Govt needs to balance high growth with quality of life for citizens

As air quality worsens, balancing 8% GDP growth with cleaner air requires stricter enforcement and new policy focus

Over the past few weeks, soaring air pollution in Delhi and other metros has forced Indian policymakers to confront an issue they often prefer to ignore: The need to focus on total emissions, not just the emission intensity of the economy, even as India seeks to accelerate gross domestic product (GDP) growth and march towards becoming a developed country by 2047.

 

The distinction between total emissions and the emission intensity of the economy is crucial. India has focused on reducing emission intensity — that is, its goal has been to lower emissions per unit of economic output. The target for 2030 is to cut GDP emission intensity by 45 per cent from 2005 levels. This seems eminently doable — as it has already reduced emission intensity by around 36 per cent since 2005.

 

The problem is that it does not actually lead to cleaner air or stop global warming. The absolute emissions are still going up — and will continue to go up until policymakers figure out a way of reducing, or at least capping, emissions, while devising policies to accelerate growth. Current studies suggest that India’s total emissions could well continue going up all the way till 2040, or even longer at current rates of GDP growth.

 

Balancing rapid GDP growth with the inevitable rise in emissions that high economic growth brings is an issue that all developing nations face. Rapid growth inevitably requires higher energy consumption, higher construction activity, and higher industrial production, among others.

 

India’s development targets for 2047 will require the economy to grow at 8 per cent per annum or more consistently over two decades. This growth is necessary to ensure that the country’s per capita income crosses the threshold the World Bank uses to classify a nation as high-income.

 

Equally, the 8 per cent-plus growth would inevitably lead to higher total emissions for the time being — and, unless dealt with aggressively, will adversely affect the health of citizens in all big cities in the country. Numerous studies have shown that consistently high air pollution reduces life expectancy —and new research indicates that it can also affect unborn babies at the foetal stage.

 

The hallmark of a developed country is not merely high per capita income but also high quality of life — especially education and health, along with higher per capita incomes as per the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Index (HDI). This would mean that India should focus on air and water pollution, among other things, such as universal and high-quality school education while encouraging higher industrial and service sector growth.

 

Ensuring quality school education while pursuing high economic growth is not very difficult — though most Union governments in India have so far preferred to leave improvements in education to state governments or the private sector. Reducing or tackling absolute emissions, however, is a far bigger challenge for policymakers.

 

India’s future economic growth will need to come from both manufacturing and services. At one point, the theory was that services-led growth would require less energy and produce lower emissions than rapid manufacturing growth. But the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and gargantuan data centres has caused alarm bells to ring about their energy and water consumption. This is why it is important for policymakers to realise that they cannot wait till India becomes a high-income nation to tackle total emissions or issues like air pollution. Even interim targets on the path to net zero by 2070 that India has adopted will need to provide solutions for absolute emissions while continuing to reduce the emission intensity of economic growth.

 

The answer obviously is not to slow down economic growth, but to figure out how to tackle the very real problem of air pollution — an inevitable byproduct of high growth — that citizens face. At least some of these problems could be addressed by implementing more stringent environmental regulations and ensuring better enforcement of existing norms.

 

It is no secret that many industries — large, medium, and small — pay little heed to emission norms. Nor do local, state, or even Union authorities particularly care about emissions or air pollution. Old thermal power plants have often been given additional time to implement emission control systems by authorities. Water pollution and depletion continue unabated across the country. Trees, which are crucial for absorbing emissions, are cut down with impunity to build roads, factories, and for mining activities, with little effort to create alternative green lungs. Similarly, cleaning water bodies could help absorb emissions, along with measures such as stricter emission controls for construction activity and related sectors. The Union government needs to find the right balance between high growth and an improved quality of life for citizens. It cannot focus on one while ignoring the other.

The author is former editor of Businessworld and Business Today magazines,  and founder of Prosaic View, an editorial consultancy