Environment and Society

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: GS1 asks why India suffers water scarcity despite its endowment, what reclaiming urban water bodies does to a city, and how groundwater decline threatens food security; GS3 asks about pollution, GM crops and disasters. This chapter's contribution is a single argument that turns these into sociology: environmental problems are also social problems, because who suffers from them, who can escape them and who gets to define "the public interest" depend on property, power and inequality. NCERT builds the argument from ecology through risk to social ecology and sustainable development. The 2026-27 reprint drops one box of the pre-2022 edition (P. Sainath's report on water parks in drought-hit Vidarbha) and keeps the rest. Several of NCERT's figures are dated (the Bhopal toll, WHO's 2012 air-pollution deaths), so this page prints each NCERT figure with the current official one and its basis.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Everything around you comes from nature. The classroom chair is wood, iron nails, glue and varnish; its journey from a tree to you depends on electricity, diesel, trade and telecommunications, and on loggers, carpenters, transporters and traders who themselves use goods and services drawn from nature. Trace those resource flows and the complexity of environment-society relations becomes obvious. All societies have an ecological basis.

Ecology is never purely natural. Ecology is "the web of physical and biological systems and processes of which humans are one element": mountains and rivers, plains and oceans, their flora and fauna, shaped by the interaction of geography and hydrology. Over time human action has modified it, so that what looks natural, aridity or flood-proneness, is often produced by human intervention, and it becomes difficult to separate natural from human factors in ecological change.

The relation runs both ways, and it is social. Social environments emerge from the interaction of biophysical ecology and human intervention: "just as nature shapes society, society shapes nature". How that interaction runs is shaped by social organisation (property and the division of labour), by values and by knowledge. So an environmental crisis has social roots, falls unequally on different groups, and cannot be solved without changing relations between those groups.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Key Terms at a Glance (NCERT's definitions)

The Five Major Environmental Hazards

One Resource, Different Groups (NCERT's cases)

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

Ecology and Human Action

Ecological factors limit and shape how humans can live: a desert's plant and animal life is adapted to scarce rainfall, rocky or sandy soils and extreme temperatures, and so are its people. But ecology has been modified by human action. Deforestation in the upper catchment of a river may make it more flood-prone; climate change brought about by global warming shows the reach of human activity. NCERT's activity gives two surprises: the Ridge forest in Delhi is not the region's natural vegetation but was planted by the British around 1915, dominated by Prosopis juliflora (vilayati kikar), brought from South America and now naturalised across north India; and the chaurs, the grassy meadows of Corbett National Park in Uttarakhand that offer fine views of wildlife, were once agricultural fields whose villages were relocated to create what "now appears to be a pristine wilderness".

Some environments are more obviously human-made: a farm with its soil and water conservation works, cultivated plants, domesticated animals, fertilisers and pesticides; or a city of concrete, brick, glass and tar, which uses natural resources but is "very much a human artefact".

Social Environments: A Two-Way Process

Nature shapes society. The fertile soil of the Indo-Gangetic floodplain allows intensive agriculture whose surpluses support dense settlements, non-agricultural activity, and "complex hierarchical societies and states"; the Rajasthan desert can support only pastoralists who move with their livestock in search of fodder. Society shapes nature. The social organisation of capitalism has reshaped nature worldwide: the private automobile, one capitalist commodity, has transformed lives and landscapes through air pollution, congestion, regional conflicts and wars over oil, and global warming.

NCERT's historical case is the Industrial Revolution in Britain, whose ecological effects were felt everywhere. Large areas of southern North America and the Caribbean became plantations to supply cotton to the mills of Lancashire; young West Africans were forcibly transported to work them as slaves, and the depopulation of West Africa let its fields revert to fallow; in Britain, coal-burning mills fouled the air, and displaced farmers and labourers lived in wretched conditions in the cities. "The ecological footprints of the cotton industry could be found all over urban and rural environments."

Social Organisation, Values and Knowledge

Property relations determine how and by whom natural resources are used. If the government owns forests, it decides whether to lease them to timber companies or let villagers collect forest produce; private ownership of land and water decides whether others get access and on what terms. The division of labour gives different groups different relationships with resources: landless labourers and women relate to them differently from men, and in rural India women feel scarcity most because gathering fuel and fetching water are their tasks, "but they do not control these resources".

Values and norms matter too. Capitalism supports the commodification of nature: a river's ecological, utilitarian, spiritual and aesthetic meanings are reduced to calculations of profit from selling its water. Socialist values of equality and justice led to the seizure of large landlords' land and its redistribution to landless peasants in several countries. Religious values have led some groups to protect sacred groves and species, and others to believe they have divine sanction to change the environment to suit their needs.

Knowledge is shaped by social conditions. In the "nature-nurture" debate, are people poor because they are innately less talented, or because they are born into disadvantage? The ideas that women were naturally less able than men, and Blacks than Whites, were challenged as ideas of equality spread in the 18th century's revolutions. Colonialism produced a great deal of environmental knowledge, compiled to make resources available to imperial powers: geology, geography, botany, zoology, forestry and hydraulic engineering were institutionalised "to facilitate the management of natural resources for colonial purposes".

Environmental Management and Risk

Environmental management is very difficult. Not enough is known about biophysical processes to predict and control them; industrialisation has expanded and accelerated resource extraction; and complex industrial technologies need sophisticated management systems that are "often fragile and vulnerable to error". NCERT concludes: "We live in risk societies using technologies and products that we do not fully grasp." Its examples are nuclear disasters like Chernobyl, industrial accidents like Bhopal, and Mad Cow disease in Europe.

NCERT's box on Bhopal asks: who was to blame? On the night of the disaster a deadly gas, later identified as methyl isocyanate (MIC), escaped from a Union Carbide pesticide factory in the city. Drawing on the Centre for Science and Environment's State of India's Environment: The Second Citizens' Report, NCERT lists the failures. Union Carbide's arrival in 1977 was welcomed for jobs, money and foreign-exchange savings at a time of rising pesticide demand after the Green Revolution. The MIC plant had several leaks, one killing an operator; the government ignored warnings, including a notice from the head of the Bhopal Municipal Corporation in the late 1970s (he was transferred and the company gave Rs 25,000 for a park). In May 1982 three Union Carbide Corporation experts from the USA found alarming safety lapses, reported in the local weekly Rapat; the employees' union wrote to ministers; the state Labour Minister kept reassuring legislators; weeks before the leak the state pollution control board granted an environmental clearance. The Centre ignored the plant's safety record and the Department of Environment's siting guidelines. The company employed relatives of powerful politicians and bureaucrats, and hosted politicians. The plant itself was under-designed, lacked the computerised early-warning system standard in the company's US plants, had no evacuation plan with the community, was poorly maintained, ran at a third of capacity with reduced and demoralised staff, and many instruments were out of order. NCERT's discussion question: which social institutions and organisations play a role in such accidents, and how can they be prevented?

Major Environmental Problems and Risks

The relative urgency of hazards varies by country, but NCERT names five recognised globally.

A. Resource depletion. Using up non-renewable resources is among the most serious problems. Fossil fuels, especially petroleum, "hog the headlines", but water and land are probably being depleted even faster. Groundwater is falling rapidly all over India, especially in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh: aquifers that took hundreds or thousands of years to fill are being emptied "in a matter of a few decades" to meet the demands of intensive agriculture, industry and cities. Rivers have been dammed and diverted, damaging basin ecology irreversibly; urban water bodies have been filled and built upon, destroying natural drainage. Topsoil, also built up over thousands of years, is lost to erosion, water-logging, salinisation and brick-making. Forests, grasslands and wetlands are shrinking, mainly to agriculture; despite some re-forestation, the overall trend is a loss of biodiversity, endangering species unique to India, as in "the recent crisis" when the tiger population was found to have fallen sharply despite strict laws and large sanctuaries.

B. Pollution. Air pollution causes respiratory and other illnesses and deaths in towns and villages alike. Its sources include industry, vehicles and the burning of wood and coal at home. Indoor pollution is often overlooked: in rural homes, green or poorly burning wood, badly designed chulhas and poor ventilation put women at serious risk because they do the cooking. NCERT cites WHO: around 7 million people died in 2012, "one in eight of total global deaths", as a result of air pollution exposure, more than double earlier estimates, making air pollution "the world's largest single environmental health risk" (3.3 million deaths linked to indoor and 2.6 million to outdoor air pollution). WHO's current fact sheets (2024, 2025) put the combined effects of ambient and household air pollution at 6.7 million premature deaths a year, with ambient pollution causing 4.2 million (2019) and household pollution 2.9 million (2021); the two parts come from different years, so quote the combined figure as WHO does. Water pollution affects surface and groundwater through sewage, factory effluents and farm run-off laden with fertilisers and pesticides. Noise pollution from loudspeakers at religious, cultural and political events, horns, traffic and construction has been the subject of court orders in many cities.

C. Global warming. Carbon dioxide, methane and other gases create a "greenhouse" effect by trapping the sun's heat, causing "a small but significant rise in global temperatures". The resulting climate change is projected to melt polar ice-fields, raise sea levels, submerge low-lying coasts and upset ecological balance, with greater climatic uncertainty. China and India are "increasingly significant contributors" to emissions. India's Nationally Determined Contribution for 2031-35, approved by the Union Cabinet on 25 March 2026, commits it to reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 47 per cent from the 2005 level and to reach 60 per cent of installed power capacity from non-fossil sources by 2035.

D. Genetically modified organisms. Gene-splicing lets scientists move genes from one species to another: genes from Bacillus thuringiensis introduced into cotton make it resistant to the bollworm; modification can also shorten growing time or increase size and shelf-life. Little is known about long-term effects on consumers or ecosystems, and companies can create sterile seeds that farmers cannot re-use, guaranteeing that seeds "remain their profit-yielding property".

E. Natural and man-made disasters. NCERT calls this category self-explanatory: the Bhopal disaster of 1984 and the tsunami of 2004 are its "most recent examples" of man-made and natural environmental disasters. For the tsunami of 26 December 2004 the US Geological Survey gives 227,898 killed or missing and presumed dead in 14 countries; in India 10,273 were reported dead and 5,823 missing (Home Minister, 10 March 2005).

Why Environmental Problems Are Also Social Problems

How an environmental problem affects different groups "is a function of social inequality". Status and power decide how far people can insulate themselves from a crisis or overcome it, and their "solutions" may worsen disparities. In Kutch, Gujarat, where water is scarce, richer farmers sank deep bore tubewells to irrigate cash crops; when the rains fail, the poorer villagers' earthen wells run dry and they lack even drinking water, while "the moist green fields of the rich farmers seem to mock them".

Some concerns look universal: reducing air pollution or protecting biodiversity seem to be in the public interest. Sociological analysis shows that how public priorities are set and pursued "may not be universally beneficial": securing the public interest may serve politically and economically powerful groups or hurt the poor. "As the debates over large dams and around protected areas show, the environment as a public interest is a hotly contested arena."

Sustainable Development

The relation between ecology and economy is complex, but "unless there is a balance between the two, the future of humanity will remain bleak". For three hundred years development has emphasised controlling and ruthlessly exploiting nature for a section of the population, driving thousands of species of flora and fauna to extinction; reliance on non-renewable energy and the introduction of many new species have "played havoc with ecology". If depletion and extinction continue, future generations will pay the price.

NCERT quotes the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987): "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It contains two key concepts: needs, "in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given"; and the limitations imposed by technology and social organisation on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.

Capitalist development rests on consumption: old things must be destroyed so that new products are bought. NCERT quotes Sunita Narain (Down to Earth, 2016): there is growing inequality, "aspiration is the new God", and anyone poor is marginalised for not making the grade, "the survival of the fittest, in a way that would have made Darwin insane". Existing stratification lets some sections control most resources and opportunities. NCERT's answer is a society "where people are at par; where there is equitable distribution of resources; where the aim is development but one that is inclusive and not exclusive". The UN's member states and global civil society arrived, through a deliberative process, at the 17 Sustainable Development Goals with 169 targets (the 2030 Agenda, adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit on 25 September 2015), echoing former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's line that "there can be no Plan B, because there is no Planet B". NCERT closes the box with Gandhi: "God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism in the manner of the West... If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts."

Two Environment-Society Conflicts

Farmers' distress. NCERT reports that thousands of farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra have killed themselves, often by drinking pesticide. The journalist P. Sainath's investigation finds a fusion of environmental and economic causes. Farming has grown more volatile as farmers are exposed to world-market fluctuations and government support for small farmers declines under liberalisation. Cotton is a high-risk, high-return crop that needs some irrigation and is very susceptible to pests, so growers need capital for both, and both have grown dearer: over-extraction has depleted water so wells must go deeper, and pests have become resistant, needing new pesticides sprayed more often. Farmers borrow from private moneylenders and traders at high interest; if the crop fails, they cannot repay, feed their families or meet obligations like children's marriages, and "suicide seems to be the only way out". NCERT asks how agriculture depletes water.

Urban space. Amita Baviskar (2003) shows the conflict over urban space growing more acute. Migrants who come for work cannot afford scarce legal housing and settle on public land, now in demand for malls, multiplexes, hotels and tourist sites for affluent residents and visitors; poor workers are evicted to the outskirts and their homes demolished. "Besides land, air and water have also become highly contested resources in the urban environment." NCERT's discussion questions: is water scarcity natural or human-made; what social factors shape its allocation; why do the urban poor live in slums; who controls landed property and housing; and what affects access to water and sanitation?

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

Applying the Chapter

Exam Strategy

For Prelims: know NCERT's definitions (ecology, social ecology, the two-way social environment) and its five hazards with examples. Current figures to carry, each with its date: CGWB 2025 stage of extraction (Punjab 156.36 per cent, India 60.63 per cent); WHO's 6.7 million deaths from ambient and household air pollution combined; Bt cotton as the only GM crop approved for commercial cultivation (approved 2002); AITE 2022 mean of 3,682 tigers; SDGs 17 goals and 169 targets (25 September 2015); Brundtland Report 1987; Bhopal on the night of 2-3 December 1984.

For Mains: NCERT's ten exercises ask you to define ecology, explain why it is not limited to nature, describe the two-way process, show how social organisation shapes environment-society relations, explain why management is hard, list pollution hazards and resource-depletion issues, explain why environmental problems are social problems and what social ecology means, and describe environment-related conflicts other than the text's. Structure answers on NCERT's argument: nature shapes society, society shapes nature, inequality decides who suffers, and solutions need changed social relations. Use the Bhopal box for institutional failure and Kutch for unequal water.

Avoid: treating environmental problems as purely technical; quoting NCERT's 2012 WHO figure or Bhopal's "about 4,000" as current without the newer official figures; calling GM mustard a commercially approved crop.

Practice Questions

Practice (UPSC-pattern, not past papers). Mains items 1 to 7 are NCERT's own exercises.

Prelims:

1. NCERT's activity notes that the Ridge forest in Delhi:
   (a) is the natural vegetation of the Aravallis
   (b) was planted by the British around 1915 and is dominated by Prosopis juliflora
   (c) was created by relocating villages, like the chaurs of Corbett
   (d) is a sacred grove protected by religious values

2. Consider the following statements based on the Central Ground Water Board's assessment of 2025:
   

   1. Punjab's stage of groundwater extraction exceeds 150 per cent.
      
   2. Haryana and Rajasthan both extract more groundwater than is annually extractable.
      
   3. India's overall stage of extraction exceeds 100 per cent.
      Which of the statements given above are correct?
      (a) 1 and 2 only (b) 2 and 3 only (c) 1 and 3 only (d) 1, 2 and 3

3. Which one of the following is the only genetically modified crop approved for commercial cultivation in India, according to the Ministry of Agriculture (2024)?
   (a) Bt brinjal (b) GM mustard DMH-11 (c) Bt cotton (d) Golden rice

4. The school of social ecology, as described by NCERT, holds that:
   (a) environmental problems are caused mainly by population growth
   (b) social relations, especially the organisation of property and production, shape environmental perceptions and practices
   (c) nature determines the form of every human society
   (d) technology alone can solve environmental crises

5. The definition "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" comes from:
   (a) the Stockholm Declaration, 1972 (b) Our Common Future, 1987 (c) Agenda 21, 1992 (d) the 2030 Agenda, 2015

6. In NCERT's account, the indoor air pollution from chulhas puts which group at most serious risk?
   (a) children at school (b) village women, because they do the cooking (c) factory workers (d) urban commuters

Answers: 1 (b); 2 (a), since India's overall stage is 60.63 per cent; 3 (c); 4 (b); 5 (b); 6 (b).

Mains:

1. Describe in your own words what you understand by the term "ecology". Why is ecology not limited only to the forces of nature? (150 words)
2. Describe the two-way process by which "social environments" emerge. (150 words)
3. Why and how does social organisation shape the relationship between the environment and society? (250 words)
4. Why is environmental management a complex and huge task for society? (150 words)
5. What are the major environmental issues associated with resource depletion, and what are some of the important forms of pollution-related hazards? (250 words)
6. Explain why environmental problems are simultaneously social problems. What is meant by social ecology? (250 words)
7. Describe some environment-related conflicts that you know of or have read about, other than the examples in the text. (250 words)
8. "Securing the public interest may actually serve the interests of particular politically and economically powerful groups." Examine with reference to India's groundwater crisis. (250 words)

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

• NCERT, Understanding Society (Class XI), ch. 3 "Environment and Society", Reprint 2026-27: ncert.nic.in PDF; pre-2022 text in the book archive, Wayback copy of November 2020.
• NCERT, Politics in India since Independence (Class XII), ch. 7 "Rise of Popular Movements" (2021-22 print; Chipko, Narmada Bachao Andolan): Wayback copy.
• Central Ground Water Board findings, Ministry of Jal Shakti: PIB, "Findings of Dynamic Groundwater Resources Assessment", 18 December 2025: pib.gov.in; PIB, "Dynamic Groundwater Resources Assessment, 2025", 29 January 2026: pib.gov.in.
• WHO fact sheets: "Ambient (outdoor) air pollution", 24 October 2024: who.int; "Household air pollution", 16 December 2025: who.int.
• PIB, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, "Cultivation of Genetically Modified crops", 6 August 2024: pib.gov.in; Supreme Court of India, Gene Campaign v. Union of India, 23 July 2024: Indian Kanoon.
• PIB, "All India Tiger Estimation-2022: Release of the detailed Report", 29 July 2023: pib.gov.in.
• PIB, "Cabinet approves India's Nationally Determined Contribution (2031-2035)", 25 March 2026: pib.gov.in.
• Supreme Court of India, Union of India v. Union Carbide Corporation (curative petitions), 14 March 2023: Indian Kanoon.
• US Geological Survey, "Today in Earthquake History: December 26" (2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami): USGS; PIB, Home Minister's statement on the tsunami, 10 March 2005: pib.gov.in.
• Government of Kerala, Agriculture (Forest Special-A) Department, notification declaring Silent Valley National Park, 15 November 1984: forest.kerala.gov.in PDF.
• Supreme Court of India, Narmada Bachao Andolan v. Union of India, 18 October 2000: Indian Kanoon; PMO, "PM dedicates Sardar Sarovar Dam to the nation", 17 September 2017: pmindia.gov.in.
• World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (1987), UN text: un-documents.net PDF; UN, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (A/RES/70/1): sdgs.un.org.
• Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft (Suhrkamp, 1986): suhrkamp.de; Risk Society (Sage, 1992): Internet Archive record.