Rural life styles have close links with nature and its resources. Thus the environmental problems that manifest in rural areas of the country are largely due to over-use or misuse of resources mostly because of sheer poverty, ignorance and lack of alternatives.
The denudation of vegetative cover due to expansion of agricultural activities, indiscriminate collection for firewood and the overgrazing by cattle and other livestock and consequent soil erosion are good examples of the impoverishment of environmental resources.
The growing use of chemical fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides, weedicides and non-availability of systems for the disposal of community wastes lead to the contamination of water courses and creation of insanitary living conditions in the rural areas. Despite all efforts about 2 lakh villages with a population of some 200 million are yet to be provided with potable water supply facilities while sewerage systems are non-existent in the villages.
This has been a cause of water-borne diseases like jaundice, typhoid, cholera, malaria etc. The chronic unemployment and under-employment in these areas have led to the migration into towns and cities that have added to the already severe environmental problems in urban areas. On social front rural society is traditional, conservative and less receptive to new innovations and changes.
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That is why caste prejudices, untouchability, illiteracy amongst females, child marriage, purdah system, malnutrition, belief in supernatural forces and evil spirits etc. are more rampant in rural areas. Keeping manure pits and catties near the homes, defecating in the open fields, leaving dead animals exposed, and lack of proper drainage make the surrounding worse.
In recent years brick-kilns are causing great damage to the quality of the air in rural areas. But due to less industrialization, less use of fossil-fuels, lower consumption of energy and economical way of life the environmental problems are less acute in rural areas of India if compared with the highly developed, urbanised and industrialised Western society.
According to the 2001 Census 19 per cent of India’s urban population lived in 5 mega cities and about 38 percent lived in 35 metropolitan cities each with a population of more than one million. The phenomenal increase in urban population both as a result of natural growth as well as immigration from rural areas has led to the mushroom growth of slums and squatter settlements wherein even the basic facilities of living are lacking.
The pressures on urban land have often resulted in an indiscriminate mixture of land uses resulting in a steady deterioration of already strained urban services and environmental quality. In order to provide additional land, ill-conceived reclamation has been carried out on water bodies and marsh lands which have crucial ecological roles to play in safeguarding coastal towns and cities. Major instances of such coastal reclamation are to be found in Mumbai, Kochi and Kolkata.
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India has been plagued with urban environmental problems, especially air and water pollution, and trashing of the city environment, including a vicious attack by non-biodegradable materials. Besides large and medium towns the small towns are also gradually compounding the signs of urban decay, with hardly any system to, halt this process. In fact, India is getting into the same set of serious pollution problems that once afflicted Europe and North America in the 1960s and 1970s (The Citizens’ Fifth Report, Part I, 1999, p. 437).
India is facing a total collapse of its urban environment. The state of our towns and cities is abysmal, and it is worsening with every passing day. Most basic services like clean drinking water, sanitation and solid waste disposal are crumbling under increasing population pressure. For example, Bhagalpur has no sewerage and, not surprisingly, it is drowning in its human outpourings and other domestic wastes. Aligarh, on the other hand, has a sewage system. None the less, it is also drowning in filth.
It is the city’s sewage that is flooding Aligarh. As water supply agencies have failed in every single town to supply clean and adequate water, people are turning more and more to the use of groundwater.
The result is declining groundwater tables in almost every town and, even worse, the domestic and industrial wastes are increasingly polluting the groundwater aquifers that lie beneath these towns. These towns are also dumping their wastes into the rivers passing by, and in turn, affecting the towns downstream. Most of over rivers are highly polluted and their water is not fit for human use.
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Air pollution is another growing menace spreading rapidly across the country. Air quality monitoring and management is still very poor. The country lacks any long- term goals for air quality and comprehensive action plan to achieve these goals (The Citizens Fifth Report, Parti 1999, p. 437).
The condition of the social side of the urban environment is also not very encouraging. The growing materialism and mad race for acquiring more and more wealth has made the life of urbanites restless and full of tension wherein old traditional values are fast disappearing. Ethnic clashes and riots make the situation worse. Crimes are growing (For urban environmental problems also see para 28.5.5. pp, 827-833 of this book).
These urban problems will only intensify in the future with the increasing population pressure, thus generating additional problems related to environmental health. So far attempts at environmental improvement in human settlements have come in a disjointed and piecemeal fashion with attention focused on one particular function or the other (transportation, water supply, power generation, etc.) rather than treating settlements and their activities as a dynamic and organic whole. Vigorous and coordinated steps are now required for environmentally sound planning and development of human settlements.