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Environmental governance in India: The challenge of multiple transitions* B. G. Verghese We are never contemporary with our present. History advances in disguise. It appears on stage wearing the mask of the preceding scene… – Regis Debray Introduction Sixty-six years after independence, India is not the country it was in 1947. Our geography has remained more or less static since partition, but our demography has changed drastically, altering all ratios such as mouths to feed, jobs to be created, housing needs and natural resources to share, especially land and water. Nothing is the same. Yet we all too often hear nostalgic references to the past, especially with reference to the environment. The exponential growth of numbers has not merely been quantitative but qualitative. At the commencement of the first Five-year Plan in 1950, no more than 50 million elite lived in a modernising, industrialising and largely urban India, while the vast majority of 300 million others resided in the traditional and largely agrarian recesses of Bharat. With education, communications development and social change, maybe 500 million live in ‘India’ today while over 700 million inhabit ‘Bharat’. Millions graduate from Bharat to India every year, but especially during general elections that are greatly empowering political and social mega-convocations. There is another qualitative difference: the country's astonishing diversity lends it richness and hybrid vigour. This has gradually telescoped into a larger sense of ‘Indianness’ without necessarily affecting pride in ancient identities and heritage. Thus, it is difficult to define emerging India in simple categories despite visible convergences. This upwelling from below of newly empowered cohorts has necessarily resulted in new political formations giving rise to coalitions as the alternative to former single-party dominance. This is a natural progression and the fact that intelligent persons should baulk at the rise of local and regional parties betrays a deplorable lack of understanding of the nation's social dynamics. This phenomenon will Commonwealth Governance 120 Handbook 2013/14 Box 1: India in 2035 India is no longer an agrarian society, though a slight majority still lives in the countryside. Manufacturing contributes more to GDP than farming, with services accounting for the largest share. Agriculture can no longer absorb growing numbers as farm holdings shrink under population pressure. Greater agricultural production has to come from increased productivity and better land and water management. In another 20 years, India will be a predominantly urban society, which it already is in some regions. All children should be in school by then. But there will be no demographic dividend unless jobs and skills multiply. The urban configuration will change. Mega-city peripheries will cease to be noisome shanty towns sheltering Malthusian refugees. Instead, rural growth centres will multiply as hubs of small and tiny enterprises servicing the countryside and supplying the cities. Urban India will also spawn satellite towns, green cities along radial axes with rapid connectivity. This is already happening. The east-west railway corridor, with planned industrial hubs alongside from Punjab to Mumbai via Delhi and Ahmedabad, is the first manifestation of this new ribbon architecture. A national grid of super-highways will perform a similar role. Here is a huge new challenge for well planned urbanisation, with sanitation as a central concern. All this will happen within a democratic framework. India, uniquely among post-colonial nations, deliberately determined that it would make full-fledged parliamentary democracy the instrument of economic and social transformation and poverty alleviation rather than its end product. The world, and even some in India, scoffed and wondered about what would be the result of this brash experiment, standing history on its head. They have remained to marvel. The Indian elections are a wonder of the world with a vibrant electorate larger and more diverse than that of all of Europe, including Russia, and North America combined. * Adapted from the Diamond Jubilee Lecture given at Triplicane Cultural Academy, Chennai (July 2013). This article reflects the author's personal views and not those of the CHRI or the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.


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