State of India's Environment: The Citizens' Fifth Report

THE 1982 THE State of India’s Environment: a Citizen’s Report produced by the Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi in collaboration with a large network of groups from all over India, set new standards in terms of comprehensiveness, coverage, detail and quality of presentation.
Subsequent editions, including these, the two latest, retain these qualities. This latest report has an abundance of colour photos and many graphs, maps and diagrams. It is accompanied by a second volume which is a statistical database; it was felt that statistics on the environment were too scattered, not easily accessible, and not presented in a reader-friendly way, so the second volume seeks to provide activists, policy makers and researchers with accessible, relevant statistics.

The message of this report is that the Indian government still lacks the ability to deal with emerging problems and only deals with an issue when it becomes a crisis. Issues such as deforestation and land degradation have received some recognition and there has been some success in dealing with them. However, new environmental problems such as pollution and waste generation are emerging, which are particularly damaging in urban areas. No serious attempts are being made to reverse these processes even though India’s cities and rivers are becoming increasingly unhealthy and polluted. Politicians in India are evidently finding it increasingly hard to reconcile population and economic growth with environmental conservation.

The report is divided into 11 sections: land, water, forests, dams, atmosphere, habitat, people, health, energy, living resources and agents of change. The first nine sections describe the nature of the threats faced by each resource and present data in boxes, charts and tables to illustrate the extent of each problem in India. Many examples of good and bad practices, as well as profiles of people and places, make the problems real and strongly contextual. There is a wealth of detail for any urban specialist (as well as those more interested in rural or natural resource issues). For instance, the section on water focuses on river pollution, much of it arising from urban-based activities, and the
limited impact of river action plans. The section on atmosphere describes the state of urban air quality, both for major cities and for many smaller urban centres. This is one of the few urban reports that give detailed information on air quality outside the largest and best-known cities. The section on Habitat expands on this theme by concentrating on small and medium-sized urban centres, with case studies on environmental quality in four industrial towns, four non-industrial towns and one tourist town. The section on agents of change describes how the judiciary has given the ordinary citizen the right to lodge complaints against polluters, and how a series of landmark judgements by the Supreme Court has triggered a wave of environmental consciousness across India. The book ends with an essay on corruption and how greed contributes to environmental degradation.