If any more evidence was needed that environmental governance has reached its nadir in India, it is provided by the country’s ranking on the latest rendering of the Environment Performance Index (EPI).
We stand second from the bottom, 176 out of 177, on 47 indicators relating to environmental health, ecosystem vitality and climate change mitigation. The index is refreshed every two years. We were 176th among 180 countries in 2024 and 180th in 2022.
Obviously, for things to have descended to such depths, the environment as a priority must figure way down the agenda of central as well as state governments.
A rash of recent occurrences attests to systemic disregard, each the outcome of environmental concerns being abandoned to the elements. The deadly mudslip at the entrance of an under-construction tunnel at Kalladi in Wayanad district of Kerala on July 7 is a textbook case of infrastructure contractors paying no heed to environmental issues in landslide-prone terrain.
A mountain of excavated rubble became turgid in the rain, disintegrated and slid down a 20-degree slope, killing eight construction workers. There was mismanagement at several levels: The debris ought never to have been allowed to pile up 100 feet high; the site was not monitored during the recent spell of rain; and standing orders to clear the rubble were ignored.
Just the day before the Kalladi incident, the syndrome of infrastructure building without heed to environmental concerns was also evident in a flash flood and landslide at a hydroelectric power project at Kishtwar in the Jammu region. A cloudburst in the fragile Chenab Valley triggered a torrent of mud that buried heavy machinery at the under-construction project site. Initial reports have pinpointed poor monitoring and a failure to follow the mandatory disaster management plan.
Similarly, a day after the Kalladi mud slip, an administrative building of a waste-to-energy plant at Moshe near Pune collapsed when a mountain of garbage slid onto it, killing eight workers. Again, critical flaws in waste management infrastructure and poor environmental compliance by the local municipality were to blame.
The common thread running through these cases is that they took place adjacent to infrastructure projects. The obvious inference from them is that environment-conscious project design is not high on the state’s order of priorities even where negative outcomes are foreseeable in the immediate term and even if the potential triggers for such consequences are eminently possible to monitor through available technology.
The contractors executing the Kalladi, Moshi and Kishtwar projects could well have been sensible and sensitive to the buildup of harmful triggers, but chose to ignore them. And agencies empowered to enforce compliance did not do their job.
Given such poor performance by contractors and vigil agencies, the risks to workers building roads in the hilly terrain of Himachal Pradesh or to people living next to rubble dump sites in our cities are grave.
India’s low ranking on the EPI does not reflect a lack of capacity. It shows a lack of care, both in planning and execution.
But above all, it indicates a rapacious arrangement among government leaders, contractors and bureaucrats to build, operate and scoot, the devil take the hindmost. How else does one see the green clearance given to the Google data centre in Vizag in a matter of nine days, without carrying out the mandatory environmental impact assessment, any public consultations, or expert scrutiny?