India leads in environmental conflicts

There are more environmental conflicts in India than any other country, and more clashes are over water (27 percent) than any other cause, according to the recently released Global Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas).

India has 222 listed conflicts - in proportion to population, there are many more - followed by Colombia and Nigeria with 116 and 71 conflicts, respectively, according to the EJAtlas, an interactive map of 1,703 global ecological conflicts, categorised by cause, such as water management, waste management, fossil fuels and climate justice, and biodiversity conservation.

With India currently facing the worst crisis in a decade and on course to become “water-scare” within nine years, as IndiaSpend reported last month, the scale of the conflicts listed in the Atlas further indicates a worsening situation.

The conflicts over water are most evident in Himachal Pradesh, and most are related to hydroelectric projects, often planned without considering the needs and consent of local communities.

Similar conflicts have been recorded in Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Manipur, Mizoram, Orissa, and Sikkim, among other states.

There are other kinds of water management conflicts. In Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, locals objected to a municipal corporation partnership with a private company to build a pipeline and augment water supply, because prices were to be decided by the company. Another example involves use of groundwater by Coca-Cola, involved in five conflicts with local communities protesting bottling plants (one each in Jaipur, Dehradun, and  Plachimada (Kerala), and two in Mehdiganj, near Varanasi.

Dams are persistent sites of conflicts, especially when they are being built and commissioned, said Sailen Routray, an independent researcher based in Bhubaneshwar. He has worked extensively on water issues and conflicts.

Most Indian conflicts listed in the EJAtlas appear to be a consequence of the country’s expanding economy.

For example, the raging underground fires in the Jharia coal mines in Jharkhand - an exclusive storehouse of prime coking coal - were first seen a century ago, started spreading in the 1970s and, currently, more than 70 mine fires are underway, polluting the air, water, and land and devastating the health of the locals.

Several conflicts centre on garbage dumping sites, such as Deonar in Mumbai, Sultanpur and Bandhwari villages near the national capital region, Kodungaiyur near Chennai, Eloor in Kerala, and villages around Bangalore. Across India, more than three million truckloads of garbage are dumped without being treated, as IndiaSpend has reported, a manifestation of growing urbanisation.

Conflicts have also erupted at construction sites of new airports, seaports, and other big infrastructure projects. The common theme running through most conflicts is a loss of the right to land or livelihoods of local communities.

Although the EJAtlas lists 220 environmental conflicts in India, there are much more. “You should realise that 220 is in proportion to population,” said Joan Martinez-Alier, Professor of Economics and Economic History at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and director of the EJAtlas project. “India has more cases than any other country because good work has been done on the EJAtlas by our partners at JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and also obviously because India is the country with the largest population in the world.”

He attributed conflicts to a growth in “social metabolism”, prompted by economic expansion. “Materials and energy are extracted from new places and transported far away. Mining expands and reaches new frontiers. Hydroelectricity expands and reaches villages in the Himalaya,” said Martinez-Alier.

Environmental conflicts are global, but India differs from other developing countries in South America or Africa on one crucial point: External trade.

“Despite being a large country, India does not import or export too much,” said Martinez-Alier. “Most of the extraction of materials in India is for internal consumption. But there are conflicts between states—sometimes about water rights. And, sometimes because some states (like Odisha, Jharkhand) become providers of raw materials for the rest of the country at very high internal social and environmental costs.” A comparison of the states shows that some of them have indeed borne a larger share of environmental conflict.

In recognition of rising environmental disputes, the government established a National Green Tribunal in 2010 to serve as a fast-track court for such disputes, but the tide of environmental conflicts is not ebbing.

“NGT has played a good role (in delivering environmental justice),” said Swapan Kumar Patra, one of the Indian contributors to the EJAtlas. In an unrelated paper, Patra and V.V. Krishna, professor at JNU and the other Indian contributor to EJAtlas write: “Since its inception, NGT has given many fast-track judgments in various cases and has passed several orders to the respective authorities like ban on illegal sand-mining, against noise pollution in Delhi, preservation of biodiversity of Western Ghat Mountains, wildlife protection in Kaziranga National Park in Assam, suspended many environmental clearances, and so on.”

However, despite NGT’s intervention and rising participation from affected locals, environmental injustice in India is on the rise. The question, however, is not how to avoid the conflicts, said Martinez-Alier, but how to profit from the awareness of so many conflicts-“in order to move to an economy which is more sustainable and also more socially just”.