Let them eat pollution!
The utilitarian approach to economics has widely distorted the way a nation’s welfare is looked at , narrowing down the concept of development with merely rising GDP , per capita income, industrialization or increasing personal incomes at the cost of ripping the earth’s supposed-to-be equally treated poor people of their basic rights to live. The realization of this fact became much more firmly established in my conscience when I visited a village a few miles away from University of Hyderabad in continuation of field survey in Environmental Economics that I was supposed to conduct as part of my academics curriculum. The village is located amidst a hub of pharmaceutical and drug industries which on continuous basis keep polluting the environment- a basic precondition to lead a healthy and clean life ; as recently illustrated by our Hon’ble PM in his “Sawacch Bharat Abhiyan”- through their hazardous emissions and discharges of toxic elements into water streams. My other group mates started covering their mouths and all to save them from being “polluted” as they are hailing from affluent families which had never an occasion of an iota of materialistic misery!! I was at the same struck by a new concept in economics that can be referred to as “Ecological Imperialism” which presents itself most obviously in the following ways: the pillage of resources of some countries by others and the transformation of the whole ecosystems upon which the whole nation depends, the dumping of ecological wastes, the exploitation of ecologically vulnerable societies to promote imperialist control. The US-led attacks on Iraq in the guise of “ War against Terror” in order to capture the oil reserves is a stark example of such imperialism. On interviewing people who are having to work there in the same industries out of no choices barely left as a consequence to the