NCERT Economy Ch 9: Environment and Sustainable Development

The one-line takeaway

The environment is a resource that supports the economy in several ways, but unchecked growth has degraded it through pollution and over-extraction. Sustainable development is the answer: meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This chapter is the economics bridge to environmental science.

What the environment is and does

• The environment is the totality of the surroundings, the sum of all biotic and abiotic elements that support life.
• It performs four functions for the economy:
  1. It supplies resources, both renewable (which regenerate, such as forests and fish, if not over-used) and non-renewable (which are finite, such as fossil fuels and minerals).
  2. It assimilates waste (absorbs and breaks down the by-products of production and consumption).
  3. It sustains life by providing the genetic and biological diversity that makes life possible.
  4. It provides aesthetic and amenity services (scenic and recreational value).
• A problem arises when the demands on the environment exceed its carrying capacity, that is, when extraction outruns regeneration and waste outruns the assimilative capacity. Then the environment can no longer perform its functions, and we face resource depletion and pollution.

Externalities and market failure

• The environment is largely a common (public) resource, not owned by anyone, so individuals and firms have no incentive to conserve it. This leads to over-use, the classic "tragedy of the commons."
• A negative externality occurs when an economic activity imposes a cost on others that the actor does not pay for, the textbook case being pollution: a factory's effluent harms downstream communities while the factory bears no cost. Because the market price ignores this social cost, the market over-produces the polluting good. This is the economic case for government regulation, pollution taxes and the "polluter pays" principle.

Environmental challenges in India

• The two major environmental problems are the threat to environmental supply (depletion of forests, falling water tables, soil erosion, biodiversity loss) and the growing volume of pollution (air, water, land and the health costs they impose).
• India faces the additional burden of a large population, poverty (which forces dependence on natural resources for survival), and the demands of industrialisation. Air pollution and groundwater depletion are among the most severe.
• The opportunity cost of environmental degradation includes the rising spending on pollution-related illness and on cleaning up rivers and air.

Sustainable development

• The concept was popularised by the Brundtland Commission report Our Common Future (1987), which defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The core idea is intergenerational equity: the present must not consume the resource base on which the future depends.
• The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (the seventeen SDGs, adopted in 2015 with a 2030 horizon) operationalise this globally; verify the latest progress data.

Strategies for sustainable development

The NCERT lists practical measures:

• Non-conventional (renewable) energy: solar, wind and other clean sources to cut fossil-fuel use (links to infrastructure).
• LPG and gobar gas in rural areas, replacing firewood and dung, which reduces deforestation and indoor air pollution.
• CNG in urban transport, to cut vehicular pollution.
• Wind and solar power for clean electricity.
• Mini-hydel plants, small-scale local hydropower in hilly regions.
• Traditional and modern knowledge, including organic farming and recycling, the three Rs (reduce, reuse, recycle).
• Bio-composting and biopest control, reducing chemical use in agriculture.

Key terms to fix

• Carrying capacity: the limit beyond which the environment cannot regenerate resources or absorb waste.
• Renewable versus non-renewable resources: regenerating (forests, fish) versus finite (fossil fuels, minerals).
• Negative externality: an uncompensated cost imposed on others, the case of pollution.
• Sustainable development: meeting present needs without compromising future generations (the Brundtland definition, 1987).
• Intergenerational equity: fairness between present and future generations in the use of resources.

CAPF angle

The environment is increasingly a security issue. Resource scarcity (water, land, forests) fuels local conflict; control of forest resources is entangled with the left-wing-extremism conflict in central India; and climate change is treated as a "threat multiplier" that worsens migration, disaster and instability. The CAPFs are first responders in natural disasters (the National Disaster Response Force is drawn from the CAPFs), so environmental risk is operational reality. The human-rights lens recognises a right to a healthy environment as part of the right to life under Article 21, affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Authored practice