'Development and environment are two sides of the same coin'

How can India strike a balance between development and environment protection?

Updated on: Jul 1, 2012, 24:24:59 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan

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How can India strike a balance between development and environment protection?

India and China with over 35% of the world's population are on a high-growth trajectory. This growth comes with a hidden environmental cost. As our population grows, finding a balance between economic advancement and consumption of natural resources is a vital question that India should address today.

Developing countries like India can become greener and lessen their environment footprint while at the same time continue to grow and deliver goods and services, for vital economic development. A two-pronged approach has to be followed to work in this direction.

Firstly, enterprises need to decouple production systems from the consumption of materials and energy (produce more with less) to become sustainable. Material and energy costs account for 40-60% of the operating costs of enterprises in developing countries. By following steps like switching from non-renewable to renewable sources of energy and materials targetting cleaner production, maximising recycling and reuse of wastes and environmentally sound product design, enterprises can significantly work towards sustainable growth.

Governments also have a key role to play. Policies need to be simplified to create an ecosystem for new sustainable businesses to flourish. Efforts like the introduction and adoption of Green Accounting standards will be a step towards enhancing the speed of transition among businesses.

The steps industry needs to take to strike this balance...

There is a greater need for industries across sectors to come together on a common platform to address the issues concerning economic development and environment protection. Globally, industry is responsible for more than one-third of the global primary energy consumption and energy-related carbon dioxide emissions and has the technical potential to decrease its energy intensity by up to 26% and emissions by up to 32%.

Therefore, improving energy efficiency in industry is one of the most cost-effective measures in countries like India to loosen the link between economic growth and environmental degradation. The agenda to reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency by industries should not be restricted to their own operations, but should be extended to the entire supply chain.

Businesses can transform themselves through sustainable practices and become engines of green growth by developing technologies that enable others to drive their sustainability agenda. An example of this is the Information and Communications Technology industry. According to the recent SMART 2020 report, by 2020, emissions from the ICT sector will represent an estimated 2.8% of total global emissions. However, ICT has the potential to enable others to achieve significant emission reductions, helping industries and consumers avoid an estimated 7.8 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions. That is 15% of predicated global emissions and of five times ICT's own footprint.

The ICT industry has a key role to play in enabling a low-carbon society by providing standardised information on energy consumption and emission across sectors, as well as capabilities and platforms to improve accountability in energy use and carbon emission. By replacing goods and services with virtual equivalents and by providing technology to enable energy efficiency, ICT has the potential to offer innovations that will capture energy efficient opportunities across industries including commercial buildings and homes, logistics and transport, power and manufacturing. In India, the government is recognising that ICT can help drive socioeconomic achievements via e-health, e-government services and smart grids for utilities.

Has Indian industry hidden behind the country's poor to avoid protecting the environment while pushing for higher growth targets?
Some larger companies are getting global recognition for their sustainability practices. India has about 11 million Micro Small and Medium Enterprises. These companies may not have the capacity or capital to implement sustainability in their businesses. This is where we need to provide support. In this sense, the industry is not hiding behind the country's poor, rather we are a poor country and hence our current priorities are to feed, clothe, house and educate every citizen of the country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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