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BOOK REVIEW 
  

Shooting at the Wrong Target 
 

Eswaran Somanathan  
 
Julien-François Gerber and Rajeswari S. Raina (eds.). 2018. Post-Growth 
Thinking in India: Towards Sustainable Egalitarian Alternatives, New Delhi: 
Orient Blackswan, ISBN: 9789352873937; pp. 388, INR 1075 
 

The contributors to this book are united 
in their dismay and condemnation of 
two aspects of life in India today – the 
ecological and environmental ruination, 
and the inequality and poverty of many. 
They see these problems as inter-related 
and a consequence of the capitalist 
system. Many of them conclude that 
there is no way to solve these problems 
without putting an end to economic 
growth itself. Others are less categorical, 
merely suggesting that economic growth 
be given less importance than it 
presently receives. At least two of the 
authors, Jayati Ghosh and Kanchan 
Chopra, do not buy the argument that 
economic growth must end forthwith. 

They argue for equitable growth that does not come at the cost of undue 
environmental destruction. It is a strength of the book that different 

 
 Professor, Economics and Planning Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, 7, S. J. S. Sansanwal 
Marg, New Delhi - 110016; som@isid.ac.in 

Copyright © Somanathan 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.63  

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i1.63


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [152] 

perspectives and points of view are included, although not all of them are 
equally convincing. 

Anyone who lives in India today cannot be unaware of the horrendous 
damage inflicted on the environment, or the continuing poverty and 
inequality. Does economic growth cause environmental degradation? 
Evidently, it does. Economic growth means greater consumption of mineral 
and biological resources, more waste generation and, therefore, fewer intact 
ecosystems.   

However, the first (majority) group of authors then makes a leap of logic: 
They conclude that economic growth is, therefore, bad, and should be 
halted forthwith. It is clear that solving poverty and inequality means 
moving to a more equal economy. But this has no connection with 
economic growth – if anything, it gets harder to solve the problem of 
poverty if there is less to go around. What about the environment? The 
nature of growth can be changed – growth can be made less damaging. 
Why not reduce or even eliminate the damage, rather than attacking growth 
itself?  

Arguments are made that this is not feasible – for example, that energy is 
required for growth and energy production is necessarily environmentally 
harmful. It is claimed that renewable energy technologies too are 
environmentally harmful, even if less harmful than the conventional 
technologies, and that they take too much land, etc. These criticisms of 
particular technologies would be unconvincing even if they were fully 
correct (which they are not). After all, what is relevant is not current 
technology developed in a system that does not penalize pollution enough, 
but the technology that we would develop if we had the incentive to do so 
– as we would if pollution were appropriately penalized. In fact, this is the 
solution to environmental problems that mainstream neoclassical 
economics proposes – penalize externalities so that companies cannot 
profit by shifting damages to others. What is remarkable is that the anti-
growth authors do not even attempt to address this solution. They simply 
never mention it. 

But does it work? Do we, in fact, see that the places that have stricter 
environmental regulations or high pollution charges, there is less pollution 
and cleaner technology? The answer is an overwhelming yes. For example, 
Sweden was one of the first countries to introduce a carbon tax, back in 
1990. Since then, the Swedish economy has grown as fast or faster than 
other industrialized countries, while its carbon emissions have also declined 
more rapidly than elsewhere. More generally, countries that enforce strict 
environmental regulations have much cleaner environments, and their 



[153] Eswaran Somanathan 

economies are not noticeably poorer as a result. The industrialized countries 
generally have a stricter environmental regulation than the developing 
countries, and obviously bluer skies and cleaner waterbodies. However, this 
was not always so. In fact, since they industrialized earlier, many of them 
haveAho been through the horrors we are experiencing today. Yesterday, as 
I travelled through one of the more industrial parts of northern India, I was 
struck by the thought that J. R. R. Tolkien could have modelled his land of 
Mordor on it. This is not a coincidence. In fact, Manchester, London, and 
other British cities at the time Tolkien was writing did have problems 
similar to those we are experiencing today. The infamous London fog of 
the winter of 1952 that killed 4000 people was caused largely because 
people densely packed into a city were burning coal to cook and keep 
themselves warm. Replace coal with wood, dung, and crop residue, and you 
have northern India today.  

How, then, did London and other cities escape the problems we face today? 
Not by returning to the land, but by replacing coal with gas, and taking 
other measures to clean up pollution. The rich countries today are not just 
rich, they are also mostly clean. The assumption that cleaning up the 
environment can only come by reducing consumption is simply not borne 
out by experience. Of course, this is not to say that Sweden or other rich 
countries have solved all environmental problems. But it does suggest very 
strongly that the remaining problems should be addressed directly, rather 
than attacking economic growth in the hope that this will make the 
problems vanish. 

If India is the epitome of an environmental disaster, it is because we have 
allowed polluters to get away with polluting without paying for the 
consequences, and because we have, as a society, made little effort to help 
the poor among us afford alternatives to polluting traditional technologies. 
Several contributors provide examples of community management of 
natural resources and revival of traditional techniques for land and water 
conservation to promote the idea that a good society is possible without 
economic growth. These are valuable and inspiring cases. The effort to raise 
agricultural productivity without polluting the land is crucial. But it does not 
follow from these examples that a good society is possible without 
economic growth. The examples do not address issues like air pollution. 
How is this to be tackled with traditional technology when the population 
density is 1000 persons/sq km as it is in those parts of India with the most 
people? The latest comprehensive study on the sources of air pollution in 
India shows that the largest single source is cooking fires (Health Effects 
Institute, 2018). This should surprise no one who has read the history of 
pollution in the industrialized countries, or for that matter, even anyone 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [154] 

who has read the Sherlock Holmes stories. The only way to provide clean 
cooking for everyone is to expand access to electricity for cooking and 
heating, and/or LPG. Reducing electric power generation in the name of 
de-growth will only hinder the expansion of access. Instead, the effort must 
be to provide cleaner electricity generation.  

This is just one example, but it highlights a major flaw in the de-growth 
arguments made in this book. India has 1.3 billion people. Presenting the 
example of a traditional economy and society such as that of Ladakh before 
the tourism boom, or other traditional solutions to our environmental 
problems evades two awkward facts. It is not possible to even feed the 
population we will have in the next two decades with our traditional 
agricultural technologies, let alone provide them a decent education and 
healthcare. Traditional economies also had much higher infant and child 
mortality, and it was this that allowed them to maintain their life styles. 
Mortality was high enough to ensure a very low population growth rate, 
thus avoiding resource scarcity. Life expectancy in India in 1960, before the 
Green Revolution up-ended traditional agriculture, was 41 years. In 2015, it 
had risen to 68 years. This was a consequence of less poverty, better 
nutrition and water supply and the wider availability of modern medical 
technology, all enabled by economic growth. The demographic transition to 
lower mortality and lower fertility is well underway and it has avoided 
misery for millions of parents who would have suffered the deaths of their 
children, had it not occurred. Modern educational, health, and contraceptive 
services are needed to help complete this transition, and that is possible 
only in an economy that can provide the necessary industrial infrastructure 
of electricity, clean water, sanitation, medical education, and 
communications. It is impossible to achieve this without growth. 

Towards the end of the book, Kanchan Chopra gently makes the argument 
that the focus should not be on reducing economic growth, but on green 
growth — improving the environment and protecting ecosystems while 
moving to an equitable economy. I could not agree more. 

 

REFERENCE 

Health Effects Institute. 2018. Burden of Disease Attributable to Major Air Pollution 
Sources in India. https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/gbd-air-pollution-india  

https://www.healtheffects.org/publication/gbd-air-pollution-india

