Opinion Rio once more

Before sitting down to write this,I drove through the Mumbai suburb of Mankhurd. It looked like a human settlement rising out of a landscape of garbage. Children,stray dogs and cats and huge rats burrowed in the garbage and shops rose out of it. In the narrow alleys that led to the hovels that pass for human dwellings,small children squatted along the open drains. The stench was indescribable. After Mankhurd,I drove into villages on the edge of Mumbai and living conditions were marginally better but every village I passed had emptied its garbage onto the national highway to Goa.

Anyone seriously interested in saving India from imminent environmental disaster should be able to see that we are already in the middle of an environmental emergency. Clean water,clean air,clean living conditions are all in short supply. But,it is India’s misfortune that it is not just the Ministry of Environment that thrives on babble and buzzwords but our environmental NGOs as well.

They spend their time making a noise about such things as genetically modified foods oblivious even to the fact that without GM wheat,the green revolution would not have happened. Or they raise false alarms about ‘poison’ levels in Coke and Pepsi without admitting that the problem lies with the quality of Indian water.

Then,there are those who are against all methods of producing electricity. They rage against nuclear,thermal and hydro and demand alternative ‘green’ technologies that are really no alternative. As the environmentalist,Bjorn Lomborg,pointed out in Newsweek recently,‘Germany,the world’s largest per capita consumer of solar energy,produces just 0.3 percent of its energy this way. And to achieve this No. 1 status,the country has paid $130 billion for $12 billion worth of energy. The net reduction in CO2 emissions will slow the pace of global warming just 23 hours by the end of the century.’ He added that biofuel production now consumes 40 per cent of the US corn harvest to supply 4 per cent of that country’s transport fuel.

In India,we would perhaps not have an environmental crisis if we could solve problems related to poverty—sanitation,clean water,malnutrition and urban squalor. Yet,you can count on the fingers of one hand the environmental NGOs working towards solving these problems and the number of so-called environmental journalists who report on them. Environmental activism is so fashionable that we have lots of television channels and newspapers these days sponsoring campaigns to ‘green’ India with movie stars lending celebrity support. But,when did you last see a campaign to clean up slums or improve sanitation? The ugly truth about India’s real environmental problems is that they are too squalid and unsightly to be glamorous.

So when the green conference begins in Rio,we will undoubtedly see an army of ‘environmental’ journalists wend their way there in the wake of the official delegation from the Environment Ministry. And they will spend their time interviewing our Environment Minister about India’s position on the controversy of the day and they will spout more babble about sustainable development and climate change than anyone else. Then all will be forgotten till the next international conference where they will turn up to repeat the same performance. At none of these conferences,will you hear them,or the NGO types,or Environment Ministry officials talk about poverty being the worst environmental pollutant in India. It is a reality that is too shameful to discuss,India’s dirty secret.

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ Tavleen_Singh