India’s economic growth depends on protecting its fragile environment

Subscribed with another email? Logout and Login with that one. Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials, Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective. First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming. Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day. Science For All The weekly newsletter from science writers takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in! Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers THEdge At the cutting edge of education and careers Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there Gender Agenda Stories from beyond the binary. The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features. The riverbed of the Bharathapuzha has turned completely dry even before the onset of summer. A view from the Mayannur bridge, near Ottappalam, Palakkad, on May 30, 2026. Sand-mining, deforestation in the catchment areas, and erratic rainfall have drastically reduced the river’s flow. | Photo Credit: K.K. Mustafah/The Hindu The environment is what sustains all biotic and abiotic processes. The monsoon, for which India is known, and the environment together sustain India’s economy as well as its food, water, energy, health, and national security. On this World Environment Day, it is worth walking through the inseparable coexistence of India’s economy and the environment. If we ignore the environment, we do so at severe risk to India’s economic development. It is traditional to think of economic development and sustainability as parts of the overall socioeconomic framework while environmental issues often enter the picture as an afterthought. But the environment is an integral part of sustainability, society, and economy. As the well-known American economist Herman Daly noted, it is a fallacy to treat the environment as a sphere similar to economy and society. Daly spent his life making cogent arguments about how economies and societies operate within the environment and that economic growth and societal comforts are typically accomplished by exploiting the environment. Protecting the environment thus requires us to carefully track our impacts on the environment as a whole — including air, water, land, and ocean pollution as well as the health of all species. India is unique among the world’s countries for its economy’s dependence on the monsoon, directly and indirectly. The monsoon’s variability and changes in its patterns are the result of the local amplification of global drivers such as climate variability, climate change, and global warming. The local amplifiers of monsoon variability and change are all environmental factors: some are natural but more and more are now human-made. Land conversion and deforestation for urbanisation, agriculture, infrastructure development, etc. all affect interactions between land, the atmosphere, and the oceans. They also enhance the variability of the monsoon as well as its sensitivity to global warming. In fact, ‘environmental change’ is a more accurate term for the complex interactions between human and natural systems over India. The Indian economy’s dependence on the monsoon is in large part because of agriculture. Even if this sector contributes less than 20% of the GDP, nearly half the country is employed in this sector and more than 70% of rural India’s livelihoods depend on it. More than half of India also still lives in rural areas, although this fraction is shrinking as the country urbanises, helped along by a rural to urban and peri-urban transformation driven by the risks of agriculture as a way of life. And this very risk is accelerated by environmental degradation and weather and climate extremes. Kharif grain production is nearly matched now by the rabi harvests — yet both crops face important challenges in the form of concentrated bursts of rain, heavy unseasonal rains, flooding, droughts during the monsoon season, and heatwaves. As human economic development degrades the environment, the latter’s ability to buffer agriculture from climate hazards also dwindles. Further, the consequences of weather extremes — in the form of landslides, glacial lake outburst floods, cloudbursts, etc. — are related to the way local environment change amplifies global warming. This is a direct consequence of humans separating weather and climate predictions and disaster management from the environment and its protection. India has invested considerably in predicting the weather and the climate and the results have been paying off handsomely in terms of protecting lives and livelihoods. This particular mechanism is crucial to sustain economic growth and stay on track for ‘Viksit Bharat’. India’s green cover has also increased — although controversially so as some of the new additions are in the form of plantations, which

India’s economic growth depends on protecting its fragile environment

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India’s economic growth depends on protecting its fragile environment

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