A lot of high-flown rhetoric ushered in last week's UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Rio+20 was the biggest summit the UN had ever organised.

Final document is being touted as victory for developing world, as it reiterates principle of common but differentiated responsibilities

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, came to an end last week. The conference declaration, entitled “The Future We Want”, is a weak and meaningless document. It aims at the lowest common denominator consensus, to say nothing consequential about how the world will move ahead to deal with the interlinked crises of economy and ecology. The question arises: is this the future we want or the future we dread?

Some good sanitation news, discussed in a Nature commentary this week, is that some 80 percent of India’s urban residents now have access to a toilet.

Sixty per cent of people living in India do not have access to toilets, and hence are forced to defecate in the open. In actual numbers, sixty per cent translates to 626 million. This makes India the number one country in the world where open defecation is practised. Indonesia with 63 million is a far second!

At 949 million in 2010 worldwide, vast majority of people practising open defecation live in rural areas. Though the number of rural people practising open defecation has reduced by 234 million in 2010 than in 1990, “those that continue to do so tend to be concentrated in a few countries, including India,” notes the 2012 update report of UNICEF and the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The iron and steel sector is non-transparent, non-compliant with weak environmental norms and is getting away with it because of an even weaker regulatory framework

When the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) started its Green Rating Project in the mid-1990s, India had just liberalised its economy. There were fears that it would be disastrous if the country took the route to economic growth that ignored environmental considerations. The Green Rating Project was designed to find ways of measuring the environmental performance of companies and to drive changes in policy and practice through public disclosure.

Indian steel companies are getting away with causing grave damage to the environment.

TOI Guest Editor Sunita Narain presents a green paper on all the things India desperately needs to get right

Says sector severely wanting in pollution & regulatory compliance

The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a non-government organisation based here and promoting sustainable development, today exposed major inefficiencies in the performance of India’s iron and steel sector. In a detailed rating, which took two years to compile, of the country’s 21 top steel makers, it found a general inefficiency in resource usage, widespread pollution and violation of environmental norms, among other deficiencies.

A harried parent called a few weeks ago. She wanted to know if pollution levels in Delhi were bad and, if so, how bad. The answer was simple and obvious. But why did she need to know that? Her daughter’s prestigious school (which I shall leave unnamed) had sent a circular to parents saying the school authorities planned to shift to air-conditioned buses because they were worried about air pollution. She wanted to know if this was the right decision.

My answer changed. The fact is that pollution levels are high and we need to find ways to bring them under control. But this does not mean the rich can find ways to avoid breathing the air so as to keep pollution at bay.