India is facing an environmental crisis. But you wouldn’t know from reading papers and watching TV

Broken News

 

There’s a country beyond Delhi and news beyond social media outrage. If only our media realised.

 

 

Let me begin by stating the obvious: India is not New Delhi. For the moment, at least for the media, it is.  Not so for the rest of the people in this vast and diverse country.

So even as India's capital heats up with the impending election to the Delhi Assembly, and is already on fire with the determined and seemingly unflappable opposition of the women of Shaheen Bagh to the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens, there is much else happening in the rest of India.

And by that I don't mean the current fracas over comedian Kunal Kamra's monologue with Arnab Goswami on an Indigo flight between Delhi and Lucknow. The anxieties of private airlines to prostrate themselves before the Ministry of Civil Aviation will be a story long remembered.

The closest I can get to that incident and what I plan to focus on is this tweet:

 Yes, reducing your carbon footprint in the light of global warming, (not to be confused with the political heat in Delhi) requires some attention from the media. This should not be reduced to reproducing agency copy with statements by the very serious and determined Greta Thunberg, who recently told off the world's top businessmen meeting at Davos.  Or even the mention of the devastating bushfires in Australia that destroyed an estimated 16 million acres in that country.

A combustible political climate should not be an excuse to take our eyes away from the processes that could destroy the very ground on which we stand. And this could happen sooner than we anticipate as is evident from what happened in Australia. Forest fires in that country are an annual event.  But successive extremely hot summers have made parts of Australia a virtual tinderbox, and much of it went up in flames this time.

We have lessons to draw from that. Not just how we prevent the same thing happening in India, something that would be much more devastating considering the size of our population, but to pay attention to other changes occurring because of the heating up of the earth's atmosphere.

We actually have a central ministry that has appended climate change to environment and forests.  But we have still to hear any sensible plan or strategy emerging from it that relates to heeding the warnings.  A plan is in the making, we hear, but when it will be ready, and thereafter operationalised, is anyone's guess.  Meantime, an estimated 600 million people in India are at risk from the impact of global warming.  That, one would have thought is a big enough number to make the media jump to report on it.

There are always exceptions, of course, and usually these happen to be digital platforms.  IndiaSpend, for instance, did an excellent seven part series on the impact of climate change. Each of the stories was centred on people, ordinary people who are already paying the price.

Awareness about climate change has also resulted in some "good news" stories.  Yet these too are generally ignored by mainstream media.  Forests, for instance, are precious for many reasons, but more so today because they play an essential role in carbon sequestration, literally absorbing the carbon that otherwise accumulates in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

A charming story about how some villages in West Bengal's Purulia district got together and literally grew a forest on a mountain appeared on the website Mongabay.  This website has established itself as the go-to place for well-researched environmental stories.  These villages took the help of a local non-governmental organisation and over time reforested a mountain. This has replenished underground water aquifers, provided easier access to biomass for fuel, and restored biodiversity.  It's a story worth reading in these bleak times.

Apart from climate change stories, well-researched environmental stories have virtually disappeared from our mainstream media. There was a time, not so long ago, when many newspapers, and even some television channels, had environmental correspondents. They were given time and financial backing to investigate and write stories on the environment. And such reports do require time, as well as money. They cannot be written at a desk in an office, looking at online reports and academic studies.

During the heyday of environmental reporting, journalists also became aware that environmental stories were not just about forests and rivers; they also meant looking at government policy in terms of location of hazardous industries.  This was brought home in December 1984, when an estimated 3000 people in Bhopal were killed in just one night after the terrible accident at the Union Carbide factory. The so-called accidents in industrial plants using hazardous chemicals were the direct outcome of the indifference of both owners, and those in government designated to enforce safety standards, to the lives of workers who operated such plants.

Despite that, today we see regular reports of industrial accidents, especially in chemical plants, but there are practically no follow-up stories about why these happen with such frequency, or the cost to the workers, most often poor migrants.

Many of these stories do not require the kind of investment in time and money that stories tracking the impact of climate change do.  These are routine follow-up stories that mainstream media ought to do.  Yet, with the nature of news having been redefined to be news that sells the product, clearly the depressing tale of the dangers facing poorly paid workers in industrial estates is a non-story.

Here's a recent example. On January 11, just two hours outside Mumbai, in an industrial estate managed by the Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation (MIDC), there was an explosion in a chemical unit.  Eight workers were killed, another seven seriously injured. The story ran for a couple of days; the government closed down the unit, and then all was forgotten.

Only two papers, as far as I could see, did the obvious follow-up stories. Indian Express sent a reporter to the industrial estate.  He found that there were 1,100 units in the complex of whom 500 manufactured chemicals. Eighty per cent of them were small-scale units with a poor safety record. Since 2015, there had been 582 accidents in this very complex, and just in the last two years, 21 people had died, and 70 injured.

A safety auditor told the reporter: "Memory in the government, industry and public is short.  No one cares about the lives of the workers. They go to work at chemical factories everyday to feed themselves but there is no guarantee of what will happen to them at work or whether they will return."

This remark is heart-breaking, indicative of the callous indifference to human lives, especially when they are poor. To make matters worse, there is an acute shortage of safety inspectors.  So even if the government planned a safety audit in the future, as it has announced it will, there are not enough trained personnel to carry it out. 

The Hindu Business Line follow up story was even more worrying as it reported that three workers die, and 47 are injured every day in some factory in some part of India.  Data provided by the Labour and Employment Ministry reveals that between 2014-2016, 3,562 workers had died and 51,124 injured in factory accidents in India. Gujarat led in the number of fatalities followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, all three being the most industrialised states.

Politics in India has become so volatile that much of the media feels compelled to keep their eyes peeled on the constantly breaking news. But in the process, we are neglecting our role of covering everything that is happening in India, including the silent processes that will lead one day to enormous natural catastrophes.