World Environment Day: Protecting nature key to securing India’s economic future

On World Environment Day, experts are calling for a shift in how India views development, arguing that the environment sustains the nation’s economy, not the other way around.

The monsoon and the environment together underpin India’s food, water, energy, health, and national security, and ignoring ecological health poses a severe risk to economic progress, environmental analysts said Thursday.

It is traditional to treat economic development and sustainability as parts of a broader socioeconomic framework, with environmental issues often added as an afterthought. But that approach misreads the relationship, they argue.

The late American economist Herman Daly spent his career challenging the idea that environment, economy, and society are separate, equal spheres. He argued it is a fallacy to treat the environment as just one sector among others. “Economies and societies operate within the environment,” Daly noted in his work. “Economic growth and societal comforts are typically accomplished by exploiting the environment.”

On this World Environment Day, researchers pointed to India’s monsoon-dependent agriculture and water systems as a clear example of this inseparable coexistence. Protecting ecological systems, they said, is not a cost to development but the foundation of it.

The message from scientists and economists: sustainable policy must start by recognizing that India’s economy runs inside the environment, and cannot outgrow it.