Decoding the pollution control debate

Book review of 'Business, Institutions and the Environment'

Business, Institutions and the Environment 

Runa Sarkar

Oxford University Press 

220 pages; Rs 249

I must confess when I hear impassioned debates about environmental issues I am tempted to wonder what the hot air being expelled is all about: Isn’t it obvious that businesses (and other enterprises) must go about their work responsibly and make sure that the effluents they create in their manufacturing processes be suitably treated such that they don’t pollute the environment? How can our business tycoons be so cavalier about such commonly shared things like the water we all drink or the air that we all breathe? 

My bewilderment rose to new heights when President Donald Trump declared last month that the United States will exit the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit environmental pollution that leads to an increase in the earth’s temperature. What could possibly cause the US, a country that is generally at the forefront of progressive international initiatives, to exit a pact that has already been signed by 195 countries? Is there more to environmental issues than what I had gathered from my casual reading of newspapers and other media?

This bewilderment is what drove me to cram Runa Sarkar’s book, Businesses, Institutions, and the Environment, along with the heap of books that I put into my bag last week when I got to take a few days off from work and go the Masai Mara in Kenya. It helped that at a slim 140 pages it is easy to travel with this book (it is part of Oxford University Press’ “Short Introductions” series).

If a measure of the worth of a book is a list of things a reader gets to know after reading it as compared to what he knew before he read it, then, Professor Sarkar’s book is worth a lot to me. For instance, I had not known that the arrival of the smartphone, that constant companion to all of us nowadays, has led to a dramatic reduction in the large number of other devices that have littered the landscape so far: Watches, alarm clocks, weather gauges, calculators, radios, and so on. Or that the invention of sharing models like Ola and Uber in transport and Airbnb in travel has made transportation and travel less taxing on the environment.

This book also reminded me that we in India woke up to the challenges of industrial pollution that dark night on December 2, 1984, when deadly methyl isocyanate gas leaked from Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant killing more than 10,000 people and injuring several thousand other poor people living near the factory. It is only after this terrible event that the authorities launched a massive regulatory effort to update the ancient (1948) Factories Act that was supposed to govern the working of factories but also spent time and effort to create other related legislation.

Professor Sarkar also walks us through the Serengeti of the environmental protection world: The command and control institutions (Pollution Control Boards are an example), market-based measures (fines, penalties, tradeable emission permits), global institutions (WTO-like outfits) and NGOs (Sunderlal Bahuguna and his Chipko movement, Medha Patkar’s campaign against large dams are examples). The book also has a number of case studies about Indian firms both big and small who are tackling environmental issues successfully.

It surprised me to discover from this book that the main culprits in creating pollution in the world and more so in India are not large Union Carbide Bhopal-style factories with smoke belching from chimneys. The real polluters apparently are medium and small enterprises. Such small enterprises, according to scholarly studies account for 70 per cent of the pollution in the world. It turns out that such enterprises pollute more per unit of output compared to large-scale enterprises because of inefficiencies in their production processes, inferior equipment or their location, which is often in or close to residential areas. 

This, I suddenly realised, is what makes pollution control such a double-edged sword: These 46 million small enterprises that are at the forefront of causing pollution in India are the very institutions that are the sources of livelihood for 106 million of our fellow citizens, account for 45 per cent of India’s industrial output and 40 per cent of exports. Coming down hard on this sector would jeopardise the whole economy. I guess therein lies the dilemma about control of environmental pollution. 
 

The reviewer is the author of The Wave Rider, A Chronicle of the Information Age ajitb@rediffmail.com