India still has enough green cover left for Union Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh to gather fig leaves to hide his shame each time he does a somersault on policy. It would seem Mr Ramesh wants to convince himself more than his critics that he is not changing his mind, but is in fact getting his way. After a series of policy reversals, with ostensible riders that the party concerned says they can ride, Mr Ramesh has now done the big one. A green signal has finally been given to the South Korean steel giant Pohang Iron & Steel Company (Posco) to take the next step to bring the biggest foreign-funded industrial project into India. The 32 new conditions for port development, the 28 new ones for the steel-cum-power plant and the additional one, not yet given, for forest use have all been found acceptable to Posco and the state government. A clutch of local activists will continue to protest and they have the right to do so, but an overwhelming number of people in Orissa will look forward with hope to new economic opportunities. It is truly shameful that it took more than five years to get to this point.
Industrialisation is not a picnic, it is a social and economic process. Anyone who has any understanding of the history of industrialisation and of the benefits, and indeed costs it imposes, should know that every such project has its pluses and minuses. The question is whether on balance this project would benefit the people of India, and indeed Orissa, or not, without imposing unaffordable social or ecological costs. In any such project some are bound to focus only on the negatives and some only on the positives. It is incumbent upon policy makers to take a balanced view. Mr Ramesh has repeatedly failed to adopt a balanced posture on a variety of policy issues, willing to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds. Such populism is second nature to most Indian politicians. Mr Ramesh, we hoped, was not just another partisan politician, much less a populist. But climbing the Congress party ladder comes at a price and Mr Ramesh seems happy to pay that price. So what if the biggest foreign-funded industrial project is held up and the country’s prime minister has to visit South Korea empty-handed and with just an apologetic smile on his face? Mr Ramesh now proclaims that the project holds “considerable economic, technological and strategic significance for the country”. Really?! Imagine if Mr Ramesh could have got his act together and delivered this week’s approval a couple of months earlier, on the eve of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Seoul.
There will be more Poscos in years ahead, if India seeks to seriously push industrialisation forward, creating jobs in the millions for a rapidly growing workforce. Luddites and ecological extremists will seek to obstruct such projects. Political leadership would then mean taking the process forward, addressing all concerns in the best way possible in a reasonable period of time.
