India is one of the world's largest economies, and yet beneath the headline numbers, the systematic enabling of harmful industries through weakened environmental safeguards, institutionalised corruption, and political nepotism.
India's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is the primary gatekeeper for industrial projects. In theory, no mine, power plant, or chemical facility may operate without a rigorous Environmental Clearance, but in practice, the system functions like a processing desk rather than a regulatory body. Government statistics reveal that between 2006 and 2008, the ministry approved 587 new mining projects while rejecting only 10. In another survey, out of 2,515 mining, power, industrial, and construction projects that sought environmental clearance, the ministry rejected a mere 20. One of the former environment ministers acknowledged he would like to see a higher rejection rate, because "that will mean we are doing a good job."
To make matters worse, the government has repeatedly pushed to legitimise industries that never obtained clearance in the first place. In 2017, the environment ministry offered violating industries a six-month window to "regularise" their operations, to bypass the public hearings, impact assessments ordinarily required, i.e. the processes that are the the backbone for the approval. The draft EIA Notification in 2020 went further, proposing a mechanism for post-facto approvals, but thankfully the Supreme Court struck down the concept, ruling saying that the post facto clearances are "alien to environmental jurisprudence" and "detrimental to the environment." In the words of evironmental lawyer Rahul Choudhary, "It has become a pollute-and-pay principle."
Under the current PM's rule, the average time for granting environmental clearances was slashed from 600 days to just 170 days. In the first five months of 2018 alone, the number of projects cleared jumped 37 percent year-on-year, with 38 percent of all projects approved within 100 days. We should be noting that the government exempted public hearings for several key sectors, making the process more and more opaque to those affected, to achieve these timelines.
One coal-fired power plant in Telangana received its clearance in just 78 days, something that experts say should take a minimum of 6 months to evaluate properly. So, this fast tracked process which clearly bypassed important evaluations likely with hush money affects many things but what exactly? The consequences of this acceleration are suffered by communities and ecosystems.
The WHO has identified India as home to 14 of the world's most polluted cities. Air pollution is currently accounting for more than 2 million deaths per year in India. A 2022 Lancet study estimated 1.72 million deaths attributable to industrial particulate pollution alone, with an economic cost of $339.4 billion.
Regulatory failure in India's industrial sector isn't just a matter of bureaucracy, rather it is, in large part, orchestrated through corruption. Human Rights Watch documented in a landmark report how a single politician, Janardhana Reddy, allegedly used his ministerial position in Karnataka to run a state-sanctioned extortion racket, using forest department officials to force mine operators to hand over 30 to 60 percent of their production. When CBI agents searched Reddy's home, they reportedly found $1 million in cash and gold bars worth $1.5 million. If everyone in the system is corrupt and self serving, who does the common man, or the affected turn to for help?
The Karnataka scandal ultimately cost the state an estimated Rs 13,500 to 22,500 crore ($3 to 5 billion) in illegally mined iron ore where no royalties were paid, just to put these numbers into context, Karnataka's entire annual health budget was just Rs 2,600 crore. As the then anti-corruption chief Santosh Hegde said, "Political leaders, forest department officials, revenue department officials, mines and geology officials, road and transportation officials, all are involved."
The EIA process is riddled with structural conflicts of interest. Companies are required to hire and pay the consultants who produce their own Environmental Impact Assessment reports. For example, preliminary reviews of EIAs in Goa found widespread falsification everywhere, reports declaring no forest cover where forests existed, no water bodies where rivers flowed, no tribal communities where they lived, all to circumvent legal protections to these things and people. In one particularly notorious case, a mine in Maharashtra that received clearance based on an EIA report that contained data copied verbatim from a Russian bauxite mine.
After the blatant corruption, nepotism comes into play. Investigations by the Goa Herald documented that six state government officials in higher positions of power had personal mining interests. Contractors with political connections are routinely awarded industrial contracts not for competence, but rather for their ability to navigate and evade the protections and regulations set by the regulatory framework. Even industry insiders publicly admit that if a politician backs a contractor they will most likely be awarded the contract.
Harvard economist, Pranab Bardhan, has described the symbiotic relationship between India's politicians and its industrial conglomerates as a "crony capitalist oligarchy." Most industries in which these so called crony capitalists operate are either non-traded or heavily regulated, making access to government approvals the single most important competitive advantage. The result? A system where industrial licences are given, not to the most responsible operators, but to the most politically connected ones.
From 82,000 recorded cases of illegal mining in 2010, to chemical plants operating for years without valid clearances in Gujarat, the industrial regulatory system has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot, and will not, hold harmful industries accountable for their damaging actions.
Activists, whistleblowers and protesters who have challenged this have faced intimidation, violence, and in several documented cases, murder. The human cost is not an abstract value, its real. Farmers in Goa report destroyed water tables and failed crops, children in northeast India's coal towns work in unregulated "rathole" mines, communities near thermal plants in Telangana show surging cancer rates, and while this massacre happens? The regulator opens another meeting, approves another application, and rubber-stamps another clearance in record time.
India's economic ambition should not come at a price this large. But until the policies exist to separate industrial permits from political patronage, and to enforce the environmental laws already on the books, the country's most vulnerable citizens shall continue to pay for growth they were never meant to be a part of.