The World Bank’s reorientation of its vision, by adding “on a liveable planet” to the existing statement of “creating a world free of poverty” is well aligned with Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s earlier global call for a mass movement on LiFE (Lifestyle for Environment) at Glasgow in November 2021. The Bank’s long-standing goal of ending extreme poverty is now explicitly qualified towards liveability and sustainability. The modified vision, recently endorsed by the Bank’s shareholders, is also expected to open the path to greater investments to address global development challenges. The October 2023 meetings of the World Bank at Marrakech also dwelt on those issues — including environmental fragility, the climate crisis, food and water insecurity, loss of biodiversity and the threat to human health — which happen to be core concerns of Mission LiFE. The latter, along with a global call for action, had been launched a year earlier by PM Modi together with United Nations secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, at Kevadia, India in October 2022.
While the World Bank’s renewed focus on the planet is timely, the India-led Mission LiFE was prescient in focusing on nudging people’s action — both individual and collective — towards environmental and climate protection, premised on the firm belief that making the planet liveable is everyone’s business and that every small step counts. The energy and effect of the behavioural nudge have already been experienced by national missions like Swachh Bharat, which implemented a successful jan andolan for freedom from open defecation. Swachh Bharat is now contributing to liveability in urban areas by making all 4,800 cities in India garbage-free by 2026. Reduce, reuse and recycle are the new behavioural themes being promoted; with segregation of household waste being one of the more challenging ones.
Mission LiFE has also become a people’s movement. Recently, on October 1, PM Modi led about a hundred million citizens in one hour of voluntary cleaning up of public spaces to demonstrate that individuals and communities can make a difference in both cleanliness campaigns as well as in the reduction of their carbon footprint — the latter a key focus of Mission LiFE. Another recent national campaign, Swachh Sagar, Surakshit Sagar (Clean Coast, Safe Sea) cleared up 1,500 tonnes of waste from 75 beaches in 75 days.
India’s experience of large-scale behaviour-change programmes during the last decade, whether in sanitation, LED use or Ujjwala gas connections, has been leveraged in rolling out Mission LiFE.
The immediate goal set by the mission is to mobilise action by one billion Indians and have 80% of villages and towns become environment- and climate-friendly by 2028. It is estimated that as many as nine trillion litres of water can be saved by the simple act of turning off taps when not in use; up to 22.5 billion kilowatt hours of energy can be saved by switching off car/scooter engines at traffic lights and railway crossings; composting of waste food at home can stop 15 billion tonnes from entering landfills; and substituting plastic shopping bags with cloth bags can avoid another 375 million tonnes of solid waste.
The LiFE movement aspires to nurture a mass movement of pro-planet people, who will be harbingers and perpetrators of what the World Bank now refers to as a liveable planet. It is based on a conviction that mindless consumption and incessant addition to waste must yield to mindful utilisation, again anchored in the simple Gandhian idea that “the world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed”. Unlike other elements of the sustainability agenda, LiFE does not impinge upon any fault lines in the global climate debate. There is no Global North-South dilemma in this democratic action; it can be everyone’s pursuit in their own backyards with undisputed global public good as the outcome. India is already a leader-partner in similar efforts of common causes such as One Sun, One World, One Grid, and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure. Not surprisingly, many countries have veered towards the Indian position. The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) that concluded in Dubai earlier this month had useful resonance about such common concerns.
The G20 leaders, under India’s presidency, representing the world’s largest economies and populations, came together at their September 2023 summit in New Delhi under the tagline “One Earth, One Family, One Future”, underlining the collective responsibility of the global community to act to protect and conserve our planet. Further, in their joint Delhi Declaration, the leaders committed to mainstream the LiFE movement through “robust collective actions that will enable the world to embrace sustainable production and consumption patterns and mainstream Lifestyles for Sustainable Development”.
While India leads the world by example on LiFE, many other countries have witnessed sustainable lifestyle movements. Shops in Nigeria use solar power to stay open in the evening hours. Rice farmers in Vietnam have gone for new techniques, such as alternate wetting and drying, to reduce their water footprint and methane emissions. Likewise, bicycling paths and routes in Nordic countries keep automobiles at bay. In India, nature conservation and circular economy practice have not only been a part of ancient traditions, but these are also entrenched among village and tribal communities across India. Preference for low water footprint crops such as millets, ancient construction of the step wells of Gujarat and Rajasthan and the underground tanks of Tamil Nadu, and sun drying of clothes are just a few examples of how Indian society has traditionally and harmoniously protected the environment.
Finally, to be clear that practising sustainable lifestyles a la Mission LiFE is not just a feel-good movement without real impact on the ground, let’s refer to the International Energy Agency (IEA)’s February 2023 report, which uses modelling to project that the adoption worldwide of the kinds of actions and measures targeted by LiFE – including behavioural changes and sustainable consumer choices – would reduce annual global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than two billion tonnes by 2030. PM Modi’s game-changing Mission LiFE is undoubtedly a most dependable companion on the journey to a livable planet.
Parameswaran Iyer is executive director, World Bank and former CEO NITI Aayog and Akshay Rout is former director general, Swachh Bharat Mission. The views expressed are personal
