Ecological Responsibility

Abstract

There is an urgent need for an independent consortium of concerned NGO institutions to assess the total quantum of environmental damage being caused by the rapid pace of economic growth and to implement a people-centred parallel strategy for containing this damage. The pursuit of growth without adequate attention to sustainability is exerting pressures on India's heritage of forest cover, soil fertility, purity of its sacred rivers, air pollution, and coastal environment as never before in history. A “back-of-the-envelope” assessment of costs of environmental degradation by a World Bank team seemed to indicate that very conservatively India's environmental costs were over 4.5 per cent of the GDP (Brandon and Hommanns, 1995). A more recent estimate of the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI) puts the figure at 10 per cent of the GDP for the economy-wide environmental degradation costs (TERI, 1997). Ambitious projects are being implemented without adequate environmental impact analysis or sufficient consultation with local people or NGOs, which have completely altered the habitat of hundreds of villages. This is inspite of the fact that the first thrust area of the Country cooperation Framework-1 “addresses people at the grassroots, who are being drawn into the decision making process and those who work with natural resource management…” (GOI-UNDP CCF-1 1997-2001, September 1997, p. 17).