The Economist
February 7, 2015
Narendra Modi should learn from China’s mistakes before it’s too late
National monuments skulk in the smog. Pedestrians and traffic policemen mask their mouths in a vain attempt to keep out the fetid vapours. Children choke in their schoolrooms. Two years ago such scenes would have been set in Beijing, then suffering an “airpocalypse”—alarming levels of airborne pollution which focused public attention on China’s dismal environmental record and forced the government to do more about it. Today they are more likely to feature in India’s capital, Delhi, the most polluted city on Earth.
India’s mission in the next 30 years is to grow as fast as China has in the past 30—but without all the pollution. The global climate could not bear India following China’s path; and the health of Indians could not stand it. Instead India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, needs to improve India’s environmental laws by drawing lessons from China.
Modi vivendi
If India were to start belching out as much carbon as China does now, it would be adding an extra America’s-worth of emissions to the atmosphere every year. That is why curbing pollution would benefit everyone. But it would benefit Indians the most. One study calculated that air pollution (from soot, mostly, not carbon dioxide) has reduced the life expectancy of citizens of northern China by about 5.5 years. The authors of that study have now looked at India, and concluded that air pollution already cuts life expectancy there by about three years for nearly 700m people.
The good news is that India has some advantages over China. When it began its market reforms, China was saddled with monstrously polluting, Soviet-inspired heavy industry. India has fewer smokestacks and a bigger services sector. Its bureaucrats do not have to meet targets for economic growth, which in China encourage local officials to favour output over cleaner water or purer air. And although Indians are sometimes said not to care about the environment, they can look back to an ancient tradition of green law. Ashoka, who united much of the Indian subcontinent in the third century BC, was the first ruler to issue edicts protecting his natural surroundings (“Forests must not be burned in order to kill living things or without any good reason,” said one rule).
All that bodes well. But India still has much to do. Smoke from cooking fires claims about 1m lives a year. Fewer than one in ten coal-fired power stations scrubs its flue gases of sulphur compounds. Too many laws are weak or poorly enforced. The Pollution Control Board controls nothing. Environmental groups have filed a mass of lawsuits against the government’s inaction, with the result that the Supreme Court plays a larger role in environmental protection than its equivalent does in any other big country—an odd way to set policy.
Mr Modi should start with better information. Some Indian cities have begun to monitor particulates in the air. Others should quickly follow—and make the data public, so that independent groups can hold politicians and polluters to account. Cleaner transport is a priority. The fuel in most of India’s cars and lorries is filthy and sulphurous. In March the Supreme Court will decide whether to raise fuel-efficiency and vehicle-emissions standards. It should do both.
Happily, India has plans to clean up. It ended subsidies on diesel last year, so firms have less reason to run inefficient, polluting generators and vehicles. Next to go should be subsidies on paraffin. The dirtiest power plants must close. States should follow the lead of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, which are due to launch the world’s first cap-and-trade schemes for particulates.
India’s leaders need to recognise that the pollution created in the rush to improve people’s lives sets progress back and that emissions can be curbed in ways that do not wreck economic growth. If, for instance, India were to build a reliable electricity grid it would reduce the use of dirty private generators, cut indoor air pollution from cooking fires and boost productivity all at the same time. China waited too long to clean up its act; India should not make the same mistake.
