[Mr. Modi’s new
government did inherit cumbersome regulations. The environmental activist
Sunita Narain, in a recent article, described
a system in which “the same project had to be cleared by five to seven
agencies,” not one of which monitored compliance. Industrialists complained
that corrupt inspectors made the rounds with their hands out, and that corrupt
bureaucrats sat on files that were lined up for approval, waiting for bribes.]
By Ellen Barry and Neha Thirani
Bagri
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An industrial
plant in Vapi. Credit Graham Crouch for The New York Times
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VAPI, India — Factory owners in this
city on the western coast of India have
been fuming, railing, and arguing for years against a single troublesome
number: the pollution index used by the Ministry of Environment and Forests,
which identified Vapi as an area so badly contaminated that any further
industrial growth there was banned.
They finally got some
good news in early June, about two weeks after Narendra
Modi was sworn in as prime minister. The new officials at the
ministry told them that the pollution index would be revised — and in the
meantime, Vapi’s chemical and pesticide factories were again free to expand,
and to snap at China’s share of the global chemical export market.
Rightly so, said Harshad
Patel, standing outside the plant where he works. The air had an acrid-sweet
smell, and reddish-brown effluent was gushing from a treatment plant down the
road at a rate of 55 million gallons a day into the Daman Ganga River, but Mr.
Patel looked untroubled. “Clean India is fine — we also like clean India,” he
said. “But give us jobs.”
Indian industries have
often complained that convoluted environmental regulations are choking off
economic growth. As a candidate, Mr. Modi promised to open the floodgates, and
he has been true to his word. The new government is moving with remarkable speed
to clear away regulatory burdens for industry, the armed forces, mining and
power projects.
More permanent changes
may be coming. In a report made public last week, a high-level committee
assigned to rewrite India’s environmental laws assailed the existing regulatory
system, saying it has “served only the purpose of a venal administration”
seeking to extract bribes.
To speed up project
approvals, the committee recommended scrapping a layer of government
inspections; instead, it said, India should rely on business owners to
voluntarily disclose the pollution that their projects will generate and then
monitor their own compliance, an approach the committee described as “the
concept of utmost good faith.”
Environmentalists are
worried that the new approach will go beyond cutting red tape and will do away
with effective regulation altogether.
“If you’re building
something like a brewery or a dam, faith is the last thing you want to think
about,” said Leo Saldanha, coordinator of the Bangalore-based Environment Support
Group. “Do you have ‘utmost good faith’ in enforcing income tax, or corporate
tax law? No. This is a territory on which the government wants to be weak —
because they want growth.”
Mr. Modi’s new government
did inherit cumbersome regulations. The environmental activist Sunita Narain,
in a recent article, described
a system in which “the same project had to be cleared by five to seven
agencies,” not one of which monitored compliance. Industrialists complained
that corrupt inspectors made the rounds with their hands out, and that corrupt
bureaucrats sat on files that were lined up for approval, waiting for bribes.
Mr. Modi’s new
environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, made it clear that speedy clearances
would be the order of the day. The newly appointed National Board for Wildlife,
which must approve projects in and around protected areas, plowed through 140
pending projects during a two-day gathering in mid-August. One member said they
worked at a rate of 15 to 30 minutes per file.
More significant,
activists say, were the raft of regulatory changes and dilutions that followed.
Smaller coal mines were granted one-time permission to expand without holding a
public hearing; projects in forests will no longer have to seek the approval of
tribal village councils; smaller mining projects of less than 100 hectares (247
acres) will no longer undergo ministry inspection. Several categories of
projects will be allowed to proceed as soon as they receive clearances from
state bodies.
“We have decided to
decentralize decision-making,” Mr. Javadekar said. “Ninety percent of files
won’t come to me anymore.”
He said the new
government was not phasing out important environmental protections, just “those
which, in the name of caring for nature, were stopping progress.”
Environmental activists
are alarmed at the plan to devolve power to state regulators, in part because
state chief ministers have powerful incentives to support industry. “It would
be a rubber stamp, because the chief minister would just call the pollution
control guy and say, ‘clear it,’ ” said Jairam Ramesh, who served as
environment minister under the previous national government. “In the state, the
chief minister is the king, he’s the sultan.”
Few places embody the
tensions between regulators and industry as starkly as Vapi, where around 800
factories — mostly small ones — produce dyes, pharmaceuticals, pesticides and
other chemicals and employ about 80,000 people. For decades the factories
simply dumped caustic byproducts and waste into open ditches; when pressure
mounted in the 1990s to clean up the mess, they banded together to build an
effluent treatment plant.
But while the effluent
plant has improved matters somewhat, Vapi is still polluted. Downstream from
the plant, the riverbanks are abandoned and villagers said their old fishing
grounds were useless. Acrid fumes settle thickly in the area early in the
morning, making it difficult to breathe. Ask business leaders here about
pollution, though, and they bristle, arguing that the government inspectors’
sampling is faulty. “People talk as if you go to Vapi and you can’t breathe,
your lungs are damaged,” said Rajju Shroff, chairman of one of India’s largest
pesticide manufacturers. “It’s all lies. People are nice and healthy in Vapi.
There is no problem at all.”
Regulators say it is
nearly impossible to police the country’s many small manufacturers. In
frustration, Mr. Ramesh imposed a total ban in 2010 on industrial growth in 43
areas that the Central Pollution Control Board said were the most polluted in
India. Vapi was at the top of the list.
“That was the only way I
felt I would get these guys to act,” he said. “Enforcement was weak, the
penalties were very weak, and there was no visible deterrent penalty for
noncompliance.”
The moratorium did impose
pain on businesses in Vapi, forcing abrupt cancellation of planned expansions.
But it did not lead to any significant reduction in pollution levels, at least
according to the control board, which renewed the ban last year.
The general election in
the spring, which replaced a Congress-led coalition government with Mr. Modi
and his Bharatiya Janata Party, seems to have changed all that.
During a recent visit,
the Vapi Industries Association was an upbeat place. A copy of the magazine
Corporate India was on display, with the headline “The Light at the End of the
Tunnel.”
Mr. Shroff said he was
sure that business owners would invest in the equipment necessary to monitor
their own pollution levels, as envisaged in the government’s new “utmost good
faith” policy. Or at least, the ones who could afford it would.
“The problem is, 90
percent are good, and 10 percent are difficult to convince,” he said. “It is
human nature to cheat, to do something to save the headache.”
Hari Kumar contributed
reporting.
