before drawing upon the external and unreliable sources of water.

In such a situation, there are invariably no quick-fixes. But, as I said, politicians are learning to play the development game. Their answer is two-fold. One, to design arrangements with private capital with a focus on what is beneficial to both parties — power stations, software parks, industries and large roads. This way, politicians can optimise on the efficiencies of the private interests and market themselves as effective. But remember, private interests do not work in the interests of all. Therefore, this “feel good” will be limited to areas of mutual convenience and not societal good. The other answer is to ensure the development vote is divided on the basis of caste, class and religion so that development does not count. In any case, caste equations have provided the security blanket in the past. And if development does not work, dividing votes will in the future.

The questions then are: If water, electricity and jobs are on the election agenda, how do we make sure that these votes count? If politicians are learning to subvert development, how do we make them unlearn? Will these elections teach us new lessons? I do not know the answers. But I do know every election is also a promise; nominally, it provokes a certain future. This time, politicians have explicitly promised “development”. Let us see how we can make our ideas work for them.

The writer is director, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi