Every NCERT book that matters for UPSC — open a book, then a chapter. Learn each chapter's concepts, then how UPSC tests them — with diagrams, flowcharts and the past questions to attempt.
Environment and Society
Start here: why this chapter matters
Chapters 1 and 2 dealt with structure, processes, change and order. This short chapter applies those ideas to the environment: how society and nature shape each other, why environmental problems are also social problems, and what social ecology and sustainable development mean. It has three activities, four discussion prompts, three boxed quotations, a long box on the Bhopal disaster, a box on farmer distress, five photographs and ten exercise questions. It is short on theory — the book itself gives about half a dozen ideas — so this page has seven concept sections rather than ten, and does not pad.
- Builds on Chapter 1 (property, cooperation and covert conflict) and Chapter 2 (the environment as a source of social change; technology and economy); Introducing Sociology (stratification, the conflict perspective). Leads into Chapter 4 (Marx, Weber, Durkheim) and Chapter 5 (Indian sociologists).
- Pairs with live chapters: Social Change and Development in India, Chapter 8 Social Movements (Chipko, environmental movements) and Chapter 4 Change and Development in Rural Society (Green Revolution, farmer distress); Indian Economic Development, Chapter 7 Environment and Sustainable Development; Contemporary World Politics, Chapter 6 Environment and Natural Resources; India: People and Economy, Chapters 4 Water Resources, 6 Planning and Sustainable Development in Indian Context and 9 Geographical Perspective on Selected Issues and Problems (pollution, slums); Fundamentals of Physical Geography, Chapters 11 (climate change) and 14 (biodiversity); India: Physical Environment, Chapter 6 Natural Hazards and Disasters.
- UPSC: GS1 Society and Geography, GS3 Environment and Science, the Essay. Mains asked why India suffers water scarcity despite its endowment (2015), about intra- and inter-generational equity (GS3 2020), the implications of reclaiming urban water bodies (2021), whether environmental protection can conflict with the needs of the poor (2025), and the essay ‘Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them’ (2024). Prelims asked about Bhopal's gas (1993), terminator seeds (1999), Bt cotton (1999, 2000, 2001), sustainable development (2010), Bt brinjal (2011, 2012) and Prosopis juliflora (2018).
| Word | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Ecology | The web of physical and biological systems and processes of which humans are one element |
| Hydrology | The science of water and its flows, or the structure of water resources in a region (Glossary) |
| Social environment | What emerges from the interaction of biophysical ecology and human intervention |
| Property relations | Who owns and controls resources, and so decides how and by whom they are used |
| Commodification | Turning nature into things bought and sold for profit |
| Nature–nurture debate | Whether individual characteristics are innate or shaped by environment and opportunity |
| Risk society | A society living with technologies and products whose dangers it does not fully grasp |
| Aquifer | A natural underground formation where water is stored (Glossary) |
| Emissions / effluents | Waste gases / liquid wastes from industries or vehicles (Glossary) |
| Deforestation | Loss of forest area by felling or by taking land for other uses, usually cultivation (Glossary) |
| Monoculture | Plant life of a locality reduced to a single variety (Glossary) |
| GMO | An organism carrying genes imported from another species by gene-splicing |
| Social ecology | The view that social relations — of property and production — shape environmental perceptions, practices and crises |
| Sustainable development | Development meeting present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet theirs (Brundtland) |
At a glance — the six ideas to carry away
- Ecology = the web of physical and biological systems with humans as one element; it is modified by human action — deforestation makes rivers flood-prone; the Delhi Ridge and Corbett's chaurs are human-made.
- Two-way process: nature shapes society (Indo-Gangetic surplus → states; desert → pastoralism) and society shapes nature (capitalism, the private car, Lancashire cotton → plantations, slavery).
- Social organisation (property, division of labour), values (commodification, redistribution, sacred groves) and knowledge (colonial sciences) shape the relationship; women bear water and fuel scarcity.
- Risk societies: complex technologies we do not fully grasp — Chernobyl, Bhopal (1984, MIC), Mad Cow disease; the Bhopal box blames company, state and Centre alike.
- Five problems: resource depletion, pollution (indoor chulha smoke), global warming, GM organisms (Bt cotton, sterile seeds), disasters. Environmental problems are social problems (Kutch).
- Social ecology (Bookchin): ecological crises have roots in social inequality. Sustainable development (Brundtland 1987): needs + limitations; 17 SDGs, 169 targets; Sainath on farmer distress; urban eviction.
1. Ecology: nature with humans inside it
All societies have an ecological basis. Ecology denotes the web of physical and biological systems and processes of which humans are one element — mountains, rivers, plains, oceans and the flora and fauna they support. A place's ecology is also shaped by the interaction of its geography and hydrology: desert plants and animals are adapted to scarce rain, rocky or sandy soils and extreme temperatures, and similar factors limit and shape how people can live there.
Over time, ecology has been modified by human action. What looks like a natural feature — aridity or flood-proneness — is often produced by people: deforestation in a river's upper catchment can make it more flood-prone; climate change through global warming is a planet-wide instance. It is often hard to separate natural from human factors. Other elements are more obviously human-made: a farm, with its conservation works, cultivated plants, domesticated animals, fertilisers and pesticides, is a human transformation of nature; the built environment of a city — concrete, brick, glass, tar — uses natural resources but is a human artefact.
- Prosopis juliflora is native to Mexico, Central America and northern South America. It is now treated as an invasive species that crowds out native plants and reduces local biodiversity — what UPSC Prelims 2018 asked; it is also a fuelwood source for many rural households, so its removal is itself debated.
- Corbett was established in 1936 as Hailey National Park — India's first national park — and renamed after Jim Corbett in the 1950s.
- Debates over relocating villages from protected areas set conservationists who stress inviolate habitats against scholars and activists who stress forest-dwellers' rights; the Forest Rights Act, 2006 is the legal reference point. Present both.
2. A two-way process: nature shapes society, society shapes nature
Social environments emerge from the interaction between biophysical ecology and human intervention — a two-way process. Nature shapes society: the fertile soil of the Indo-Gangetic floodplain allows intensive agriculture whose high productivity supports dense settlement and surpluses for non-agricultural activity, giving rise to complex hierarchical societies and states; the Rajasthan desert, NCERT says, can support only pastoralists who move to find fodder. Society shapes nature: the social organisation of capitalism has reshaped nature across the world — the private automobile, a capitalist commodity, has transformed lives and landscapes, bringing urban air pollution and congestion, regional conflicts and wars over oil, and global warming. Human interventions increasingly alter environments, often permanently.
The Industrial Revolution in Britain had ecological effects worldwide. Large areas of southern North America and the Caribbean were converted to plantations to feed Lancashire's cotton mills; young West Africans were forcibly transported to work them as slaves; West Africa's depopulation caused its agriculture to decline and fields to revert to fallow; in Britain, coal smoke fouled the air, and displaced farmers and labourers crowded into cities in wretched conditions. The cotton industry left ecological footprints in urban and rural environments alike.
- NCERT's ‘the desert of Rajasthan can only support pastoralists’ is a simplification: the Thar also has rain-fed farming and, since the Indira Gandhi Canal, irrigated agriculture (Beyond NCERT). The lesson — ecology limits livelihoods — stands.
- The cotton chain: the Caribbean was chiefly a sugar economy, and by the early 19th century most of Lancashire's raw cotton came from slave plantations in the American South. The Atlantic slave trade began in the 16th century, long before the Industrial Revolution, which deepened rather than started it (Beyond NCERT). Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and slavery in most of its colonies in 1833; the United States abolished slavery in 1865.
3. Social organisation, values and knowledge
The interaction between environment and society is shaped by social organisation. Property relations decide how and by whom natural resources are used: if the government owns forests, it decides whether to lease them to timber companies or let villagers collect forest produce; private ownership of land and water decides whether others get access and on what terms. Ownership and control are tied to the division of labour: landless labourers and women relate to resources differently from men. In rural India women are likely to feel resource scarcity more acutely, because gathering fuel and fetching water are generally their tasks, yet they do not control these resources.
Relationships also reflect values, norms and knowledge systems. Capitalist values support the commodification of nature: a river's ecological, utilitarian, spiritual and aesthetic meanings are stripped down, for an entrepreneur, to profit and loss from selling water. Socialist values of equality and justice have led to the seizure of land from large landlords and its redistribution to landless peasants in several countries. Religious values have led some groups to protect sacred groves and species, and others to believe they have divine sanction to change the environment to suit their needs.
Perspectives differ — including the nature–nurture debate: are people poor because they are innately less talented or hard-working, or because they are born into disadvantage and lack opportunity? Theories and data are shaped by the social conditions in which they emerge: the notions that women are intrinsically less able than men, and Blacks than Whites, were challenged as ideas of equality spread in the 18th century's social and political revolutions. Colonialism generated and systematically compiled knowledge about environment and society to make resources available to imperial powers: geology, geography, botany, zoology, forestry and hydraulic engineering were among the disciplines created and institutionalised to manage resources for colonial purposes.
- Garrett Hardin's ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ (1968) argued that shared resources are overused unless privatised or state-controlled; Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990; Nobel in economics, 2009), showed many communities manage commons sustainably through their own rules. NCERT's point that property relations matter fits both.
- Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive (1988), argued an ecofeminist case that women have a special closeness to nature; Bina Agarwal (‘The Gender and Environment Debate’, 1992) replied that women's stake comes from their material position — the division of labour and lack of property NCERT describes — not from nature.
- Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha (cited by NCERT) argue that colonial forestry, from the Indian Forest Act of 1878, curtailed customary rights to serve the state's timber needs; others stress that scientific forestry also checked unregulated felling. Present both.
- NCERT says equality ideas challenged claims of innate inferiority in the 18th century — not that they ended them: ‘race science’ flourished through the 19th century (Beyond NCERT).
- Women feel scarcity more acutely because of the division of labour and lack of control — a social, not natural, explanation.
4. Risk societies and the Bhopal disaster
Environmental management is very difficult. Too little is known about biophysical processes to predict and control them, and human relations with the environment have become increasingly complex: industrialisation has expanded and accelerated resource extraction, affecting ecosystems in unprecedented ways; complex industrial technologies and organisations need sophisticated management systems that are often fragile and vulnerable to error. We live in risk societies, using technologies and products we do not fully grasp. NCERT's examples: the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the industrial accident at Bhopal, and Mad Cow disease in Europe.
- The leak began around midnight of 2–3 December 1984; ‘the night of 3 December’ is a loose description.
- The death toll is disputed: NCERT's ‘about 4,000’ is close to official immediate counts (about 3,800 is often cited); later government and independent estimates run much higher. Safe line: ‘thousands died; the toll is disputed’.
- The gas was methyl isocyanate, not dioxin (dioxin was released at Seveso, Italy, in 1976) — what UPSC Prelims 1993 tested.
- The box cites the CSE's Second Citizens' Report, but the chapter's reference list gives only the 1982 first report, which predates Bhopal; the Bhopal analysis is from the second report (1984–85).
- Ulrich Beck coined ‘risk society’ in Risikogesellschaft (1986; English 1992): modern societies increasingly organise themselves around manufactured risks they themselves create. Critics note that risks still fall unequally — Beck himself said ‘smog is democratic’, but Bhopal's victims were overwhelmingly poor residents of slums near the plant.
- Chernobyl, then in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), exploded on 26 April 1986. BSE (‘mad cow disease’) was identified in British cattle in 1986; its link to a human disease was announced in 1996.
- After Bhopal: the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, 1985; the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986; a Supreme Court-approved settlement of US$ 470 million (1989); the Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991. Victims' groups have long called the settlement inadequate.
5. Major environmental problems and risks
A. Resource depletion. Using up non-renewable resources is among the most serious problems. Fossil fuels grab headlines, but water and land are probably being depleted even faster. Groundwater levels are falling across India, especially in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh: aquifers filled over hundreds and thousands of years are being emptied in a few decades for intensive agriculture, industry and cities. Rivers are dammed and diverted, irreversibly damaging water basins; many urban water bodies have been filled and built upon, destroying natural drainage. Topsoil, also formed over thousands of years, is lost to erosion, water-logging and salinisation, and to brick-making. Biodiversity habitats — forests, grasslands, wetlands — are shrinking, chiefly through farm expansion; despite some re-forestation, the overall trend is loss, endangering species unique to India — as in the crisis when the tiger population was found to have fallen sharply despite strict laws and large sanctuaries.
B. Pollution. Air pollution, from industries, vehicles and burning wood and coal, causes respiratory illness and death. Often overlooked is indoor pollution from cooking fires: green or poorly burning wood, badly designed chulhas and poor ventilation put village women at serious risk because they cook. WHO reported about 7 million deaths in 2012 — one in eight of all deaths — from air-pollution exposure, making it the world's largest single environmental health risk. Water pollution affects surface and groundwater, from sewage, factory effluents and runoff of farm fertilisers and pesticides. Cities also suffer noise pollution — loudspeakers at religious and cultural events and political campaigns, horns, traffic and construction — the subject of court orders in many cities.
C. Global warming. Carbon dioxide, methane and other gases create a ‘greenhouse’ effect, trapping the sun's heat; global temperatures have risen a little but significantly. Climate change is projected to melt polar ice, raise sea levels, submerge low-lying coasts, upset ecological balance and make climates more unstable; China and India are increasingly significant emitters. D. Genetically modified organisms. Gene-splicing imports genes from one species into another: genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) in cotton make it resistant to the bollworm; modification may also shorten growing time or increase size and shelf-life. But little is known of long-term effects on those who eat GM foods or on ecosystems, and companies can create sterile seeds so farmers cannot re-use them and stay dependent. E. Natural and man-made disasters — NCERT cites Bhopal (1984) and the 2004 tsunami.
- NCERT writes that ‘in 2012, total 3.3 million deaths [were] linked to indoor air pollution and 2.6 million … to outdoor’. Those are WHO's figures for low- and middle-income countries in its South-East Asia and Western Pacific regions only. 3.3 + 2.6 = 5.9 million — not the 7 million total.
- WHO's world figures for 2012 were about 4.3 million (household) and 3.7 million (ambient); they sum to 8.0, more than 7, because many people are exposed to both and deaths cannot simply be added.
- One in eight: 7 million of roughly 56 million deaths worldwide in 2012. Safe line: ‘WHO estimated about 7 million air-pollution deaths in 2012, one in eight of all deaths.’
- NCERT's Glossary defines a green house as a glasshouse for plants; the ‘greenhouse effect’ borrows the name — gases absorb and re-emit outgoing heat radiation, which is not quite how a glasshouse works.
- NCERT says the 2004 tsunami killed ‘thousands’; the toll exceeded 2 lakh across about 14 countries (Beyond NCERT; see the live Interior of the Earth page).
- Bt cotton was approved for commercial cultivation in India in 2002 and now covers most of the cotton area; Bt brinjal was put under a moratorium in February 2010. Approvals rest with the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) under the environment ministry.
- ‘Terminator’ (genetic use restriction) seeds were patented but never commercialised; India's Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers' Rights Act, 2001 bars registering varieties carrying such technology. So Bt seeds are not terminator seeds (UPSC Prelims 2012).
- Scholars disagree on GM crops: supporters cite yield gains and less spraying in Bt cotton's early years; critics cite secondary pests, pink-bollworm resistance, seed costs and corporate control. Present both.
- The ‘tiger crisis’: in 2005 Sariska was found to have lost all its tigers; the 2006 estimate was 1,411. The 2022 estimate was about 3,682 (minimum 3,167).
7. Sustainable development
The relation between ecology and economy is complex, but without balance between them the future is bleak. NCERT argues that for about 300 years economic development has emphasised controlling and ruthlessly exploiting nature for a section of the population, driving thousands of species to extinction; reliance on non-renewable energy and the introduction of many new species for industrial demand has played havoc with ecology. If depletion and extinction continue, future generations will pay.
The Brundtland Report (Our Common Future, 1987) defined sustainable development as development that meets present needs without compromising future generations' ability to meet theirs. It contains two key concepts: needs — above all the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given — and limitations imposed by technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs. NCERT then quotes Sunita Narain (Down to Earth, 2016): capitalist development now rests on consumption, inequality is growing, ‘aspiration is the new God’, and the poor are marginalised as failures. Existing stratification lets some control most resources; a sustainable society must be one where people are at par, resources are equitably distributed, and development is inclusive, not exclusive. In this light, the 193 UN member states and global civil society arrived at 17 ‘Global Goals’ of sustainable development with 169 targets, echoing Ban Ki-moon's ‘there can be no Plan B, because there is no Planet B’.
- Dates: NCERT's text says ‘Brundtland Report, October 1987’, while its footnote says the report was presented at a press conference in London on 27 April 1987. The report was launched in April 1987 and debated at the UN General Assembly later that year. Safe line: ‘the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (1987)’.
- The SDGs were adopted by the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015 in the 2030 Agenda, replacing the eight Millennium Development Goals (Beyond NCERT). 17 goals, 169 targets.
- Narain's line about ‘survival of the fittest’ and Darwin: the phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer (see the live Chapter 2 page).
- Gandhi's ‘300 million’ reflects India's population in his day; the passage is usually dated to Young India, 1928 (Beyond NCERT).
- The World Commission on Environment and Development was chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway. Earlier, the UN Conference on the Human Environment met at Stockholm in 1972; the Rio Earth Summit (UNCED, 1992) adopted Agenda 21.
- Brundtland's two concepts underlie two exam terms: intra-generational equity (needs of today's poor) and inter-generational equity (future generations) — UPSC GS3 2020. Its ‘limitations’ idea is close to carrying capacity — the keyed answer in UPSC Prelims 2010.
- Debates: ‘weak’ sustainability allows natural capital to be replaced by human-made capital; ‘strong’ sustainability holds that critical natural capital cannot be substituted. Some ecological economists argue for ‘degrowth’; others, for ‘green growth’ through technology. Present both.
8. Two conflicts: farmer distress and the contest over urban space
NCERT's box on farmer suicides draws on the journalist P. Sainath: thousands of farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra killed themselves over some six years, often by drinking pesticide. Their distress, he shows, is a fusion of environmental and economic factors. Farming has become more volatile as farmers face world-market swings and as government support for small farmers declines under liberalisation. Cotton is high-risk and high-return; it needs some irrigation and is very prone to pests, so growers need capital. Both inputs have grown dearer: over-extraction has depleted water, so farmers drill deeper; pests have become resistant, so farmers spray new pesticides more often. Credit comes from private moneylenders and traders at high interest; if the crop fails, the farmer cannot repay, feed the family or meet obligations like children's marriages — and, facing financial and social ruin, some see no way out.
The second conflict is over urban space (from Amita Baviskar, 2003, on Delhi). Migrants come to the city for work but cannot afford scarce legal housing, so they settle on public land. That land is now in demand for infrastructure for affluent residents and visitors — malls, multiplexes, hotels, tourist sites — so poor workers are evicted to the city's outskirts and their homes demolished. Besides land, air and water are highly contested urban resources.
- The National Crime Records Bureau publishes suicides by farmers and agricultural labourers in its annual Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India; figures and classifications have changed over time, so cite them with care.
- Scholars disagree on causes: some studies link distress to Bt cotton's seed and input costs in rain-fed areas; others find no overall rise in suicides after Bt cotton and stress debt, rainfall, prices and the absence of irrigation. Most agree that indebtedness, rain-fed cultivation and price risk matter. Present both.
- On urban eviction: courts and policy have moved between treating informal settlers as encroachers and recognising rights to rehabilitation; Mike Davis's Planet of Slums (cited by NCERT) argues slum growth is global. The live Chapter 2 page covers slums and gentrification.
NCERT's activities and discussion questions — short answers
The chapter has three activities, a question on agricultural water use and four discussion prompts. Short outlines follow.
Activity 1 (page 51): Other examples where what seems 'natural' is actually modified by cultural intervention?
Bhopal box discussion (page 55): Which institutions and organisations play a role in industrial accidents like Bhopal? How can such disasters be prevented?
Page 62: How is water depleted through agricultural activity?
Activity 2 (page 62): Household water use by income group; time and money spent; who collects it; how much the government provides to different classes?
Discussion (page 62): Is water scarcity natural or human-made? What social factors shape allocation? How do patterns of use affect different groups?
Discussion (page 63): Why do the urban poor often live in slums? Who controls landed property and housing in the city? What social factors affect access to water and sanitation?
Activity 3 (page 63): A day in the life of a fifteen-year-old in a slum.
NCERT exercise — answer outlines
The ten questions at the end of the chapter (pages 63–64).
1. Describe in your own words what you understand by 'ecology'.
2. Why is ecology not limited only to the forces of nature?
3. Describe the two-way process by which 'social environments' emerge.
4. Why and how does social organisation shape the relationship between environment and society?
5. Why is environmental management a complex and huge task for society?
6. Important forms of pollution-related environmental hazards?
7. Major environmental issues associated with resource depletion?
8. Explain why environmental problems are simultaneously social problems.
9. What is meant by social ecology?
10. Environment-related conflicts you know of (other than those in the text).
What to remember
Numbers
One-liners
- Humans are one element of the ecological web, not outside it.
- Much that looks natural — flood-proneness, a forest, a meadow — is human-made.
- Social environments emerge from a two-way process between nature and society.
- Property relations decide who uses natural resources and on what terms.
- Women feel water and fuel scarcity most but rarely control those resources.
- Capitalist values commodify nature; other values produce other relationships.
- Knowledge about nature is shaped by the society that produces it — including colonialism.
- Industrial societies are risk societies.
- Indoor smoke from chulhas puts village women at serious risk.
- Power decides who can insulate themselves from an environmental crisis.
- The ‘public interest’ in the environment is a contested arena.
- Social ecology roots environmental crises in social inequality.
- Sustainable development joins the needs of the poor to environmental limits.
Traps to avoid
- NCERT's 3.3 m indoor and 2.6 m outdoor deaths (2012) are for two WHO regions only; they sum to 5.9 m, not the 7 m world total.
- Bhopal's gas was methyl isocyanate (MIC) — dioxin was Seveso (1976).
- The Bhopal death toll is disputed; ‘about 4,000’ is near the official immediate count.
- Bt genes come from a bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis), not a fungus or virus.
- Bt seeds are not terminator seeds; terminator technology was never commercialised.
- Brundtland Report: 1987 (launched April; NCERT's text says October).
- SDGs: 17 goals and 169 targets — not 169 goals.
- ‘Survival of the fittest’ is Spencer's phrase, not Darwin's.
- NCERT's ‘Rajasthan can only support pastoralists’ simplifies — the Thar also has farming.
- The Industrial Revolution deepened, but did not start, the Atlantic slave trade.
- Social ecology (Bookchin) is not deep ecology — it stresses social hierarchy as the root.
- Prosopis juliflora is an introduced, invasive species — not native to Delhi.
How to strategise
Prelims — what UPSC asks
- GM crops: Bt genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (1999, 2000, 2001); Bt brinjal's purpose is pest resistance (2011) and objections were about health and biodiversity, not fungal genes or terminator seeds (2012); terminator seeds cannot form viable seeds (1999). Add GEAC, the 2002 approval and the 2010 moratorium.
- Disasters and species: Bhopal was MIC, not dioxin (1993 match); Prosopis juliflora reduces biodiversity where it grows (2018). Sustainable development: Brundtland's definition is tied to carrying capacity (2010 — the keyed answer; ‘inclusive growth’ is a tempting distractor because of NCERT's own gloss).
Mains — where it appears and how to answer
- Water (GS1): why India suffers water scarcity despite its endowment (2015) — the chapter's ‘natural or human-made?’ frame: over-extraction for intensive farming, unequal access (Kutch), polluted and filled-in water bodies; and the implications of reclaiming water bodies for urban land use (2021) — lost drainage, floods, groundwater recharge, and who is evicted or protected. Develop with the live Water Resources page.
- Equity and sustainability (GS1, GS3): intra- and inter-generational equity (GS3 2020) — Brundtland's ‘needs’ of today's poor and ‘limitations’ for future generations, Narain on consumption, inclusive development; whether environmental protection can conflict with poor people's needs (GS1 2025) — the contested ‘public interest’, protected areas and dams, Kutch, with both sides: the poor also suffer most from degradation (indoor smoke, polluted water).
- Essay: ‘Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow them’ (2024) — the two-way process (Indo-Gangetic surplus and states; deforestation, aridity and flood-proneness as human products), the Industrial Revolution's global footprint, Gandhi's ‘locusts’, sustainable development. Use the Bhopal box and risk society for any essay on technology and responsibility.
Self-check
Tap an option. NCERT's own exercise questions come first; the rest test the figures and common confusions.
1. NCERT uses the Delhi Ridge and Corbett's chaurs to show that:
2. In rural India, women experience water and fuel scarcity more acutely mainly because:
3. The gas that leaked at Bhopal in December 1984 was:
4. NCERT's Kutch example shows that:
5. The school of social ecology holds that environmental crises are rooted mainly in:
6. Brundtland's definition of sustainable development contains two key concepts:
7. According to NCERT, the WHO estimated that air pollution caused about how many deaths in 2012?
8. Sainath's analysis of cotton farmers' distress stresses:
UPSC questions from this chapter
Open any question to attempt it in the Question bank — your attempt is saved to your progress.
6. Why environmental problems are social problems: social ecology
How environmental problems affect different groups is a function of social inequality. Status and power decide how far people can insulate themselves from a crisis or overcome it, and their ‘solutions’ may worsen disparities. In Kutch, Gujarat, where water is scarce, richer farmers sank deep bore tubewells to irrigate cash crops; when the rains fail, the earthen wells of poorer villagers run dry and they lack even drinking water, while the rich farmers' green fields ‘seem to mock them’.
Some concerns — cleaner air, biodiversity — seem universal, in the public interest. Sociological analysis shows that how public priorities are set and pursued may not benefit everyone: securing the ‘public interest’ can serve politically and economically powerful groups, or hurt the poor and politically weak. As the debates over large dams and protected areas show, the environment as public interest is a hotly contested arena.
The school of social ecology holds that social relations — especially the organisation of property and production — shape environmental perceptions and practices. Different groups stand in different relationships to the environment: a Forest Department bent on maximising revenue by supplying bamboo in bulk to the paper industry sees and uses a forest very differently from an artisan who harvests bamboo for baskets. Their interests and ideologies generate environmental conflicts; in this sense, environmental crises have roots in social inequality. Solving them requires changing environment–society relations, which means changing relations between groups — men and women, urban and rural people, landlords and labourers; changed social relations will produce different knowledge systems and ways of managing the environment.