TACKLING THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
THOSE WHO COULD, FLED. EACH SUMMER, AS THE NORTHERN Gangetic plains sweltered and temperatures reached as high as 124 degrees Fahrenheit (51 degrees Celsius), the mountains grew intensely appealing. Hindu pilgrims, for example, found this the ideal time for a devotional walk, or yatra—in effect, a delightful hike in the hills of Kashmir. Throngs of devotees—600,000 each summer—ascended to a valley for a three-day walk to a holy cave called Amarnath. One year the walk was briefly delayed as soldiers checked for landmines or infiltrators from Pakistan; then a mass of happy pilgrims lurched on. Barefoot and bedraggled yatris, including some scrawny men who were near-naked and puffed on pipes of cannabis, walked while tinkling bells. They passed far larger numbers of city boys and middle-aged men with pot-bellies who lurched ahead, then sagged down for frequent rests. This was a friendly sort of religious stroll, an extended picnic for the masses. Chattering blended with the hiss of wind in the trees. Chaucer, a millennium or so after writing his Canterbury Tales, would have reveled in the scene. Young couples walked hand-in-hand, pausing for a smooch or a selfie in the shade of a tree. One man staggered in such tiny, agonized steps it was hard to imagine he would get far before the snow returned. The landscape was serene: white peaks above intense green valleys with glacial lakes.
As a reminder that this was also a war zone, soldiers were everywhere. Cliff-faces were daubed with painted instructions—“slow and steady,” “respect nature”—and the names and insignia of army battalions. Marksmen crouched in nests of sandbags, atop ridges, their red communication wires thrown upward along cliffs and around waterfalls. Even at fifteen thousand feet, soldiers guarded field kitchens that turned out noodles, fried food, tea, and starchy sweets. Militants, trained in Pakistan, had previously attacked the walkers, but in most years the threats were more mundane: altitude, bad weather, poor health. Some 130 of my fellow yatris died that year, victims of accidents, heart attacks, exhaustion, complications from altitude, or sudden flooding rain. Many were ill-prepared, in T-shirts and flip-flops, unconcerned about the mountain weather, trusting fate for their well-being.
The walk was a delight, shared with both pilgrims and the Kashmiri men who rented out tents, convivial in one another’s company. It was a thrill to be a part of it and to reach the cave at Amarnath. Revered by Hindus, especially by couples ready to start a family, the cave contained a lingam, a phallus-shaped lump of ice that symbolizes fertility. Only one thing marred the expedition: the valley around the cave was all but trashed. It was a puzzle hard to explain, a wider problem for India: the disregard for public goods, shared spaces, air and water. The last approach was up a narrow valley to the cave, surrounded by jagged peaks, beside a rotten glacier-turned-rubbish dump, on a path strewn with plastic, paper, tins, drinks cartons, and mounds of waste half-buried in the ice. Pilgrims, some atop donkeys or ponies, scattered plastic potato-chip and candy packets, empty bottles, and other litter as they plodded on. Almost nobody worried about soiling a place considered sacred, or that they visited because it was—or had been—pristine. A few Kashmiri men had been hired to gather some trash. They filled sacks with it and hurled them into streams, or partly buried rubbish in the snow. Near the cave itself, the valley was crowded with tarpaulin-covered shacks, stalls, ponies, and pilgrims. It had the despoiled air of a refugee camp: paths were slippery with mud and excrement. The sky filled with acrid smoke from damp, smouldering piles and half-burned plastic on cooking fires. Helicopters buzzed noisily just overhead, whisking the wealthy and unfit back and forth. After years of pilgrimages the effect was to leave this part of the valley as an extended rubbish dump, some of it melting into the river.
What was true near Amarnath applied in much of India, where the environmental strain was often overwhelming. China’s experiences of ecological ruin, along with soaring rates of cancer, asthma, and other woes, constituted a stark warning of what India—much more densely populated, on average, than China—faced as it tried to industrialize. It was quite possible Indians would suffer even more than the Chinese from pollution, shortages of fresh water, and the effects of climate change. One sorry example was a site even more revered by Hindus: the River Ganges, the holiest, longest, and probably filthiest river in India. The faithful dunked themselves in it, sipped its murky water, called it their mother, offered it flowers and rose petals, set afloat on it little oil lamps, and generally celebrated it as a life giver. In its upper reaches it remained relatively clean. In the foothills of the mountains the water could seem icy and clear, as fish and other wildlife flourished. But downstream, in the densely populated flatlands, rivers that fed the Ganges were almost literally sewers, with darkened, sludgy liquid, as farmers extracted huge quantities of water for their fields. What remained was topped up with mostly untreated industrial and human waste. Any boat trip along the Yamuna River in Delhi left you gagging at the smell of feces as untreated effluent spilled from pipes into thick, black water that bubbled and fizzed. A yellow, foamy scum gathered atop the river, creating an apocalyptic-looking bubble bath. Not too far downstream, at Agra, the white marble of the Taj Mahal temple began to turn green—the result of clouds of insects from the nearby pesticide- and sewage-infused river defecating on a great symbol of India.
Equally striking was the poisoned Ganges when it reached Varanasi, farther downstream. An authority on the river, a man in white kurta pajamas, a brown waistcoat and square glasses, was Dr. Vishwambhar Nath Mishra, the priest of the Sankat Mochan Temple. His temple was on a ghat, a built-up riverbank, in the old city. For decades Mishra’s foundation had conducted daily tests of the contents of the river water that were both more accurate and more worrying than official figures. Mishra’s assistant dropped a garland of orange marigolds over my head and presented a sheet of paper with statistics describing a water sample gathered, just outside, a few hours before. Mishra leaned forward and tapped the paper: “These show the septic conditions of the river, the fecal count today is at least ten times above the safe level, our river has become a sewer,” he said. “You should not treat the Ganga as a flush-toilet.”
The river accepted much of north India’s waste. Tens of millions of people lived near its banks, hundreds of millions in the territory it flowed through. At best only a tenth of their sewage was treated. The national census in 2011 found nearly five thousand towns and cities without even a rudimentary sewerage network. Streams, small rivers, and the land were all polluted. Varanasi was also the most auspicious place for many Hindus to be cremated: every year thirty thousand corpses, many only partly burnt, were dropped into the Ganges at this spot alone. Upstream were industrial cities: run-off and heavy metals from leather tanneries, discharges from factories, paper mills, and chemical plants all ended up in the same coffee-colored water. Farmers’ pesticides and fertilizers sloshed in, too. During the monsoon, when the river burst its banks, the few sewage treatment plants were swamped. In the long dry months, when even the mighty Mother Ganges became a more modest waterway, the stench could be overpowering.
Modi had pledged to Mishra, and then to the public, that he would clean the Ganges. He then launched a campaign to improve hygiene in the rest of India. He appointed a minister, Uma Bharti, to take charge of the sacred river. Some mud was cleared from the ghats on its banks, in a token gesture. Experts and donors offered help: Australians would relate their experiences of cleaning the Murray River; the British talked of the Thames, in London, which once stank so badly parliament had to close. An expert on water, Asit Biswas, described how Singapore successfully cleaned its waters and told of his frequent requests from Indian political leaders to repeat that process in India. But Modi offered mostly gestures. He appeared on television wielding a broom, sweeping streets in a corner of Delhi, urging celebrities—in politics, sport, movies—to set similar examples. He bragged in the most vainglorious way about what he would achieve. “Ma Ganga has called me,” he said shortly after winning the election in 2014. “She has decided some responsibilities for me. Ma Ganga is screaming for help, she is saying I hope one of my sons gets me out of this filth,” he said. “It is possible it has been decided by God for me to serve Ma Ganga.” He pledged that $3 billion would be spent to clean the river.
Some personal behavior changed because of the overall campaign. In Lodhi Gardens, a beautifully tended park in New Delhi, you might see a well-dressed young man stoop to pick up an empty plastic bottle, discarded by someone else, and drop it in a bin. The railways, notoriously dirty, were spruced up somewhat; the stations were kept a bit cleaner. Modi used his first speech as prime minister from the ramparts of the Red Fort, in Delhi, to tell each individual to take responsibility and reduce filth. A moment of hope existed. Yet after the applause at the end of that speech, the crowds dispersed and revealed a carpet of litter—empty bottles, snack packets, candy wrappings, rags—discarded even as the listeners cheered his words about a clean India.
Private homes were almost always pristine, even in poor areas. But unlike villages in rural Africa, where the shared areas are often neatly swept and cared for, Indian villages were often unclean. Overcrowded cities were routinely filthy. The cost of this was evident. Awful hygiene was a big reason why nutrition levels in north India remained just about the world’s worst, with Indian children skinnier than those in poorer countries. It was not unusual to see human waste on pavements, railway tracks, and in parks. UNICEF, the United Nations agency for children, launched an animated campaign song titled “Take the Poo to the Loo.” Others campaigned to improve public hygiene; for example, politicians said that building toilets was more important than putting up more temples. Yet there were times when India seemed to be buried under a layer of trash and waste. In one dispiriting visit to a northern town, Gorakhpur, I saw children playing cricket in a field that looked entirely covered by plastic and other junk, where cows chewed on plastic bags. The rubbish at their feet, lifted by gusts of wind, flapped like the beating wings of dying birds.
Arun Jaitley, India’s finance minister, pledged that by 2019—to mark 150 years after the birth of Mohandas Gandhi—nobody should be defecating in the open. It was a wildly ambitious goal (and undoubtedly would not be met), but also a dismally basic one. Politicians made occasional strong speeches on public hygiene, but few came up with any detailed policies or described how effective implementation would fix the problem. The fate of the Ganges told the broader story. Those foreign advisers and experts soon said they doubted that progress on cleaning India would happen any faster than it had under previous governments.
As late as 2015, around 130 million Indian households lacked toilets. Nearly three-quarters of villagers still relieved themselves behind bushes or in fields. Even in towns, near the plushest homes, latrines were missing—or were not maintained—for the poor. Immediately beside the American embassy school where my children went daily, in the swankiest part of Delhi, a slum existed without sewerage or any proper housing. Children in rags defecated on the roadside. Wealthy parents at the school would have helped to pay to improve the slum, in the interests of their families, but for decades the slum-dwellers had been denied legal status to stay. Installing basic infrastructure was apparently forbidden, in case it conferred to slum-dwellers the right to remain. If the problem could not be fixed there, it was hard to imagine the rest of north India tackling it quickly.
Campaigners kept attention on the problem. Of the many splendid tourist sites in Delhi, for example, none quite matched the eccentric brilliance of the International Toilet Museum. The founder was Bindeshwar Pathak, a toilet enthusiast with round glasses and frizzy dark hair, in his seventies, who described himself as “a missionary of sanitation.” Pathak headed Sulabh International, a non-governmental organization that promoted public hygiene. He displayed diverse contraptions in his sprawling museum: solar-powered solid-waste incinerators, waterless flushers, cooking stoves powered by bio-gas, human-sized statues made of plastic-coated excreta. Most striking was a photo of a Harappan water closet—a modern-looking toilet, with piped water, from the nearby Indus Valley. The civilization that built it existed 4,500 years ago.
Pathak wanted every policymaker to study that history and said Indians should get to work digging basic latrines, not fuss about space missions: “We are trying to go to Mars, yet we have no money for public health,” he said. Attitudes changed slowly. Occasional articles in the press claimed that women in villages were refusing marriages until their fiancés provided a toilet in their family home. But poor understanding about basic procedures like hand-washing meant that children were ingesting bacteria and worms that infected their intestines. Around 120,000 of them died yearly from diarrhea, an entirely preventable cause of death. Far more suffered problems such as enteropathy, which prevents the body from using calories and nutrients from food; the resulting poor nutrition, in turn, hampers brain development. Fixing the problem, as China did decades earlier, should have been a priority for India’s government officials. But few seemed interested.
Individuals could have done far more to take it upon themselves to dig and use latrines, or at least to maintain those that had already been built by the state. Yet by 2010 or so, more Indian families owned mobile phones—and more would eventually have smartphones—than had toilets. That suggested the most pressing problem was to educate and change attitudes. It was a sensitive topic, one of culture and religion, about behaviors notably seen in poor Hindu households. Ordinary Indians could be urged to change simple habits, especially those who might be influenced by tradition: the Laws of Manu, a text from two thousand years ago, had encouraged defecation far away from the home—to avoid impurity, for example, at a cooking place. Surveys by excellent institutions, such as RICE (Research Institute for Compassionate Economics), an economics think-tank in Delhi, suggested that many rural Indians still had a lingering preference for defecating outdoors, even if a latrine existed at home. North Indian and Nepalese villagers talked of relieving themselves in the open as wholesome, healthy, and social. Men sometimes scorned the idea of using latrines, implying it was unmasculine to do so, and suggesting latrines were for use by the infirm or the elderly.
Culture and religion mattered, and a lingering belief in caste played a role. By tradition, society’s lowliest, the Dalits, had cleared away human waste, helping to generate a taboo among some in confronting the problem. A clear difference in behavior also existed between religions. Since at least the 1960s Hindu families had suffered from higher rates of child mortality than Muslim ones—even though Muslims typically were poorer, less educated, and had less access to clean water. By 2014, for every 100 children, 1.7 more Muslim than Hindu ones survived to be five years old, a big gap. Dean Spears, a researcher at RICE, argued that this could be explained only by differing sanitation habits. A 2005 government survey found that 67 percent of all Hindu households practiced open defecation, compared with just 42 percent of Muslim ones. (In the rare places where there was more open defecation among Muslims than Hindus, the mortality gap was reversed.) The most urgent priority was not to order more concrete latrines to be built but, rather, to tackle attitudes and education.
Other problems reflected a lack of individual care for the common good, as in Amarnath. Progressively more foul air choked Delhi and many northern cities; the smog was often even worse than in China’s cities, and brought a high human cost. If you rubbed your skin after a short walk, your fingers were left coated with sooty black smudges, an indication of what you had also breathed in. During a shower, black water ran off your body. By one estimate Delhi smog was killing 10,500 people a year by 2015; others put the figure closer to 50,000. Studies of the air suggested that 200 tons of arsenic, black carbon, formaldehyde, nickel, sulphur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide were falling on Delhi every day. That fug triggered heart and asthma attacks, including among the young and apparently healthy; tiny particulates caused cancer in lungs. Winter brought the sootiest air, milky yellow light at noon, a carpet of grit and dust that settled on everything. Even in cabinet ministers’ offices, grand government rooms with high ceilings, the smog was visible indoors. Flying over north India—or Pakistan and Bangladesh—in winter, I noticed that the entire territory was trapped under a blanket of brown, wet air, the product of cooking fires, stubble burnt in fields, brick kilns, factories, coal-powered plants, and millions of vehicles. Winter inversions meant a lid of cold air that pressed the blanket low and unmoving.
Yet India had shown it could act. For roughly a decade after 2001, some hope—and blue skies—came to Delhi after courts forced 100,000 buses, taxis, and auto-rickshaws to switch from diesel engines to ones run on liquefied gas. A daytime ban on lorries within the city cut pollution. The annual average level of sulphur dioxide fell from 14 micrograms per cubic meter to just five in 2016. Much else got worse, however. Levels of nitrogen oxide almost doubled, from 29 micrograms to 55. A measure of the average level of particulate matter known as PM 10 (dust with a diameter less than 10 micron-meters) rose from 120 to 261, far above the supposedly safe limit of 100. It was not unusual to see PM 10 levels of 750 in winter. (By comparison, PM 10 levels in Los Angeles were considered terrible when they averaged 88, in 1988.) Even scarier were the really tiny particles, PM 2.5, which settled deep in the lungs. The agreed-upon safe limit for these was 60, but official Delhi monitors at times indicated levels of 900 or higher.
The huge annual holiday of Diwali, the festival of light each autumn, is greeted with deafening firework displays that continue for days. The result is sulphur and gunpowder smoke that also lingers for days and marks the start of the worst season of pollution. Meanwhile, Punjabi farmers, west of Delhi, burn stubble. NASA one year released pictures showing thousands of orange dots, blazes over much of north India late in the year. In November 2016 thousands of schools in Delhi were closed because air pollution had reached exceptionally dangerous levels. Indoor smoke is probably more deadly yet: fumes from cooking fires, often burning straw-filled dung cakes, kill hundreds of thousands of people a year.
The government could fix some of these problems while also making India richer. Rolling out a reliable electricity grid, and getting more people to cook on gas stoves rather than on dung, wood, or coal fires, would improve human health (depending on how the power was generated) and bring about a cleaner environment. Brick kilns could be powered by electricity instead of charcoal. Shifting more goods from overloaded lorries to trains would also help. Paying farmers to stop burning stubble would make sense, too. In 2016, the Delhi government experimented with limits on the number of cars on the road, to little effect. But what really mattered were heavy vehicles: Delhi’s biggest highways, in the middle of the night, carried immense lines of juddering trucks, all belching sooty, sulphurous diesel smoke. Often the fuel was adulterated with cheap kerosene, causing it to be even more polluting. That helps to explain why, in 2014, India had thirteen of the twenty most polluted cities on Earth, according to the World Health Organization (WHO)—and four of the remainder were in Pakistan and Bangladesh, making South Asian air exceptionally polluted.1
The WHO reckoned that almost every Indian was breathing unsafe air. A study published in 2012, but drawing on data gathered as long as a decade earlier, found Delhi children’s lungs to be unusually small and filled with sputum.2 Children also showed high blood pressure and other worrying symptoms. Outdoor and indoor pollution causes an estimated 1.6 million early deaths of Indians every year. Drawing on work from China, Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago said that the cost of air pollution is immense.3 He reckoned that 660 million Indians breath the dirtiest air, in the north, and live on average five and a half fewer years than if their air were clean. Greenstone calculated that pollution limits working lives, too, and thus could be said to have already cost 2.1 billion life-years in India—something economists usually do not measure. Other direct costs are slowly being understood better. One study of agriculture in India from 1980 to 2010 suggested that soaring ozone levels and other air pollution explained why wheat yields were one-third lower than would have been expected.
Official plans exist to improve the air quality, but Modi has also proposed to make India an industrial powerhouse, a workshop of the world. Manufacturing requires energy, and much of that would inevitably be generated by more coal-powered plants. Despite talk of cleaner supplies, the reality is that as of 2016 India relied on coal for at least half of its electricity, and many of its power stations lacked even the most basic scrubbers on chimneys to remove particulates. As for transport, fuel standards were kept low because raising them would have made engines, and cars, more expensive for consumers—thus affecting sales. Various states also failed to cooperate. Delhi enforced higher fuel standards than nearby states, but as a result many drivers bought cheaper and dirtier fuel outside of the city.
India has some good laws (though these are badly implemented) on protecting forests and wildlife. Tree plantations are growing, though more important old-growth forests have shrunk. Some impressive activists and academics have insisted that more attention must be paid to these issues, but India’s government, especially under Modi, has bullied groups like Greenpeace that protested. Huge wind farms did get built—for example, in Tamil Nadu and in Gujarat. Producing solar electricity in sunny India has become almost as cheap—about 9 US cents per kilowatt-hour in some places, and falling fast—as importing coal to burn for electricity. India has cut subsidies on some fossil fuels, such as petrol and diesel, and on cooking gas, and plans to do so for kerosene. That would bring real environmental gains. Some 115,000 mobile-phone towers once powered by diesel generators were ordered to be changed to clean energy. In Uttar Pradesh, in 2013, in remote areas you could see phone companies fitting solar plants for their towers instead, and then selling surplus clean electricity to light up nearby homes and businesses using micro-grids.
But the pace of action on protecting and cleaning the environment is too slow. Nor has India been especially responsive in tackling climate change. Individual Indians have a low impact on the Earth’s climate, but as of 2015 the country as a whole was already the third-largest emitter on the planet. Each Indian, on average, dumps just 1.6 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere yearly, the same level that China had reached in 1980. China, per person, dumped five times more carbon than India in 2015. Americans, per person, emitted ten times more. But as India gets richer, it will inevitably emit more carbon and add to processes that make the climate less stable. By 2030 India is likely to triple its total emissions of carbon dioxide, to about 5.3 billion metric tons a year, with each person on average dumping 3.6 metric tons. As a result, India is on track to becoming the single biggest emitter of carbon dioxide on Earth. The consequences are likely to be tragic.
One fear is that the annual monsoon in South Asia will get less predictable—a dire prospect when roughly half the farmland in India still uses no irrigation. More rain may drop on India in a warmer climate, but it also might come down intensely or in unpredictable periods, bringing floods and damaging crops. Heavier bursts, combined with storms, would be devastating for the poorest. Between the heavy downpours, long periods of drought could become the norm. In 2016 an early-summer drought and heatwave in parts of India turned out to be the worst experienced in decades: several big reservoirs were almost entirely empty by May that year, leaving over 300 million people with little water. Record temperatures were set. A heatwave the year before had killed over 2,500 people. Those events might have resulted from an unusually strong El Niño effect in the Pacific rather than from a changing climate. But it is possible that they were compounded by climate change—and they gave a hint of the uncertainty to come. As the Indian landmass became warmer in the summers, the way it drew moisture from the oceans showed signs of changing. Given the water scarcity in India, already one of the thirstiest countries on the planet, that bodes ill for the future.
There is more that India can do to improve its environment. Nothing has made a tragedy of the commons inevitable in India, however big its population. Incomes can rise alongside improvements to the environment. Investing in—or persuading outsiders to pay for—a high-quality, efficient national grid and getting all Indians access to reliable electricity would be crucial for the country’s further development. These measures can also help to clean up the country, if people are diverted from dirtier forms of heating, cooking, and lighting. Getting clean sources of energy to power the grid will also be essential. Many cities have set about building decent public transport, including excellent metro systems, as in Delhi. Most important is raising awareness about what problems have to be tackled. One test is whether the country will become cleaner for yatris hiking to the Amarnath temple or for pilgrims trekking to the Ganges.
India can avoid the sort of environmental disaster that China inflicted on itself as it entered its primetime years—specifically, as incomes rose and education improved. In theory, the rulers of a democracy should be far more responsive than those in an authoritarian state, as citizens grumble and NGOs stir up anger about pollution. In the next decade or two it is perfectly likely that opposition politicians, probably beginning in Delhi, will take up such issues—for example, the need to tackle smog—as a way of winning wide support. As scientists produce ever more convincing evidence of the costs of air pollution, those who live in Delhi—including foreigners who have moved there for work—increase their demands for action. Unlike in China, where officials try to deny the severity of pollution by hiding data about it, in India the facts will be made public. India began with a clean-up campaign in the mid-2010s that can be followed by higher fuel standards for cars, the spread of more public transport, and higher standards for factory and kiln emissions. Because India developed its industry and transport systems later than many countries, it has a chance to avoid some of the worst mistakes made by others before it.
Efforts to clean up the environment, like those intended to improve prospects for women in India, will no doubt come more slowly than would be ideal. But politicians will act more quickly if they hear that voters care about such issues. The reshaping of Indian democracy is possible, especially as voters in towns and cities get increasing sway. Indeed, if the influence of old, feudal-type dynasties really can be reduced—if politicians (and crony-capitalists) understand that outright corruption will be punished more severely than before, and if voters demand better outcomes for all (not just for favored voter blocks)—perhaps it will make sense to talk of Indian democracy as entering its Primetime.