By law every new project has to have an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).

and the Jamuna are effectively dead. India and China have also witnessed, in recent years, the large-scale depletion of groundwater aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of forests, and the decimation of fish-stocks.

economic growth. Open-cast mining and the ever-growing appetite of industry decimated forests and wild-lands. New and dangerous chemicals were excreted into rivers and the atmosphere.

The first wave of environmentalism proceeded step-by-step with the Industrial Revolution, itself the most far-reaching process of social change in human history. The industrialization of the world dramatically altered the natural world through new methods of resource extraction, production, and transportation. The scale and intensity at which

India today is an environmental basket-case, marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water-tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests. Meanwhile, tribal and peasant communities continue to be pushed

giants are rapidly making up for lost time.

In India, we are now in the middle of what might be called an ‘Age of Ecological Arrogance.’

two Asian

The third challenge is that posed to the environments of these countries themselves. Chinese cities have the highest rates of air pollution in the world. Rivers such as the Ganga