On March 27, 1973, a group of peasants in Mandal, a village in the upper Alaknanda Valley, stopped a group of commercial loggers from felling a patch of ash trees by threatening to hug them. These innovatively non-violent methods used in Mandal were emulated by villages in other parts of the Uttarakhand Himalaya, likewise seeking to protect forests in their locality.
The manifold forms of environmental degradation outlined in the previous paragraph do not merely have aesthetic effects. They impose profound economic costs as well. Air and water pollution makes people sick and puts them out of work. When soils become too toxic, previously productive lands go out of cultivation. When forests and pastures are depleted, rural livelihoods become less secure.
The economic consequences of environmental abuse have largely escaped the attention of India’s most celebrated economists – Nobel laureates among them. However, some of their less well-known – but more grounded – colleagues have been more alert to the question. A decade ago, a group of economists estimated that the annual cost of environmental degradation in India was about Rs 3.75 trillion, equivalent to 5.7% of GDP (see Muthukumara Mani, editor, Greening India’s Growth: Costs, Valuations, and Trade-Offs, Routledge, 2013). Given how much more polluted the air and water now are, how much more toxic the soil and so on, the economic costs today are probably even greater.
26/03/2023