Contemporary Issues: Globalisation, Environment and Human Rights
What this domain tests
The 1991 reforms and their effects, climate governance, and the Indian human-rights framework, including statutory bodies, are examined here.
Core rules
- Globalisation in India is dated to the New Economic Policy of 1991: liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation (LPG). WTO membership (1995) required tariff reduction and removal of quantitative restrictions.
- Effects: growth in services and IT, FDI, and consumer choice; but also job insecurity, pressure on small industry, and inequality.
- Environment: Stockholm (1972), Rio (1992), Kyoto (1997), Paris (2015). India's updated Paris pledge: 45% reduction in emissions intensity by 2030, 50% non-fossil capacity, and net zero by 2070.
- Domestic: Articles 48A (state duty) and 51A(g) (citizen duty), the Air and Water Acts, the Environment Protection Act 1986, the National Green Tribunal (2010), and the polluter-pays and precautionary principles.
- Human rights: UDHR (1948), ICCPR and ICESCR (1966). The NHRC was set up in 1993 under the Protection of Human Rights Act; it can inquire and recommend but cannot enforce.
Worked example
A factory discharges effluent into a river. Which principles apply? Reasoning: the polluter-pays principle shifts clean-up costs to the factory; the precautionary principle allows action even without full proof of harm; sustainable development requires balancing. The NGT can order compensation and closure, and Article 21 has been read to include the right to a clean environment.
Traps
- Claiming the NHRC can punish violators.
- Mixing the original and updated Paris targets.
- Treating globalisation as only positive or only negative.
- Forgetting that environmental protection is a Fundamental Duty as well as a Directive Principle.