"India's environmental minister Jairam Ramesh.
If you had to name a most valuable player of December’s climate summit in Cancún, hands down the award would go to Jairam Ramesh. His Mexican hosts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and ministers from small island-nations such as the Maldives and Kiribati all hailed India’s 56-year-old environmental minister for salvaging the entire endeavor. Ramesh brought the West and developing countries together by pointing at ways to ease access to green technology and suggesting an agreeable way to monitor progress in tamping down emissions. In Cancún 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. But for months, Ramesh let Posco sweat. When he stepped off his flight from Mexico, however, rumors had begun to circulate that Posco was threatening to pull out entirely. Suddenly, Ramesh faced perhaps the biggest decision of his 18-month tenure.
“I am not an environmentalist,” Ramesh told NEWSWEEK last month, sitting in his wood-paneled office in New Delhi. Newspapers were neatly arranged on his desk, and he punched away at a small laptop. The mood was affable, strikingly lacking the usual retinue of assistants and handlers who typically hover around a government minister. “Environmentalism is the environment at all costs,” he said, but India must maintain its breakneck economic growth and do so without devastating the environment. “The way to resolve the conflict between environment and development is to make the tradeoffs explicit,” Ramesh says.So, on the last day of January, Ramesh made his call. Posco’s project would proceed. On his long list of terms, that is. The Koreans would be limited to just half of the 4,000 acres they originally wanted. In addition, the company would have to fall in line with 60 new conditions, among them plowing 2 percent of the project’s profits back into the local community and preserving a quarter of the plant’s premises as green space.
“The paradox of economic growth is that ecological devastation benefits one section of society”—in other words, corporations and the wealthy—but, he argues, the pain falls disproportionately on the poor. “On the environment, the track record of Indian industry is not much to write home about.”
-More Here
If you had to name a most valuable player of December’s climate summit in Cancún, hands down the award would go to Jairam Ramesh. His Mexican hosts, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and ministers from small island-nations such as the Maldives and Kiribati all hailed India’s 56-year-old environmental minister for salvaging the entire endeavor. Ramesh brought the West and developing countries together by pointing at ways to ease access to green technology and suggesting an agreeable way to monitor progress in tamping down emissions. In Cancún 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. But for months, Ramesh let Posco sweat. When he stepped off his flight from Mexico, however, rumors had begun to circulate that Posco was threatening to pull out entirely. Suddenly, Ramesh faced perhaps the biggest decision of his 18-month tenure.
“I am not an environmentalist,” Ramesh told NEWSWEEK last month, sitting in his wood-paneled office in New Delhi. Newspapers were neatly arranged on his desk, and he punched away at a small laptop. The mood was affable, strikingly lacking the usual retinue of assistants and handlers who typically hover around a government minister. “Environmentalism is the environment at all costs,” he said, but India must maintain its breakneck economic growth and do so without devastating the environment. “The way to resolve the conflict between environment and development is to make the tradeoffs explicit,” Ramesh says.So, on the last day of January, Ramesh made his call. Posco’s project would proceed. On his long list of terms, that is. The Koreans would be limited to just half of the 4,000 acres they originally wanted. In addition, the company would have to fall in line with 60 new conditions, among them plowing 2 percent of the project’s profits back into the local community and preserving a quarter of the plant’s premises as green space.
“The paradox of economic growth is that ecological devastation benefits one section of society”—in other words, corporations and the wealthy—but, he argues, the pain falls disproportionately on the poor. “On the environment, the track record of Indian industry is not much to write home about.”
-More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment