One easy way to bring these people out of poverty is to provide them with good economic opportunities (like factory jobs!). High-tech factories would demand cleaner, more stable power (natural gas, nuclear instead of coal, wood, cow dung).
2) India's totally overpopulated, agreed. One way to decrease the population growth is to bring these people out of poverty. Every developed country has seen their birth rate decline once they move to the middle class. These guys need jobs, college, etc, and people will start having less kids!
India's pollution levels are not industrial or vehicular - they are agriculture waste burning. And they are timed with agricultural harvesting cycles.
We have super fragmented farmlands who are really poor and this causes bad practices of disposal .
We are a service based economy - but to be able to bring the bottom of the pyramid out of poverty, we need to accelerate manufacturing and bring modernisation into agriculture. Not to mention education.
15 and 10 year is for privately owned vehicles
India will have a special challenge from mosquitoes and diseases like dengue and malaria, but maybe the best approach to malaria will be turning mosquito-borne diseases into diseases of the rich. We probably can't fully appreciate the solutions a wealthy India (or wealthy Nigeria) would develop, applying new resources, the latest science, and metis to deal with the world's deadliest animal.
[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Factfulness#
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Most-Lethal-Animal-Mosquit...
In cities like Delhi and Mumbai, none of these is major reason. Pollution from vehicles (especially diesel vehicles), crop waste burning (esp in areas around Delhi) and industrial pollution are the major reasons. These cities are too densed and yet too big.
The sad thing is that there are hundreds of laws to prevent pollution but law enforcement is not a thing in India.
Every year that goes by where India doesn't raise its standard of living, results in millions of stunted childhoods and lives. India needs all the manufacturing growth it can get.
The equivalent to your comment would be Indians on this forum leaving gratuitious remarks about the West ruining the planet with its excessively polluting ways. Just because you cannot see it around you, doesn't mean its not happening.
Instead of directly discussing the merit (or not) of this move by Apple, you chose to bring up an unrelated topic of general environmental problems in India.
Lets imagine the article was about Apple opening a new manufacturing facility in Texas. Would you have brought up other social/political/environmental challenges that Texas faces (oh i don't know, like racial equity, or floods)? My guess is that would be unlikely, since its kinda off-topic and would be clear you are trying to express some other gratuitous concern you may have about that region.
Yes. For examples, look at the top comments for the top three HN articles on Foxconn in Wisconsin.
1. I did a google search of "site:news.ycombinator.com Foxconn in Wisconsin", and opened the top 3 links.
2. first link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19037625. The top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038615) seems to be about cronyism and corruption in the terms offered to Foxconn by the Wisconsis government? I could be a bit off, i haven't followed that story closely. But, and this is important, its not about generalized corruption, its about corruption on this Foxconn deal!
3. second link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18328772. here the top comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18329445) is directly quoting the article about Foxconn getting exemptions from the environmental laws in Wisconsin. This is directly relevant to the article posted, again not about generic environmental concerns.
4. third link https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19630358. This one doesn't have much commentary, but here we see irrelevant comments which are not directly tied to the article, which are much in the vein of the original comment above.
Does that help clarify my position, and why comments of this nature are not helpful? Its totally fine to bring up environmental/social/political concerns, if they are relevant. They are not in this case.
I think to answer your question the best path forward is to continue as is with economic growth targets but also on a political level to be relentless in not accepting that what exists now is remotely good enough. Bring the problems up front and centre and never stop talking about them. Cuties inertia seemed to be particularly strong in India. That said India has some of the brightest minds in the world at the moment and has developed amazing capabilities so the problem isn't insurmountable if it is acknowledged and faced head on.
It's a difficult tradeoff. Economic development seems to be the only parameter that matters, especially when there are so many in poverty.
Some all time top posts on r/urbanhell are from India (UNPLEASANT IMAGERY WARNING):
https://i.redd.it/n8sdntzy8bb11.jpg
https://i.redd.it/y7i3lb94b1021.jpg
(River Yamuna. This river was reasonably clean 20 years ago but now you can see this terrible foam from the pollution and intense garbage disposal into the rivers. And yes, that's people praying, as Yamuna is considered one of the holy rivers)
"Ganga is so pure, it's literally impossible to make it impure and it has capabilities to wash off all our sins, then how can it possibly be polluted by people bathing/washing their cloths in it?"
I tried making people understand, the only way we've forward is making movies which show what can happen if we don't stop these activities then it will begin making sense to people who have no education background.
Hindu religion is not like Catholic Church. Unfortunately, in such issues, it is very fragmented and 'decentralized' with multiple different sects, castes, pontiffs etc.
Uttar Pradesh, where Ganga mostly flows has a lot of water heavy low-tech businesses. Leather tanneries is the first thing that comes to my mind. Illiteracy doesn't help either.
Things are changing. Ganga in Varanasi and a few other areas are much cleaner in the last couple years than they have been in the past!
Life here is safe and sound for us to think about climate change and other things. When people in India don't even have clean water or electricity they shouldn't give a shit about environment or other things.
It took the US 200 years of development before it started working about these things. And the US is / was a developed nation.
Of course they should be doing way, way more and support ways of cleaner development financially.
What makes the West the arbiter of such issues for other countries?
India really isn't much of an issue on that front. The 1.3 billion people living in India produce less than half the greenhouse gas emission of the USA, which has less than 1/4 of India's population.
These are all imagined, self-righteous concerns.
Leave a country to sort out its own misery in its own time. We have meddled and tortured enough out of these countries already.
If there is any priority or imposition, I would want to think like Bill Gates... His priorities are aligned with the well-being of the developing nations not the US.
But the car sales slump, at least, is very well documented. There's been a drastic fall in demand and everyone is bandying about myriad reasons (fuel prices, ridesharing, etc.). I just think people don't have enough money
It seems like India is 9 times the size of Japan and 10 times the population. It's high but its not unmanageably high for a fertile piece of land with good weather for significant part of the year.
All your arguments about political system incapable of fixing problems quickly still stand though.
It's a long way to go, but thankfully technology seems to be solving a human problem.
We are eradicating it through education and technology to the extent possible, albeit at a slower pace than we would ideally like.
If it's of any comfort - corruption is alive and well in most other countries as well, they simply have more resources per citizen and as a result, it is better disguised.
The solution seems to be to raise the standard of living of everyone involved - corruption is not going anywhere, it seems to be a deeply rooted human trait.
It seems to me there might be some tradeoff between having a flexible society and having a just one, the more leeway any particular actor has, the more they can use that leeway to gain personal advantage. It seems at least possible that a thorough study of the factors affecting levels of corruption could improve the overall system to have both more personal freedom and less overall corruption.
I hope they have learned their lesson and these manufacturing won't bring as much pollution / unit. While I don't expect it to be zero pollution, I just hope improvement are being made, and since Foxconn is working with Apple, I believe they will surely force a few criteria.
I think this pollution and all those sufferings are first step of industrialisation you might say what about current england or germany, I guess they suffered enough to make changes.