On the Environment and the Economics of Losing Hair

Dil ki basti purani Dilli hai, Jo bhi guzra hai usne loota hai --Bashir Badr.

My parents moved to Delhi in the second half of 2009. Since then, every Diwali, I go to Delhi. In recent years, during these trips, I could even feel smoke inside my room. That has been the level of pollution in the national capital.

Now, this did not happen in Mumbai—at least not until recently. Over the last couple of years, I have felt smoke inside my room in Mumbai as well. While I am no expert, my breathing tells me that pollution in Mumbai has gone up.

A recent report in The Times of India explained a major reason. Just in 2021, 2,743 building project files were approved by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai). This helped the municipality earn Rs 15,000 crore in premium fees from the developers.

Of course, all the construction that has emerged as a result of these approvals has worsened the air quality in Mumbai. Over and above this, other infrastructure projects involving digging and construction are happening all over the megapolis.

In all this comes the news that the Maharashtra government has plans to develop the Aarey Colony and “is in the process of appointing a consultant who will prepare a master plan”. A report in The Hindustan Times points out that the government has plans “to monetize the land parcels in Aarey Colony and also develop it as a tourism spot”.

The green cover of the Aarey Colony is often referred to as the lungs of Mumbai and is one of the few big green patches remaining in the city. As Bill Gates writes in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: “In preindustrial times—before the mid-18th century or so—the earth’s carbon cycle was probably roughly in balance; that is, plants and other things absorbed about as much carbon dioxide as was emitted.”

But that’s not the case now. Hence, more trees in a city is always a great idea, especially in a city where the green cover has come down over the years. A July 2020 report in The Hindustan Times cites a study to state that from 1988 to 2018, Mumbai has seen a “42.5% decline in urban green cover”.

Nonetheless, Mumbai also struggles with the lack of land and more and more people coming to the city in search of economic opportunities. Aarey Colony is also one of the last remaining big patches of land that hasn’t yet been totally concretized. Hence, there is always a temptation for the state government to do something with it.

Now, Mumbai is not the only city struggling to balance the inverse relationship that seems to have emerged between the environment and economic growth. Take the case of Bengaluru. As the city expanded, lakes were covered up by builders, and homes were built on top of them. In Hyderabad, hillocks have been flattened to build homes and roads. In Delhi and the National Capital Region, the Aravalli Range has been flattened to build homes and other infrastructure. At the same time, homes have been built on the floodplains of the Yamuna. As I said earlier, I am not an expert in this area, but every large city in India will have its share of such stories.

And all this has happened over a period of time. The lakes of Bengaluru have been gradually filled up over the years. The land inside the Aarey Colony in Mumbai wasn’t all given up in a day.

In fact, Jonathan Aldred offers a very interesting analogy in Licence to be Bad – How Economics Corrupted Us: “If a man loses all his hair little by little over time, each hair lost does not make enough difference to turn him bald, so how does he go bald?... Each individual contribution seems to make no difference, yet together they bring about a significant change.” Tell me about it.

Aldred also offers a more practical example: “Imagine some large area of land which you perceive as ‘unspoilt’ – perhaps a national park. Bit by bit, the park is developed, with a few sensitively designed houses spread about and some small access roads. Slowly, the houses and roads accumulate. Eventually, most visitors decide the park is ‘spoilt’, but exactly when did that happen? How much development is compatible with leaving the park unspoilt?”

As Aldred further points out: “A series of negligible harms can add up to something substantial, even if each harm is truly imperceptible [emphasis in the original].” Our cities have been going through the same phenomenon. A July 2023 news report in The Hindu quotes Dr. Prakash Chauhan, director of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), as saying: “If I talk only about the statistics which we have derived using our satellites, we have measured that since 1965 in Bengaluru as we speak today, there are almost 65 lakes which have disappeared over a period of time.” Slowly and gradually. It’s almost like one lake at a time.

Or take the case of the shrinking of the Aravalli mountain range. As a September 2015 report in The Times of India points out: “The range has shrunk by 40% over the last four decades, from 10,462 sq km in 1972-75 to 6,116 sq km today.” Among other things, the mountain range checks the movement of sand from the Thar Desert to Delhi, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.

Srinagar’s famous Dal Lake seems to have met a similar fate. As a March 2023 report on moneycontrol.com points out: “According to a 2018 report by the Dredging Corporation of India, the famous tourist spot’s size has decreased from 22 sq km to 10 sq km (The lake’s original size was 75 sq km around AD 1200).”

Indeed, the slowness with which this happens essentially ensures that the degradation continues. A few years back, while building a metro shed inside the Aarey Colony, it was argued that “only 2% of Aarey land is going to be used for the project”. Two percent on its own doesn’t sound much, but what needs to be kept in mind here is that the government has taken away land from Aarey Colony over the years for several projects, including the Film City. The land for Film City was allocated in 1977.

And it didn’t stop at this. A November 2019 report in Scroll points out: “In 1999, as much as 240 acres of Aarey land was sold to Royal Palms, a real estate company that has built a luxury residential township, complete with a golf course, within Aarey.”

Further, an October 2019 report in India Today points out: “In 2010, a plan for expansion of the existing Byculla Zoo was proposed. This expansion had to cover parts of the Aarey forest. In June this year, the government cleared about 40 hectares of the Aarey forest to build the extended zoo without enclosures.” An October 2023 report in the Mid-day points out that Aarey was set to lose another 1,500 sq m of land to a CNG fuel station.

Dear reader, apologies for bombarding you with so many media reports, but I guess you can now see how this dynamic plays out, slowly, allowing politicians, builders and bureaucrats to argue that “small developments make no difference” to the environment. The trouble is that these small developments never seem to stop.

The question is, why does this happen? Why has the number of lakes in Bengaluru come down? Why has the Aravalli range shrunk? Why do we see fewer hills in Hyderabad? And why is the Aarey Colony in Mumbai shrinking?

Before I start, I think I need to say this—the problem we are talking about is complex, and generalizations don’t work well in such cases—and I am trying to generalize here. So, the way to look at this is that whatever I am going to say is perhaps just one point in this rather complex problem. I am trying to look at the aggregate here; the local details will vary. So, dear reader, pardon my ignorance as and when it comes out.

Let’s start with the city of Bengaluru. The population in the city has exploded in the last four to five decades. A quaint pensioners’ town has been turned into a megapolis. According to the census of 2011, the city had a population of a little over 8.4 million. By now, it would have easily crossed 10 million.

The population explosion happened primarily because many information technology (IT) companies decided to set up shop in the city. Bengaluru became a cluster of IT companies.

When this happened, engineers, MBAs and others from all across the country took up jobs in the city. This created more jobs as drivers, maids, cooks, cleaners, plumbers, masons, electricians, mechanics, delivery people, and general helpers, were required. This attracted more people to the city. And to accommodate all of them, the city had to expand. In the process, the lakes were covered, and homes were built.

Outsiders who moved to Bengaluru did so because there was an economic opportunity in the form of employment. But they were not the only ones who spotted an opportunity. So did many firms and politicians backing those firms, who realized that homes would be needed to house all these people coming in, as well as the expanding population.

As Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write in Nudge—The Final Edition: “Markets provide strong incentives for firms to cater to the demands of consumers, and firms will compete to meet those demands, whether or not those demands represent the wisest choices.” And so, the lakes of Bengaluru got covered up.

Like Bengaluru is an IT cluster, so is Hyderabad. The dynamic that got the lakes of Bengaluru covered has led to the hillocks of Hyderabad being flattened as the city has expanded to take in more people.

Or take the case of Pune, which is an education cluster. Students from all across the country come to the city to study. Education institutes have expanded and gone to the outskirts of the city, where some have even been built on hills.

In Mumbai, as the city has expanded beyond the island and its suburbs, buildings have been built on top of flood plains. Further, walls have been built, constricting the flow of several rivers. Clearly, economic opportunity beats the need to care for our environment.

Another point here is that economic activity and opportunity in India are limited to a few big cities. As Ashok Kumar Bhattacharya wrote in a recent column in the Business Standard: “Just seven states have over the last few years accounted for over 80% of the total direct tax collections by the Union government.” These states are Maharashtra, Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and West Bengal. The sum of corporate tax and personal income tax is referred to as direct tax collected by the central government.

While the data is available at a state level, most of the direct tax is being paid out of cities in these states. So, in Maharashtra, most direct tax would be paid by companies and individuals based out of Mumbai. In the case of Karnataka, it would be Bengaluru. In the case of West Bengal, it would be Kolkata and so on.

So, a few states pay the bulk of the direct tax. And this is because many corporate firms are based out of cities in these states. When a firm is based out of a city, then so are many individuals who work for such firms—both on the rolls and off it.

Take the case of the film industry, which is now primarily based out of the Western suburbs of Mumbai. For anyone who works in films or hopes to work in films, there is no point in living anywhere else but Mumbai. The same logic would apply to a finance professional looking to work in the investment management industry, largely based in central and south Mumbai.

Again, a similar logic works for many IT professionals who need to be based out of Bengaluru, Hyderabad, or Chennai. Of course, these top jobs then create more jobs around them. That’s the multiplier effect, which attracts more and more people to such cities.

This dynamic puts pressure on the infrastructure of cities, and in that pressure lies opportunity for many others (builders, bureaucrats, politicians, landlords, and so on). In that sense, this concentration of economic activity and opportunity across a few cities tends to hurt the environment.

It also leads people to complain about everything, from the sad state of traffic to housing to the environment in general. Nonetheless, they continue to live in the city they are complaining about rather than moving to another place where they are less likely to face these problems.

This is largely because the kind of opportunities available in these cities is not available in other places. The opportunity cost of leaving a city like Mumbai, Bengaluru or Delhi, depending on one’s profession, is just way too high. And that automatically means traffic on the roads, which has its own opportunity cost. Even opportunity cost has an opportunity cost now.

So, what’s the way out of this? The simple answer is that many new clusters—where enough economic activity happens and creates enough opportunities—need to develop. Only that will lead to less pressure on our cities.

But how will that happen? It’s not easy to create new clusters. Take the case of Noida Film City—it is now being used for a totally different purpose than what was originally envisaged. Given that things work well enough in Mumbai, there is no reason for the film and TV industry to move to Noida or anywhere else for that matter. (Though a lot of Hindi films have been shot at the Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, over the years.)

Creating new clusters will need a lot of push from the local and state governments, particularly across northern and eastern India. The fact that very few attempts have been made by these governments tells us how difficult it is. Complex structural problems really do not have easy solutions. Of course, some of the smaller cities that can emerge as new clusters are already very polluted. So, what do we do? As I said earlier, I am in the business of generalizing, and there’s only so much I can think and write. Apologies for the same. See you next week!

Meanwhile, my AC, which earlier needed servicing only once in two years, now needs to be serviced every few months. Thankfully, I don’t have children.

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Written by Vivek Kaul

Edited by Saikat Chatterjee

Produced by Nirmalya Dutta

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