High concentration of economic activities and consumption patterns in post-liberalisation period has led to the failure of environmental movements in India. Elucidate. (2022, 10 Marks)
In Ecology and Equity (1995), Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha divide India into omnivores, who draw on resources from everywhere, and ecosystem people, who live off local commons. The statement holds that liberalisation after 1991 enlarged and concentrated the omnivores’ demand and power, and weakened the movements that speak for ecosystem people.
The Mechanism
- Concentrated activity, a changed adversary. FDI, the SEZ Act 2005, mining auctions, ports and power plants have clustered in mineral-rich Adivasi districts. Earlier movements such as Chipko and Silent Valley faced a single public project, rested on local appeal and NGO support, and often had a sympathetic Centre. Their successors face private and foreign capital backed by state growth targets: POSCO, Vedanta at Niyamgiri and Sijimali, coal in Hasdeo.
- The growth consensus. Every major party accepted the growth-first model, so movements lost political allies. Guha calls this the backlash phase: protest recast as anti-development and even anti-national. FCRA, sedition and UAPA were turned on activists, and Greenpeace India lost its FCRA registration in 2015.
- Middle-class consumption. Demand for cars, power, housing and air-conditioning came to count as the national interest. Amita Baviskar‘s bourgeois environmentalism captures the urban variant: the middle class wants clean, green cities and evicts slums and hawkers to get them. It seldom stands with distant Adivasi struggles.
- An investor-friendly clearance regime. To attract investment the state loosened enforcement, often with little public debate, the pattern Rob Jenkins called reform by stealth:
- the EIA Notification 2006 exempted many categories from public hearings;
- the draft EIA 2020 proposed post-facto clearance and cut hearing notice from 30 to 20 days;
- Ease of Doing Business brought the online, single-window PARIVESH clearance system;
- the Jan Vishwas Act 2023 replaced jail with penalties under the Environment Protection and Air Acts;
- the Forest (Conservation) Amendment 2023 narrowed the definition of “forest”.
- The result. Indicators have worsened despite the laws of the 1970s and 1980s: toxic air, falling groundwater, lost forest. India ranks 176th of 177 in the 2026 Environmental Performance Index.
Why “Failure” Overstates It
The period also produced the Forest Rights Act 2006 and the NGT (2010). Niyamgiri’s gram sabhas (2013), POSCO’s exit (2017) and the Supreme Court’s refusal to reopen Sterlite (2024) were post-liberalisation wins. The draft EIA 2020 stalled under a flood of public objections. M. K. Ranjitsinh (2024) recognised a right against climate change.
Conclusion
Concentrated growth has not so much defeated the movements as changed the terms on which they win. They win locally and in procedure: a clearance quashed, a gram sabha upheld. They lose structurally, because the growth model keeps generating the next project.