Atmospheric Stress and Economic Development in India's Gangetic Plain

Although its manifestation and intensity may vary from country to country, environmental strain of one sort or another is a worldwide phenomenon that transcends political systems and stages of development. Unmoved by that reality, Barry Commoner argued in the June 15, 1987 issue of the New Yorker that most pollution "is the outcome of decisions guided by freemarket forces." According to Commoner, these forces dictate the pursuit of private profit-maximizing production technologies inherently destructive of the environment.

In fact, if environmental threats were the unique attribute of advanced industrial capitalism, as Commoner has suggested, many instances of such threats around the world—East and West, North and South—would exist only in the imagination.

These threats are illustrated by acute contamination of the Vistula River at Cracow, Poland; pollution of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union; extreme deterioration of air quality in the industrial areas of Czechoslovakia; vast quantities of leaded gasoline exhaust in Caracas, Venezuela; and serious smog episodes in Mexico City. It would be easy to extend the list of examples.

Economic growth no doubt intensifies certain environmental problems. It also creates the wherewithal to deal with such problems as they arise. However, if per capita income is low, environmental protection expenditures that compete with the provision of such basics as food, clothing, and shelter may frequently be neglected even if, as is true for Mexico City's pollution, there may be a growing threat to public health.

Centrally planned economies often reflect an additional bias inimical to environmental improvement. There the planner's traditional obsession with numerical production targets often obscures environmental "externalities" such as factory waste discharges.

Indeed, given the notoriously inflexible system of cost and price dictation, such economies obscure social and economic resource costs in general. Demonstrably, a market system is much more adaptable to capturing such costs, as the Soviets are themselves now willing to acknowledge.

Rising per capita income facilitates management of environmental stress without sacrificing other welfare goals. But it need not constitute an absolute prerequisite to environmental betterment, and third-world countries should not be expected to replicate the stages of environmental progress experienced by developed countries. Clearly there are environmental lessons—for example, the dangers of asbestos or radon—learned primarily by high-income countries that can be usefully applied to help developing societies avoid the need to learn by the same experience.

The Gangetic Plain study

To illuminate such issues in a more concrete, though limited, fashion, RFF carried out a study to examine the environmental pressures—specifically, atmospheric impacts—generated by economic development in several geographic regions across the world. One of these regions was the Gangetic Plain of northeast India (see map), an area whose rapid industrialization raises the prospect of possibly serious atmospheric problems.

My colleagues and I pursued a three-stage analysis: (1) quantification of developmental activities responsible for selected gaseous emissions to the atmosphere; (2) estimates of the amount of such emissions; and (3) assessment of the consequences of the emissions for three classes of environmental problems—photochemical smog, acidification, and the corrosion of metals. The resulting report, Impacts of World Development on Selected Characteristics of the Atmosphere: An Integrative Approach, prepared for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, appeared in late 1987.

Around 250 million people inhabit the Gangetic Plain, a region of burgeoning industrial growth that encompasses 558 thousand square kilometers—roughly the combined size of the states of California and Washington. Three major urban centers are located in the plain—Delhi, Agra, and Calcutta—the last with a population of 9 million. Agra is a cultural center housing some of India's greatest art treasures, including the Taj Mahal, a factor to be borne in mind in considering the corrosive effect of atmospheric pollution in the plain.

Climatic conditions vary throughout the area; they can substantially influence the degree of environmental stress associated with a given stream of emissions at a particular site. Thus, because Calcutta has a very humid climate and is heavily industrialized, atmospheric emissions—particularly those incriminated in acidification and corrosion—are exacerbated in this easternmost, coastal part of the plain. Delhi occupies the extreme western edge of the plain; its climate is relatively dry, with low humidity. Agra, located near the center of the region, has meteorological conditions intermediate to those of Delhi and Calcutta.

To be more specific, the Gangetic Plain is bounded on the north by the Himalayas, which effectively isolate all of India from the influence of the air masses generated in Central Asia. As a result, the plain's overall climate is dominated by the marked seasonal winds of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea. During the dry winter months, air generally moves down the Ganges Valley (that is, from west to east). During the wet summer months, the monsoon winds from the Bay of Bengal flow up the Ganges Valley from the southeast. This flow produces substantial precipitation at Calcutta, with a steady diminution in the amount of rainfall westward from Calcutta to Delhi.

Emissions on the increase

As the pace of economic activity in the Gangetic Plain has quickened during recent decades, the quantity of sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and other substances released into the atmosphere has increased. These emissions are produced by electric generating plants, smelters, urban transportation, and other sources.

The geographical distribution of the major emissions sources in the plain is heavily concentrated in the vicinity of Calcutta. Emissions from these sources will thus affect air quality primarily in the eastern portion of the region during the dry winter months when the wind flow is predominantly from the west. During the wet summer months, however, the monsoon winds from the east distribute the emissions and their effects throughout the Gangetic Plain.

Between 1950 and 1980, annual sulfur oxide emissions increased from approximately 500 thousand metric tons to nearly 2 million metric tons in the region. These emissions resulted almost entirely from increased coal combustion, which grew over the same period from around 13 million metric tons annually to nearly 60 million metric tons, an average annual growth rate of over 5 percent.

Coal combustion is also the major cause of increased NOx emissions in the plain, according to estimates from our study; in 1980, such combustion was the source of over 80 percent of such emissions. NOx emissions from motor vehicles appear not yet to be major factors in Indian air quality generally, but are no doubt beginning to play a role in determining the air quality of the larger urban centers. In New Delhi alone, according to a January 1988 article in the New York Times, the number of vehicles is increasing by about 10,000 every month.

To assess environmental quality in the Gangetic Plain, we developed a data base that contains three sets of estimates: economic activities in the region; a set of technical coefficients that relate emissions to activities (for example, a specified level of SO emitted per metric ton of coal combustion); and the gaseous emissions resulting from the economic activities. The RFF analysis does not presume to provide a definitive analysis of environmental quality; there is still too much scientific uncertainty about the atmospheric phenomena and their effects. Moreover, we were compelled to do a good deal of interpolating, backcasting, and outright "guesstimating" to construct our data base. Nonetheless, a reasonably factual basis supports the qualitative assessments.

Using the data base, supplemented by additional technical and historical information and understanding, we selected historical benchmarks and qualitatively assessed whether the severity of smog, acidification, and corrosion at those times was low, medium, or high (see table 1). We found that, in general, all three disturbances were relatively low until the 1970s, at which time they began to rise.

In addition, scenarios were constructed to assess the potential severity of each of the three disturbances in the year 2030. We considered the general outlook for Indian demographic and economic developments and, more specifically, prospective trends in such activities as energy combustion and nonferrous metals smelting.

For example, coal combustion in the Gangetic Plain was estimated to rise from the 1980 level of 59 million metric tons to around 325 million metric tons in 2030. As a result of these assumed trends, we concluded that problems of smog, acidification, and corrosion might all intensify substantially by that time.

Principal conclusions

• Photochemical smog. Inferences drawn from past emissions data suggest that, historically, the conditions necessary to produce photochemical smog were inconsequential. By contrast, scenarios for the next several decades suggest that ground-level ozone concentrations—the indicator of photochemical smog—may become very high, matching or exceeding those found in the Los Angeles basin.
• Acid precipitation. Given the climatic variability within the Gangetic region, it is impossible to characterize acid precipitation for the entire area. However, scientific evidence points to alkaline precipitation having been present throughout the past century in the Delhi area. In the case of Calcutta and its environs, a trend in increasing acidity has doubtless been related to the development of heavy industry there. Development scenarios imply that in decades to come, sulfur and nitrogen oxide emissions are likely to increase significantly. As a result, precipitation over the entire Gangetic Plain is likely to become strongly acidic during the next century.
• Corrosion of metals. Prior absence of atmospheric corrosion seems supported by the condition of many of the region's artifacts. One example is the fourth-century 7-meter wrought-iron column near Delhi, which remains virtually corrosion-free. Such a circumstance has been attributed in part to historically low levels of airborne sulfur concentrations and in part to Delhi's low-humidity climate. If, as projected, the energy needs of the growing Gangetic population are met with fuels producing significant SO2 emissions, major corrosion problems are likely to result.

Can anything be done?

As the economy of the Gangetic Plain continues to grow and industrialize, improvements in one set of quality-of-life characteristics—for example, in sanitation and health—will point up existing and emerging environmental problems, including atmospheric disturbances.

To some extent, sources such as bio-mass burning, petroleum combustion, and agricultural practices will play a part in these disturbances. But clearly, coal combustion is expected to be the largest potential contributor to future air quality degradation in the region. Thus, coal is a two-edged sword; it simultaneously offers the potential to improve the economic prospects of the region (whose per capita income is probably no higher than two to three percent of that of the U.S.) while also markedly degrading the region's air quality.

These considerations suggest three issues to reflect upon. First, we should recognize that the term "environment," which spans a diversity of conditions from one's aesthetic surroundings to situations constituting major health threats, is imprecise. This imprecision makes it futile to try and deal with a single connotation of environmental quality as it relates to economic growth.

Second, those of us who live in developed countries, and are therefore less conflicted in our choices about environmental versus economic tradeoffs, should not rigidly apply the same perspective to other societies. Thus, India may not see itself benefiting from constraints on coal use such as those that exist in, say, parts of the northeastern United States. Bearing such differences in mind, we need to be sensitive to the fact that benefit-cost assessments in different cultures cannot ignore the conditions and priorities that exist in these cultures.

Third, as many other studies have found, future energy demand and supply strategies can no longer ignore implications for environmental integrity. Particular emphasis deserves to be directed to technological advances that would make the use of coal an option that is environmentally more acceptable for the time being, but which would also make dependence on coal less acute for the long haul. From a global perspective, the prospects for such decreased dependence are not yet promising. China, the USSR, and the US all have large coal resources, and have no apparent disposition to keep those resources in the ground. Because carbon dioxide is emitted during coal combustion, prospective expansion of coal use not only endangers the regional air-quality characteristics discussed here, but also threatens to bring on or exacerbate greenhouse-induced global warming. Under these circumstances, the prudence of a search for ways to make the use of coal less of an atmospheric threat seems hard to question.