Brown-Out in Calcutta
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
August 29, 2005

My French friend Rene had just finished a three-year stint as a cultural attache in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. During his medical exit-check, the doctor asked how many packs of cigarettes he smoked a day. "I've never smoked in my life," he replied. The doctor couldn't believe it. After three years of breathing Kolkata's polluted air, Rene's lungs resembled those of a chain smoker.

Globalization may be transforming India, but there's one dismal constant: pollution. India's cities are among the world's dirtiest. The air in Kolkata or Delhi is all but unbreathable in winter as car-exhaust fumes, unchecked industrial emissions and smoke rising from countless charcoal braziers get trapped by descending mist and fog. When the Australian cricket team played in Delhi, its coach complained the smog-laden air gave the home team an unfair advantage—by impairing his players' performance.

Factories belch forth noxious black clouds. Effluents pour untreated into rivers. Sewage systems reek and overflow. Despite the famed Himalayan tree-huggers, deforestation and overcultivation take their toll in rural India. Environmental consciousness remains limited. Governments pass regulations, then ignore them. Meanwhile, more and more cars ply the congested roads, and more small factories open up that do not meet pollution-control standards.

"Why do we do this to ourselves?" I asked an Indian friend, Debashis. His reply was startling. "But we don't do it to ourselves. We do it to other people." Very few Indians, he explained, have a broader sense of community than that circumscribed by ties of blood, caste or village. We take care of those we consider near and dear and remain largely indifferent to the rest. The environment is thus an abstraction, almost irrelevant—and destined to neglect.

It is common to find sumptuous luxury apartments in buildings that are filthy, whose entryways, walls and staircases have not been cleaned or painted in generations. Owners are proud of their immediate habitat but are unwilling to take responsibility (or expense) for common space. My mother once asked her "sweeper-woman" in Delhi to clean the outside steps leading to her apartment. The woman, who would have been paid extra for the chore, was astonished. "But why?" she asked. "They don't belong to you."

This lack of civic culture leaves public parks in India full of garbage. Streets remain potholed and neglected; public amenities such as pay phones and restrooms are vandalized or not functioning. The typical Indian wades through dirt and swill, past open sewers and fly-specked waste, to an immaculate home where he proudly bathes twice a day. An acute consciousness of personal hygiene coexists with an astonishing disregard for public sanitation.

So with pollution, abetted by corrupt enforcement of environmental regulations and corporate disregard. Cardiovascular and respiratory illness is rampant, with attendant health costs estimated at 4.5 percent of India's GDP. In other words, more than half of India's annual economic growth is wiped out by pollution, and development is taking place largely at the expense of the environment. But given a choice between living more modestly in a "green society" and becoming more prosperous in the midst of brown, most Indians would be happy to gasp and wheeze all the way to the bank.