The green revolution: an ecological disaster
In 1947, India officially proclaimed its independence after two centuries of British colonialism. One of the greatest challenges it faced was to ensure food security for its people. It organized its food self-sufficiency by reinforcing its agricultural methods, starting with the introduction of pesticides just one year after independence. This period, known as the Green Revolution, reached its peak in the 1960s, when Indian agriculture was booming.
One of the problems was that rice and cotton crops, widely grown in India, were particularly heavily treated, leading to contamination of water, air and soil. This was the case in Kerala, where 10,000 people were poisoned by endosulfan in the late 1990s, leading to a ban on the product in 2012. In 2017, in the state of Maharashtra, more than 800 Yavatmal farmers were poisoned, and at least 20 died, exposed to highly toxic pesticide cocktails.
These same farmers, frequently over-indebted, are now extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather, falling yields and increasingly frequent health problems, so much so that for the past 30 years, India has been facing a wave of suicides among farmers. The phenomenon is such that India's National Crime Records Bureau has devoted an entire section of its annual report to it since 2014. Ironically, the green revolution that eliminated famine in the 1960s is now threatening India's security.
However, the food crisis has raised awareness, and a more natural form of agriculture is already being organized. In the very south of the country, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, 800,000 farmers have decided to cultivate their land without any pesticides, making it the largest agroecology project in the world! Government agricultural advisor Vijay Kumar decided to introduce this program in one of India's most agricultural regions, in direct response to a wave of farmer suicides.
Global food security under threat
A water crisis, how ironic in a country that holds the record for rainfall! The country's most important resource is also its most scarce, due to a lack of infrastructure and poor water quality. Overexploited water tables are running dangerously low. Sanitation facilities are only able to treat a quarter of wastewater, and industrialists, farmers and towns are discharging their contaminated water without due care. And to seal the equation, India's water consumption is rising all the time. The predictions are alarming: it is estimated that 40% of the Indian population will not have sufficient access to water by 2050. The crisis is partly the result of the famous Green Revolution: agriculture pumps 80% of the country's water, mainly from groundwater. In fact, India has based its strategy on this precious underground water, to the point of becoming the world's largest consumer, with 250 billion cubic meters extracted every year: more than China and the United States combined. A report by NITI Aayog, an Indian government unit tasked with organizing the ecological shift, predicts that 21 major Indian cities, including Chennai, Bengalore and Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana, will have exhausted their underground sources by 2030. On the surface, things aren't much better: rivers, pumped too intensively, are drying up and becoming polluted.
What's more, heatwaves and droughts follow one another, as a direct consequence of climate change. In the spring of 2022, drought replaced the harvest, with the result that wheat yields had fallen sharply. To ensure food security for its population, the Indian government decided to suspend exports, even though the situation was already worrying, due to the stoppage of Ukrainian exports.
Waste management for a billion people
With a population of 1.4 billion, India is overwhelmed by waste. In Indian towns and villages, waste sometimes piles up to form mountains dozens of meters high. Monsoons seep into open dumps and load them with toxic materials, before ending up in the water tables, which are used to quench the thirst of populations and agriculture. In addition to soil and water, the air is polluted by the country's waste incineration, the third biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is particularly acute in the cities of southern India, and Mumbai is India's biggest waste producer, well ahead of Delhi.
The country is attempting to combat the problem, for example by banning the use of plastic bags from July 2022. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a national waste management program in 2014, called Clean India Mission, which included street cleaning, solid waste management and the introduction of recycling. Now, more than 80,000 urban neighborhoods receive waste collection directly at their doorstep, and over 65,000 practice selective sorting: a major step forward. Although, under theEnvironment Protection Act of 1986, the government is responsible for combating pollution, citizen initiatives are flourishing. One of the most successful of these took place on the outskirts of Mumbai, on Versova beach, where the world's largest spontaneous beach clean-up was organized. Instead of the fine sand it once covered, there was a thick layer of garbage, up to 1.60 meters thick. Starting with a single excited local resident, the movement was soon joined by a host of volunteers, to whom the town hall eventually lent skips. In all, 5,000 tonnes of garbage were removed from the beach. The volunteers' greatest source of pride: after decades, turtles have returned to lay their eggs on the beach.
The energy challenge
India is the world's second largest consumer and producer of coal energy, consuming over 11% of the world's resources. It is still heavily dependent on this non-renewable energy source, since two-thirds of its energy comes from coal-fired power plants, with the remainder coming mainly from oil. However, the energy transition is crucial, because the country's demographic and economic growth is increasing its electricity needs: they have doubled since 1990, and are set to double again by 2040.
The excessive use of coal is causing inordinate air pollution. In fact, six of the world's ten most polluted cities are in India, with Mumbai ranking particularly high. However, the country is showing a real determination to put things right, and is considerably increasing the share of renewable energies in its energy mix. In particular, it intends to take advantage of the sun, and has increased its solar energy production capacity sixfold over the past five years. Wind power is also being developed, to the extent that the country has the fifth largest wind farm in the world, particularly in the southern tip of the country.
The threat of deforestation
The exponential growth of India's population and economy is threatening the country's land resources, with the result that India's rich biodiversity is under threat from deforestation. Originally almost entirely covered by forest, by the 1980s it had shrunk to just 19% of the country; 50,000 km2 of forest have been razed since independence - an area the size of Croatia! A handful of laws have been enacted to combat deforestation, but in practice they are barely enforced, and local people and industrialists are still in the habit of cutting wood for building, grazing livestock or heating. Several species, plundered for their value, have virtually disappeared from Indian forests, such as sandalwood, mahogany, teak and rosewood, not to mention the many animal species threatened by the loss of their habitat.
Yet India's efforts are not in vain, and since the 2000s it has even managed to increase its forest cover from 19% to 21%: results that are still fragile, but encouraging. Citizens' initiatives, often led by associations, are also multiplying, as in Tamil Nadu, where over 100 million trees have been planted in just a few years.
The country of 100 national parks
With just over a hundred national parks, India has the third largest number of national parks in Asia. Yet just fifty years ago, it had just five. Around a third of national parks are located in southern India, particularly in the states of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Most of these parks were built on the former estates of British colonialists: from hunting grounds, they have become sanctuaries of biodiversity. These real efforts to preserve the ecology are necessary when we know that India is home to almost 50,000 plant species, over 10% of which are endemic, and 90,000 animal species, threatened by the destruction of their habitat.
Bandipur National Park is the largest of these, and the second largest in India, with a surface area of almost 900 km2. It was created in 1973 as part of a conservation project for Bengal tigers, of which it is home to the second-largest population in India.
Bandipur Forest borders three other national parks, including Rajiv Gandhi National Park (Nagarhole) and Mudumalai National Park. The former is also home to felines such as tigers, but also black panthers and leopards. In the local dialect, Nagarhole means "the snake river", in reference to the Kabini River that ripples through the thick rainforest. The latter, in addition to being declared a tiger reserve, is home to various mammals such as the elephant, gaur, sambar, porcupine and giant squirrel, as well as 266 species of birds including the Grey Hornbill and the Malabar Arrenga with its superb blue coat.
Outside the mainland, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands are also home to a number of national parks, including the Mahatma Gandhi National Park, which aims to protect marine flora and fauna, particularly corals and turtles.
