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| Kanika Datta: A clash of development | |
| Both business and politics have a penchant for turning obstructive to socially beneficial measures | | Kanika Datta / New Delhi January 8, 2009, 0:27 IST | |
If business and politics have one thing in common, it is the penchant for turning obstructive when any kind of socially beneficial measure seems to contradict their interests.
Even so, it is truly difficult to understand both Mamata Banerjee’s year-end salvo against a judicial attempt to provide Kolkata’s citizens with cleaner air and the West Bengal government’s conciliatory withdrawal. Like Delhi in 2002, the Calcutta High Court had passed a ban on auto-rickshaws with two-stroke engines in Kolkata and the outskirts of the city to improve air quality. Even a short visit to the city will confirm the wisdom of this on pure health grounds.
Yet, the auto and taxi unions under the aegis of Banerjee’s Trinamool Party controls have argued that this order will impact the livelihood of thousands of auto drivers (not to forget their rich and powerful owners) and inconvenience commuters. To make their point, they took their vehicles off the roads and attacked cars and burnt buses. Faced with public outrage, the state government has decided to seek two or three more months from the High Court to implement the order.
A quick look at the facts suggests that these are strange arguments from all angles of the political spectrum. For one, it is not clear how attacking modes of public transport helped commuters who were stranded when the ban on autos came into force.
For another, it is difficult to understand precisely why auto owners are reluctant to make the switch. Not only do two-stroke engines emit high volumes of pollutants (because they do not burn fuel as efficiently as four-stroke engines), they are also noisy and more expensive to run than CNG-powered autos. Indeed, some 3,000 to 4,000 auto owners in Kolkata did make the switch to CNG and are doing just fine.
Part of the problem, of course, is that the state government had not bestirred itself to provide sufficient infrastructure for the city’s 65,000-odd autos to make the transition. This, again, is odd. After all, the High Court order was passed in July last year — it includes phasing out commercial vehicles registered before 1993 — providing a full five months for the phase-out. Nothing was done then, for reasons that remain inexplicable. Yet, the same government now claims it can do in two or three months what it couldn’t do in five.
The obvious explanation for this debacle is electoral politics. With general elections a few months away, Banerjee, uncertain of her strength at the hustings after l’affair Singur, is looking at creating a favourable impression with a politically powerful business lobby; the state government, equally uncertain after Singur, is similarly motivated.
Both parties have clearly overlooked the Delhi experience. In 2002, faced with stiff resistance from an influential transporters’ lobby and her own transport minister, Chief Minister Sheila Dixit forced through the implementation of a Supreme Court decision to convert all public transport to CNG (no doubt a contempt of court threat proved a powerful motivator).
Taken together with a series of steps to reduce vehicular pollution starting 1999, Delhi has become a showpiece of the virtues of environmental activism tied to administrative responsiveness. The city’s air, though by no means optimum, is cleaner than most of India’s other major cities. And Dixit’s courage in pushing through a politically unpopular law didn’t harm her electoral prospects. She was re-elected in 2003 and again in 2008 for an unprecedented third term.
The point of Delhi’s CNG story is that is that being socially responsible isn’t necessarily incompatible with business or political interests. Another case in point is the nineties’ crisis in the carpet industry. In the nineties, under pressure from activist groups, US and European buyers stopped accepting products that used certain harmful dyes and chemicals and/or were made by child labour. Since this immediately put India’s export-dependent carpet industry in jeopardy, this ban raised howls of protest from politicians of a swadeshi hue and big business interests.
The western world, they said, were displaying their protectionist proclivities by raising non-tariff barriers just as world trade was being liberalised. These accusations may well have been true, but the protestors chose to overlook the fact that India’s carpet industry could scarcely boast of best practices, either in terms of labour or the environment. Luckily, the exigencies of business forced at least the bigger, more organised exporters to reform without harm to their business interests. As for the protests and burnt effigies, they came to nothing.
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