What is meant by environment?
Or
Define environment.

(i) Rising Population: India supports app. 16% of the world’s human and 20% of livestock population on a mere 2.5% of the world’s geographical area. The high density of population and livestock and the competing uses of land for forestry, agriculture, pastures, human settlement and industries exert an enormous pressure on the country’s finite land resources.

Hence, it becomes very difficult for the government to provide all types of facilities to such a huge population. All the measures adopted by the government cannot become fruitful unless we adopt a path of sustainable development. Development to enhance our current living styles, without concern for other factors will deplete resources and degrade environment at a speed that is bound to result in both environmental and economic crisis.

(ii) Air Pollution: In India, air pollution is widespread in urban areas because of vehicles, factories and other reasons. Air pollution is a great concern because it has serious harmful effects on the general population. For example, the number of motor vehicles has increased from about 3 lakh in 1957 to 67 crores to 2003. In 2003, personal transport vehicles (two wheelers vehicles and cars only) constituted about 80% of the total number of registered vehicles. This growth directly contributes to air pollution.

(iii) Water Contamination: Life depends to a great extent on water. However, increase in population, waste disposal from factories etc., contaminate water. The development process has also polluted water and is responsible for the decreasing level of water that is harmful for animals living in water. The government has taken many steps to solve the problem of water contamination but it had failed to achieve desired success.

(iv) Affluent Consumption Standards: The affluent consumption and production standards used by developed countries have placed a huge stress on the environment. In developed countries the government exerts less strictness on society because they have small amount of population and abundant resources. Hence, they try to make affluent society. But in this way, sometimes the resources remain unutilised or sometimes they are over utilised. Either the resources are underutilised or over-utilised, they generally lead to wastage of resources.

(v) Illiteracy: Illiteracy is a serious hurdle in the development process. The government has taken a number of measures to tackle the problem of illiteracy but it had failed to give desired results and had lead to deforestation, pollution, shortage of basic necessities like health, sanitation etc.

(vi) Industrialization: The cost of industrialisation is environmental degradation. The result of industrialization is that the demand for resources for both production and consumption has gone beyond the rate of regeneration of the resources. Hence, problems has started taking place.

(vii) Urbanisation: Urbanisation has resulted in environmental degradation. The government has tried hard to provide benefits and programmes in the rural and backward areas but in a quest to earn more and rapidly, people migrate to urban areas making them slums.

(viii) Reduction of forest coverage: Increasing population requires food, shelter, clothing. To meet these necessities of society, the government itself or businessmen or builders clear the forests. Clearance of forests have serious repercussions on the ecological balance and leads to ozone depletion.

(ix) Poaching: Destroying wild life is termed as Poaching or entering into other’s field forcefully is known as poaching. Preservation of wild life is essential to maintain ecological balance. The government is very much worried about the killing of animals at a massive scale and it has taken stern measures against the criminals.

(x) Global Warming: It is gradual increase in the average temperature of the earth’s lower atmosphere as a result of the increase in greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution much of the recent observed and projected global warming is human induced. It is caused by man-made increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. A UN Conference on Climate Change, held in Kyoto, Japan in 1997, resulted in an international agreement to fight warming which called for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialised nations.