Green guy

Despite all the criticism the Bharatiya Janata Party has faced from environmentalists on issues like the quite controversial river linking project, the party’s top-notch leader and newly appointed Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often presented himself as a green guy.

He has written blogs pegged with World Environment Day and has authored a book Convenient Actions: Gujarat’s response to challenges of climate change. The title was apparently in contrast to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth through which Modi tried to demonstrate that he was not just complaining about climate change but also showing what could be done about it. Indeed, he has some real action to offer: the biggest solar farm in the world, for instance, is in Gujarat, the state for he was chief minister of for more than a decade. Spanning 2,000 hectares, it produces 600MW of electricity, saving eight million tonnes of carbon emissions every year. Gujarat is also the highest carbon credit earning state in India.

Critics, however, have accused Modi of cherry-picking information in the book to promote his idea of economic growth, now known as ‘Modinomics’. He has been criticised of deliberately staying quiet about all the ecological costs Gujarat has had to bear in his pursuit of prosperity.

The question now is what will happen if Modi tries to replicate in the whole of India what he has done in his own state. For instance, he has linked rivers in Gujarat and there are speculations that he will push the idea of the quite controversial river-linking project, involving nearly three dozen rivers, across the country.

That would certainly be a matter of concern for downstream countries like Bangladesh, although Nepal will also figure significantly because it offers an

ideal location for all the water-storage facilities the gigantic river linking project would require.

Regional pollution

But an even more pressing issue for the South Asian region will be the dangerously increasing air pollution level.

A few months before Modi took over, scientific reports showed that Delhi’s air had become as dirty as that of Beijing. An alarming rise in respiratory diseases, including bronchitis, has been recorded and the World Health Organisation recently said that pollution could also lead to cancer.   

The bad news for the entire South Asian region is that dangerous air is not going to stay within Indian skies only. Such pollution has been found to affect weather systems as far as the US. So one can imagine what it could do to the region’s atmosphere. No wonder, Chinese scientists have been warning of how air pollution from South Asia is accelerating the meltdown of glaciers in Tibet. Of course, China’s own air pollution is itself a big source of the problem.

India’s increasing dependence on coal, mainly for energy production, and its rocketing use of oil and gas in the transport and manufacturing sector means that pollution will only worsen—not to mention the ever rising carbon emissions blamed for trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere. Then there is this growing concern over the possible impacts of regional carbon emissions on monsoon rains, the backbone of South Asia’s economy.

Modi has made his energy policy quite clear: It will be a mix of fossil fuels, renewables, biomass and nuclear, much like US president Barack Obama said about his country’s energy combination. But a senior Obama aide was quick to add that this did not mean coal would be a past matter in the US’ energy mix. Ditto will be the case in India, which needs cheap energy even more in its super-swiftly growing infrastructure and manufacturing sectors. There are also fears that in the quest to speed up industrial and mining projects, environmental guidelines will be relaxed.

All’s not well

Modi may argue that economic prosperity and environmental protection can go hand in hand, as he did on the blog he wrote for World Environment Day in 2012. “For the Western world, the concept of harmony with nature may be new but for us, respect for the environment has been an integral part of our glorious culture,” he wrote. “We have always been taught to live in complete synthesis with the environment without causing any damage to our surroundings.”

But many municipalities in Modi’s own state of Gujarat have been accused of not managing basic things like solid waste. The Times of India reported this in 2010: The letter of Gujrat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) member secretary RB Shah in January 2010 to the district collectors brings out in open the fact that a majority of municipalities have neither submitted their annual reports about proper disposal of solid and liquid waste system nor obtained authorisation for its management from the former.  

The report further read: Of the 159 municipalities that are generating 2,100 MT municipal solid waste daily, only 42 urban local bodies have facilities like land filling sites.

The GPCB report also revealed that only 43 urban local bodies of the 159 in Gujarat have working facilities for sewage treatment plants to treat volumes of daily domestic effluent.

These details sit awkwardly with Modi’s claim that he takes the environment quite seriously.

And now, it is not just about one state. What happens in all of India will certainly affect the environment of the whole of South Asia. Modi’s super highway of economic prosperity will also have its impacts on the region’s natural resources.

The question is how much will he be able to minimise the negative effects. That will determine how green a guy Modi is or if it was all just a green-wash.

Khadka is BBC journalist  based in London and can be reached at [email protected]