Ubaid

As air pollution in North India is reaching insane levels yet again, I was checking the current rankings for the world's most polluted countries and the top 3 are basically the former British Raj: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. China isn't even on the list anymore, which is easily one of the country's greatest - and often underrated - achievements of the past 10 years. This made me reflect: does this mean that India is going through a similar journey as China? With extreme pollution as it industrializes and builds itself up, and once it gets there it will focus on "cleaning its act" as it were? Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case. First of all, India is actually not industrializing in a meaningful way. Its manufacturing sector as a percentage of GDP actually went down over the past 10 years, from 16.7% of GDP in 2013-14 down to 15.9% in 2023-24 (newindianexpress.com/busines…). And its market share of global industrial production was 2% in 2000, projected by the UN to reach 3% in 2030 (unido.org/sites/default/file…), which will make it the same as South Korea, a country with 28 times less people... Same picture when you look at infrastructure: today, India's expressway network is just 5,930 kilometers long (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expres…), 22 years after construction of the network began. It's the same length as Malaysia's network, a country with just 34 million people to India's 1.4 billion... China's network on the other hand is 177,000 km long! Or take electricity generation: for the same number of people as China, India generates about 7 times less electricity. You'd need to go back to the pre-2000s to find a China with similar electricity production numbers. To be fair, that doesn't mean India isn't developing: its services sector, particularly IT and digital technology, is doing well. However it means India is in this rather odd place where it's leapfrogged to a services-led economy without going through an industrialization phase and without the modernization of the physical aspects of the country that typically come with industrialization. And crucially, the modern part of India's economy only employs a small fraction of the workforce: 85% of Indian workers are in the informal sector (thehindu.com/business/indias…), meaning they work without contracts or benefits in jobs like farming (45% of the workforce) or street vending. All this to say that India is getting the pollution largely without the economic transformation and the investments in its future that could somehow justify it. In fact India's pollution is more a reflection of its struggles to modernize than that of its modernization. A big cause of it is pre-industrial agriculture practices, when millions of farmers, lacking better alternatives, resort to burning stubble - setting fire to the straw stubble that remains after grains have been harvested. Another big cause is basic urban failures: unpaved roads generating dust, millions of small vehicles stuck in traffic due to inadequate public transport, construction sites that drag on for years, etc. And of course you also have India's infamously fragmented governance: while China could implement sweeping environmental policies once it had built up its industrial base, India's pollution comes from thousands of uncoordinated sources that no single authority can effectively control. All this of course doesn't mean that India cannot or won't do anything about the pollution. It could progressively modernize its agriculture, build its public transport, etc. But it does mean that India faces a much harder challenge than China did. While China could trade off pollution for rapid development and then use its newfound wealth to clean up, India is stuck with severe pollution without the economic gains that would make cleanup easier. Worse yet: pollution is reaching a stage where it's now actively hampering India's development prospects. Poor air quality deters foreign investment, drives skilled workers away from its cities, increases healthcare costs, and reduces worker productivity - making it even harder to generate the wealth needed to solve these problems. I suspect much the same picture exists in Bangladesh and Pakistan: structural pollution as a symptom of their developmental struggles rather than, as in China's case, the price of its success. An environmental crisis where the problem isn't too much development but too little, and where pollution itself becomes a barrier to the very development needed to fight it. That's a very hard problem to solve, compared with China it's basically the difference between cleaning up after a party versus trying to renovate a house while it's on fire.