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interview with Sunita Narain

The IndiaCIA The World Factbook

YI: So, how do you deal with such a contradiction: an opportunity and a threat?

Narain: I think India is learning to find a new way to do its development. That's the biggest challenge that we have. Unfortunately, what's happened in the world is that there has been--since the collapse of the Soviet Union--in a sense, a collapse of another way of thinking. All in all, we believe there is only one way to develop, which is to industrialize and to organize, and that will lead to poverty reduction. But I believe, coming from the environmental area, that India will have to do things differently, that India will have to leapfrog, that India will have to manage its waters so that it can actually manage the threat of pollution and also the opportunity that water provides, to be able to manage it for the livelihoods of poor people. And you can do both. You can use water in a way that you can decentralize water to every home in India, every village in India should have its rainwater, should use that water as a starting point to build an economic base.
On the other hand, your cities and your industries, as they grow, must make sure they do not pollute water. So, they must actually recycle every drop of sewage and there you learn from the most modern of modern technologies, and the other we learn from the most traditional of traditional technologies. And in all that, India must re-invent, re-design its own way. And that's where Indians have to think, they have to have the courage and the confidence to think differently.

YI: And to think differently means a new paradigm. Wouldn't that necessitate an information and an awareness campaign?

Narain: Absolutely. It needs a lot of things. A new paradigm is not a radically different paradigm for what you have to do. I think that's something we must understand. I'm not talking about revolution and I'm not talking about a complete change. I'm talking about India learning to manage its own challenges. The challenge of poverty on the one hand and on growth on the other hand, and India managing to do that in a way that we can actually find answers, perhaps old answers that we can test them in our own circumstances. And for that we need a huge information campaign, but you also need a campaign to actually change the minds of people so that they can think differently. I keep emphasizing this because I find that most of our planners have become like cabbages. You tend to do what everyone else has done, and you're very worried about doing anything differently, because nobody has done it before.

YI: The herd mentality?

Narain: Exactly. I can give you an example. You're sitting in a city which is extremely polluted a few years ago. We were motorizing, there were large numbers of cars in Delhi. We registered something like 400 to 500 vehicles a day in Delhi polluting, too poor a country to be able to use what Japan does--which is to phase out old technologies and old vehicles because we just cannot afford it. So you have vehicles in the city but you have large numbers of vehicles, but you have huge pollution. How would you deal with it? What we did was to suggest that we needed to leapfrog. We said what we wanted were buses. What we wanted were buses running on clean fuel, which is gas, compressed natural gas. Now, when we said this, about five years ago, everyone said 'but that's impossible, that's utopian, it doesn't happen in the real world. No part in the world is there a plan for a whole city to run entirely on gas.'
Well, if they haven't, it's because they haven't needed to. But we have to. And it is a true challenge to argue and to fight and to push and to scream and say, we have to do it because the health of people in Delhi was being compromised. After that, we now have, today, 10,000 buses, we have 100,000 vehicles running on compressed natural gas. Delhi's air is substantially cleaner, but it's still polluted. Now we are arguing that the next leapfrog is going to come in the public transports. So, why can't you design a city pretty much like Singapore, which doesn't run on cars. And everyone is turning around to us and saying, 'Oh that doesn't happen in the real world.' That's really what I mean.

YI: The other side of environmental conservation is usually the business sector. Do you think there will ever be a balance between resources management and the need for the business sector? Certainly we are need both of them.

Narain: Absolutely, and I definitely think there can be. I am a very strong advocate of saying that business and environment can also go together. But it will demand us, as civil society, to actually push the envelope. We must ask for more, because if we don't set up a goal post for business, business cannot do what is also possible or what is desirable. For instance, if you take something like the mining sector, which is one of our biggest area. I believe very strongly that we really need mining, we need business, but I also argue that business is extracting resources but not returning anything to the place from where it is taking its raw material. It is displacing community, it is dispossessing people and it is destroying the environment. Now, what is the cost if business was to invest into that environment? How much would it cost for business? You will find it's not a lot. It's not so much that is unbearable. It's about shifting the emphasis. This cost has to be paid for, because if you don't, then you will degrade the environment and you will marginalize the poor. And that is not good for business. I think there is a way of thinking about it, whether it's pollution, we fight with industries but we also engage with industries, because I believe that industries can find answers and have to find answers.

YI: So, your relations are good with the industries?

Narain: It's what I call a relationship of mutual disrespect, but and respect. I think in this industry as in most other industries in India, and I can only speak of India because I know it best.
India is a democracy, and one of the things that has to be recognized is that each one of us has legitimate status for work as much as industry is needed in India for growth, for prosperity, people like us are needed to be able to put forward a point of view so that that growth and prosperity can indeed be sustainable and indeed can be effective. So, I believe that our role in democracy is important and I think Indian industry recognizes it. We've had a number of campaigns, we have campaigns against air pollution, we have campaigns against polluted water, we have a campaign against the over use of pesticides and toxins, but these are campaigns which are directly challenging industry but we also find that there are many industrial leaders who will stand apart and say, 'this campaign actually helps me to be a leader in my field, because I can do something which is good for the country and good for the environment.

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