Gita Gopinath Says India Must Tackle Pollution. The Real Question Is How.

(Why governance design, economic framing, and institutional capacity matter more than intent)

When Gita Gopinath, former Chief Economist of the IMF, stated that India must address the problem of pollution, the observation was less a revelation than a prompt to examine how the country has chosen to respond. There is little disagreement today that pollution imposes real economic costs, through health impacts, productivity losses, water scarcity, and rising climate vulnerability.

But after more than five decades of environmental legislation, institutions, missions, and programmes, the real issue is no longer recognition. It is governance design. How exactly has India attempted to address pollution, what assumptions guided that approach, and why have outcomes consistently lagged intent?

India’s environmental governance, like many countries, evolved primarily as a top-down, residue-centric regulatory system. Laws defined permissible emissions and effluents. Projects required environmental clearance. Pollution control boards monitored compliance. Courts intervened when failures became visible. This approach had clear strengths. In a large, diverse country, central standards were indispensable. Without top-down authority, exercised at the State level through State Pollution Control Boards, there would have been no common rules or standards for air pollution, wastewater discharge, or hazardous waste management.

Yet the system also carried a quiet assumption: that compliance at individual sources would aggregate into environmental improvement. Over time, this assumption proved fragile. Air quality deteriorated across entire regions despite thousands of “compliant” stacks. Rivers remained biologically stressed despite regulated discharges. Waste accumulated burdening the landfills, even as rules multiplied. The system became efficient at granting permissions and producing documentation but remained weak at protecting and restoring ecosystems. The system also struggled with cumulative and cross-boundary impacts.

In response to the limits of regulation-led approaches, India has also witnessed a range of bottom-up initiatives, such as citizen monitoring, municipal level pilots, and community-led environmental action. These bottom-up initiatives bring real strengths: local knowledge, behavioural insight, and social legitimacy. Their limitation is not intent, but scale, authority, and institutional comfort.

State engagement with bottom-up approaches has however remained cautious. Part of this hesitation reflects an unease that community mobilisation may slide into activism, litigation, or resistance, particularly where environmental claims are seen to challenge development priorities. Development with environment is widely invoked, yet often functions more as rhetorical reassurance.

Despite this hesitation, India offers clear examples where bottom-up approaches have worked, precisely because they delivered development outcomes alongside environmental gains and received support from the State. The Johad-based watershed revival in Alwar district, Rajasthan, led by Tarun Bharat Sangh, restored groundwater levels and revived several rivers through community action linked directly to agricultural productivity and water security.

Similarly, Hiware Bazar in Maharashtra demonstrates how community-enforced water budgeting, cropping discipline, and local governance, received support by state programs that helped in the transformation of a drought-prone village into a water-secure agrarian economy.

In urban India, Indore’s solid waste management system shows how bottom-up participation can succeed when embedded within municipal authority and financing. High levels of citizen compliance were achieved not through voluntarism alone, but through consistent municipal enforcement and service delivery

Behind debates on top-down versus bottom-up lies a deeper framing choice. India organised environmental governance around residues rather than resources. A resource-centric approach asks different questions: What is the carrying capacity of this river? How much stress can this airshed absorb? Which uses must be prioritised within ecological limits?

New Zealand is the most frequently cited example of resource-centric environmental governance, particularly through river-basin management and the legal recognition of rivers such as the Whanganui as living entities. Its core achievement was not pollution elimination, but a correction of the governance unit: rivers and catchments became the basis for decision-making rather than administrative boundaries. This forced explicit negotiation of trade-offs between agriculture, hydropower, ecology, and cultural values, and reduced institutional fragmentation. Outcomes, however, have been uneven. Nutrient pollution from intensive dairy farming persists, implementation has been slow, and economic resistance remains strong. Similar patterns appear elsewhere. Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin Authority adopted basin-scale water governance and ecological flow limits, but political intervention repeatedly diluted outcomes. The European Union’s Water Framework Directive governs water bodies at river-basin scale, yet many member states missed ecological targets due to uneven enforcement and capacity. In Latin America, countries such as Colombia and Ecuador constitutionally recognised the rights of nature, enabling landmark court rulings, but day-to-day governance continues to follow sectoral logic. The consistent lesson is that resource-centric framing improves decision quality and accountability, but fails without strong institutions, geospatial data, and political commitment.

For India, resource-centric governance is necessary in principle but demanding in practice. India’s major environmental failures such as air pollution, river degradation, groundwater depletion are systemic and cross-jurisdictional, making project-based regulation insufficient. Governing at the scale of river basins, airsheds, and critical landscapes would align decisions with ecological reality, but institutional fragmentation, political sensitivity, and capacity constraints limit feasibility. What is realistic is incremental adoption for statutory airshed governance, basin-level authorities for stressed rivers, and landscape-scale governance for regions such as the Aravallis or Western Ghats. Such an approach would not replace regulation, but it would reduce the illusion that compliance equals ecological health. This will be a substantive shift.

All of this sits atop a more fundamental blind spot: the separation of economics from ecology. India measures success through GDP. Forest loss, aquifer depletion, flood-buffer loss, and health damage remain invisible in national accounts. Pollution appears manageable because its costs are deferred.

This is why ideas from ecological economics, including concepts like Gross Ecosystem Product (GEP), matter, not as replacements for GDP, but as guardrails. They force uncomfortable questions early: why growth appears cheapest where ecosystems are being liquidated, and why development keeps generating future liabilities. GDP on its own records economic activity while remaining silent on the erosion of natural capital.

Only after understanding India’s framing does comparison help. China shows that top-down governance can work when authority, incentives, and capacity align. The United States demonstrates the power of strong law and litigation, yet governance remains fragmented. Russia illustrates the opposite lesson: central authority without ecological priority delivers limited environmental outcomes. Global experience suggests that no governance model functions as a universal solution to pollution control.

Across all models, top-down, bottom-up, residue-based, resource-centric, one element has been consistently underinvested: environmental management capacity building. Institutions have been created or expanded faster than the resident skills needed to operate them. Regulations have multiplied faster than understanding the spirit of the law. Environmental management has become procedural rather than analytical. What is required is not a switch from one model to another, but alignment: top-down authority to set ecological limits, bottom-up intelligence and ownership to adapt locally, resource-centric institutions to manage eco-systems as the custodians, often going beyond administrative boundaries, economic metrics that recognize depletion of natural assets, and serious investment in building environmental capability.

Everyone agrees that pollution is a problem for India, particularly given its growth ambitions. But this concern is not unique to India; it confronts countries across income levels and political systems. Pollution is, fundamentally, a global systems problem, not a local regulatory failure.

This insight was articulated decades ago by Professor Jay Forrester, the MIT systems scientist who pioneered system dynamics. In his seminal work World Dynamics,  Forrester constructed an integrated model of the planet that explicitly linked population, industrial growth, natural resources, and pollution. Pollution, in his framework, was not treated as a by-product that could be cleaned up independently, but as a stock that accumulated over time, interacted with resource depletion and contamination, and fed back into modelling of economic and social systems. His central warning was stark: societies that pursue unchecked growth while treating pollution and resource limits as secondary concerns eventually encounter systemic constraints that policy instruments alone cannot reverse. What is striking is not that Forrester predicted collapse, but that he demonstrated how incremental fixes within a growth-first mindset consistently fail to stabilise the system. More than fifty years later, the relevance of this framing remains uncomfortable. India’s challenge, like that of many countries, is not simply to reduce pollution levels, but to recognise pollution as a signal of deeper structural imbalance between growth, resource use, and governance choices, a hybrid of top down and bottom up.

India must rethink how it governs resources, integrates economics with ecology, and builds the institutional capacity. Until then, pollution will remain something we all agree is urgent and quietly accept as inevitable.