Earth Day

Eighteen years ago, I visited the little industrial town of Valsad on the Gujarat coast, with a prospective client.  He had a marvellous technology for pollution treatment and was talking to Atul Dyes, a large dyes producer, for installing a pilot plant.  As we walked around the ageing, partly decrepit factory, I asked a pending question to the factory employee who was taking us around, ‘You must be needing loads of water for the plant?’  He nodded and gave me a figure in millions of litres, adding  ‘It comes from the river nearby.’  I continued, ‘And what do you do with the liquid effluent from the factory – the equally large volumes of coloured waste water from the production process?’  He grimaced a bit and pointed to the sea. ‘Our pipe goes three kilometres out, along the seabed.’

I had never, till that moment, come face-to-face with such insanity: fresh water to factory –> factory converts fresh water to toxic effluent –> effluent to sea.  

And, just as the reality hit, another one did as well: that this chap saw nothing wrong with all of this, it was business as usual, another day at work. 

Today, April 22^nd, is Earth Day.  Across the World, particularly the ‘developed’ world, corporates organise the standard speech-conserve-plant-a-tree routine, partly out of sympathy for the poor planet, largely out of the positive messages that they send out to all concerned.  In India too, many of the larger companies do the same – the big boss gets a tree planted in his name, everyone cheers, there are lots of soft drinks and snacks passed around, a few banners (all of which create their own waste, of course) and the juggernaut moves on.  Perhaps a CEO or two will refer to the company’s work in reducing environmental impact by installing a scrubber here or a fuel-efficient generator there.  Perhaps, he will add that two per cent of profits are now being ploughed into corporate social responsibility, as per an amendment to Company Law.

The hypocrisy of it all is lamentable.

Nobody really understands what CSR means.  Can I set up a cola factory by digging forty borewells in an area with average rainfall, and spend that 2% on providing drinking water to nearby villages (Coca Cola)?  Can I blow up a mountain for granite or alumina and set up a school for the tribal children with the 2% of the profits from the destruction of the mountain (Vedanta)?  Can we sell cigarettes for a living (and make every effort to sell more year after year), but harvest water for stakeholder villages (ITC)?  Can we contaminate an entire landscape and its watershed with mercury and then empower women self-help groups to sell our products (HUL)?  Can we set up an extra large port in a area where endangered turtles nest and then, quite separately, fund conservation research (Tata Group)?  Can we set up a destructive, Rs. 6400 crore hydro project in an ecological treasure in Arunachal Pradesh that is the last habitat of the black necked crane, and then provide drinking water to a few villages in Rajasthan (LNJ Bhilwara group)?  The litany – and litany it is – goes on…..

The two percent clause has given companies an easy way out to justify the unjustifiable, to throw money at the small picture in the hope that the big picture will be obfuscated, repositioned, concealed behind the convenient curtain of the word ‘development’ and the entirely chimerical notion of Gross Domestic Product growth.  GDP, as economic history and data informs us, is just a average.  Its recent history tells us that GDP means nothing other than more inequality, more concentration of wealth and natural resources, more agglomeration of power, influence and voice in the path of future material creation for the average human.  More GDP today has come to mean more destruction.

So, why is this - the power and cold hypocrisy of the corporate sector in general - important to understand?  In the year 2000, a study Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh of  the Institute for Policy Studies revealed that 51 of the top economies of the World were corporations and 49 were countries.  General Motors, for example, was bigger than Denmark, while Walmart was bigger than Norway.

In the last fifteen years, this concentration of wealth has grown, not reduced, though the corporations in the top 100 have changed.   For instance, the GDP (Revenues) of Monsanto – a company with a particularly dodgy record of producing toxic pesticides like glyphosate - is over twice the GDP of Nepal, a poor country with 35% of its income coming from agriculture – can farmers’ collectives in small economies negotiate with the Monsanto’s of the world in a truly win-win way that gives them more control on their lives, their health and the future of their watersheds? 

There is enough data today to suggest that corporate power breeds irresponsibility (with few, very few, exceptions).  As urbanities and consumers, we have a big, big responsibility to counter this callousness because we are consumers.  Before we buy anything, we must make it a point to study more about the impact of our decisions on the planet.  If there is no need to buy something, do not buy it; perhaps it can be borrowed on mutual goodwill?  Simple as this sounds, it is the best that we can do for a deteriorating planet.  If, to this, we add the consumption of organic food or home-grown food and the careful, parsimonious usage of water, we would have done our bit. 

As an aside: after the visit to Atul Dyes, I came back to Bangalore convinced that the startup that we were looking at funding was critical, its technology was marvellous and we just had to do this deal, both for the financial returns that could ensue and for the environmental impact it would make.  My boss disagreed, his disagreement affecting our otherwise positive working relationship as well as my annual performance review.  I now believe that this was the tipping point, the moment when I decided to leave the VC business, indeed to give the corporate sector a go-by; it’s a decision I have never ever regretted.