UNITED STATES, MARCH 13, 2011: If you had to name a most valuable player of December’s climate summit in Cancun, hands down the award would go to Jairam Ramesh, India’s 56-year-old environmental minster. Ramesh proved himself an international power broker, a star among the world’s climate warriors.
But then Ramesh returned home. Awaiting him was the pending approval of a $12 billion steel plant. The deal–the largest single foreign direct investment in India, and clearly a boon to the country’s economy–would also vanquish a track of pristine forest along India’s eastern coast. The project, proposed by the South Korean steel conglomerate Posco, had actually already been approved by his ministry. But local tribal groups were protesting, complaining that the deal endangered their livelihoods, which depend on the forest, and that they were not being fairly compensated for their land. Ramesh heeded their call and temporarily halted the project while two expert panels looked at the issue. Both found Posco in the wrong.
“I am not an environmentalist,” Ramesh said. “Environmentalism is the environment at all costs,” he said, but India must maintain its breakneck economic growth and do so without devastating the environment.
Last year India’s GDP grew at 7.4 percent; this year’s target is a blistering 9.2 percent. Ramesh ridicules what he calls the fashionable “lifestyle environmentalism” that dominates Western Europe, where the affluent compete to outdo one another in recycling, composting, and the installation of solar panels. What India needs, he says, is “livelihood environmentalism,” which preserves the bodies of water, forests, and grazing land on which the nation’s impoverished farmers, fishermen, and tribal groups depend. These ecosystems, he argues, are as essential to India as its new factories and mines.