Our legislators have returned, apparently crestfallen. They have learnt that the magnificence of Shanghai cannot be replicated back home because we are a democracy. Too bad for India. If only we were a dictatorship of legislators we’d be a transformed nation, the cynosure of the world.
As India celebrates 60 years of Independence, we have tasted, a decade each of Nehru’s Soviet, Indira’s socialist, and Manmohan’s liberalisation models to see their respective benefits and limitations. At stake is the very idea of India and therefore the opportunities, the missed opportunities and the calamities of each model are hotly debated, defended and ridiculed by proponents.
The ground battles of Narmada, Nandigram, Special Economic Zones and other such flashpoints are manifestations of this discourse by other means. They represent a clash of ideas on what constitutes sustainable development. In this Kurukshetra of ideas, the ground rules are established: the rate of growth must be nurtured; and the protection of the ecosystem which the formal economy harnesses to monetise and the informal economy depends on for its everyday survival must be safeguarded.
Advocates on both sides of the divide look across the Himalayas and cite cases from China in alarmists’ tones. The “India Shining” brigade rightly propound an unfretted, unregulated, seamless system like China that liberates them to get on with business, likewise the “India Suffering” activists too make a compelling case of the huge social and environmental price that the Chinese people are paying to be where they are today.
Meanwhile, China itself has quietly undergone a failed revolution. The audacity of what she embarked to achieve is a lesson for India.
In 2004, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) launched a project to calculate how much money pollution costs China each year, the so called “green gross domestic product.” Simply put, Green GDP is calculated by deducting the cost of natural resources’ depletion and environmental degradation from traditional GDP. Though the scheme never progressed smoothly, figures for 2004 which were finally released in late 2006 revealed pollution cost China about 511 billion yuan ($ 68 billion) or 3 per cent of GDP of the 16 trillion yuan ($ 2 trillion) GDP that year.
China has now withheld the release of the 2005 report, although officials had promised it on a number of occasions. It was reported that some local governments and municipalities felt that such “sensitive” information, euphemism for reality check, would undermine the image of their respective areas and formally exerted pressure not to publish the calculation results.
According to official estimates, China witnessed 87,000 protests, riots and other mass incidents in almost every province in what is seen as probably the biggest surge of rural violence since the Cultural Revolution. The State Council – China’s Cabinet – the nation’s highest decision making body decided to indefinitely postpone the release of the Green GDP report and keep them only as a reference for policymakers. According to Xinhua, Pan Yue, China’s deputy minister of SEPA, over the past 50 years habitable and usable land has been halved in the country echoing some of the concerns now being raised in India.
When SEPA had spearheaded Green GDP accounting, the objective was to take into account the impact of environmental degradation on the economy to drive home to the public and officials, the real costs of waste created and environmental damage due to reckless planning and development. This was because the career prospects of local officials were solely determined by the size of investments they could woo which superseded all other considerations. To change mindsets and stimulate compliance central authorities introduced the concept of Green GDP and had thus signaled to provinces that their hitherto accountability parameters for two decades had begun to change. The Green GDP issue gives a rare insight into the arguments going on within the Chinese establishment about how to achieve sustainable development.
First, the point that China has managed to calculate Green GDP. It may be an imperfect tool but if India were to adopt it, it will serve the important purpose of maturing the current emotional debate into a rational one. Second, Green GDP calculations deployed in local situations can be a policy implementation tool that calibrates the interest of all stakeholders. It would enable communities and their leaders, facilitating central, state and local administrative officials and interested investors to navigate through negotiations through a common currency on a neutral platform.
Third, Green GDP reorients the allegiance of key local officials to communities in the areas they serve. By measuring net overall wellbeing instead of an abstract figure it encourages a sharp relook by all stakeholders. Its introduction must be strategically viewed in tandem with the proposed administrative reforms currently underway for the civil services.
So why did Green GDP fail in China? Precisely for all the reason it will succeed in India. In the long run good governance pays. Enshrining Green GDP in our policy apparatus may be a key reconciliation tool in bringing all our stakeholders together. Introducing Green GDP could open up the administrative setup and make it responsive to peoples’ real needs. The task for our legislators is cut out.
(The writer is with Greenpeace India.)
