Time to rethink our future

Twenty years have passed since the World Commission on Environment and Development (known as Brundtland Commission, 1987) made the term ‘sustainable development’ a contemporary development imperative. The commission report Our Common Future formulated ‘global agenda for change’ and proposed long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by 2000. We have not only missed a deadline but also the key message from the first global concern on environment and development linkages. The debate over the definition of sustainable development still rages but the reality of poverty born out of bad environment remains. The tussle between environment and development is arguably the most challenging contemporary issue.

We tracked the Indian government’s planning documents in the last 20 years to ascertain whether the message of the Brundtland report had been incorporated into our development policies. We wanted to check whether sustainable environment had been made the tenet of development. A comparison of the 7th Five-Year Plan, coinciding with the arrival of the report, with the latest approach paper to the 11th Five-Year Plan throws some interesting facts. Firstly, development in India suffers from misunderstanding. Secondly, as a result of this, environment remains a much neglected development tool.

The 7th Five-Year Plan (1987-1992) represented a comprehensive strategy for agricultural development aimed at achieving an annual agricultural growth rate of 4 per cent per. It spoke about institutional changes, including land reforms, and extending the Green Revolution to eastern parts of the country and the dry land areas. This was to reduce regional imbalance in development and to eliminate poverty. It set a target of the year 2000 to achieve zero poverty, near full employment and access to food.

Twenty years later, the 11th plan (2007-12) approach paper has acknowledged that rapid economic growth in the last decade has failed to be sufficiently inclusive, particularly after the mid-1990s. “Agriculture lost its growth momentum and subsequently entered a near crisis situation,” the document observes. It has again set a target of 4 per cent agriculture growth to fix the problem of poverty. The paper hawks for a second Green Revolution and suggests that the dry lands be exploited to ensure food security in India. The approach paper, paraphrasing the 7th plan document, seeks to reduce disparities across regions and communities by ensuring access to basic physical infrastructure as well as health and education services for all.

It is a fact, which is too obvious to analyse. We are in a misdirected development wrap. Notwithstanding the Brundtland commission’s 20 years, India needs to rethink its future -- vis-à-vis the debate over environment and development -- for its own self. For India can’t afford a fine distinction between environment and development.