“The environmental crisis India faces is greater than the crisis of political corruption or even of caste and communal conflict,” says Ramachandra Guha. Our preoccupation with clim ate change, he worries, distracts from more pressing ecological concerns.
India faces severe environmental challenges like air pollution, groundwater depletion, soil contamination, dying rivers, and forest degradation. While climate change can worsen these, they primarily result from domestic policies and attitudes. Guha criticises the tendency to dismiss environmental concerns as a western conspiracy against the Global South. “It’s true that the West is hypocritical,” he argues, “but these problems are caused by our government, our industry, our people, our laws.”
Although influential economists dismiss resistance to development as a “frivolous luxury” that poor nations can ill afford, history suggests otherwise. In the 19th…
