India's ambitious 'Mission Life' initiative, aimed at encouraging citizens to adopt more environmentally friendly lifestyles, has been largely sidelined in the country's latest budget. Despite being championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the program has lost momentum, highlighting the challenges of enacting large-scale behavioral changes.
For nearly four years, India's government pushed an initiative to encourage people to make lifestyle choices that pollute less, like cycling instead of driving or using less plastic. But in the country's yearly budget announcement last weekend, the once-flagship program, known as the Lifestyle for Environment Initiative or Mission Life, failed to get a mention — or any promise of future funding.
Mission Life was once championed by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior ministers as a major step toward the country's climate goals. The idea was to get the whole population working to slash emissions by cutting electricity use or skipping unnecessary private car journeys. But it's fallen out of favor: Mission Life's dedicated government website used to provide monthly updates on the initiative's progress, but there hasn't been an update since March 2024. Experts say this demonstrates the difficulty of making large-scale changes in people's everyday lives, especially without financial incentives. However, lessons learned can help shape future policy that could be more successful at getting a significant percentage of the population to ditch their more polluting habits.Latha Girish, who owns a company in Bengaluru that makes plastic packaging for industrial-scale food storage and refrigeration, says she's focused on ensuring her business survives, not its emissions. Many small business owners 'don't have the luxury of thinking about the environment,' she said. 'Ask anybody in our sector, I'm sure they won't know about Mission Life or any other such initiative.' Anything that increases her business' prices — like using more sustainable raw materials — means she loses customers who only want the lowest price. 'They are looking only at how competitive you are and don't look at what you are doing or not doing for the environment or sustainability,' she said. But Sunil Mysore, the CEO of sustainability solutions company Hinren Engineering, said climate-friendly changes can be made as long as there is a motivation to live a 'better life.' 'My home is completely off the grid now,' said Mysore. He said they reuse all the waste they produce to make energy, and their rooftop garden provides them with vegetables. They also harvest rainwater at home, meaning the household is better shielded from a growing number of water crises in Bengaluru, where he lives.Prasad Gawade, who runs an ecotourism company where travelers stay with Indigenous communities in western India, agrees. He said his efforts to run an environmentally-friendly business are in spite of, not because of, government initiatives because smaller businesses don't get the kind of incentives bigger ones do. Part of the problem is that major projects that could change people's habits — like changing a city's infrastructure to make it more convenient to get around with electric trams or trains over private cars — weren't part of Mission Life, said Sanjib Pohit, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based National Council for Applied Economic Research. 'Drastic infrastructure changes are needed for (Mission Life) to be successful,' he said. India's environment ministry did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment about the Mission Life program.
Environment MISSION LIFE INDIA CLIMATE CHANGE SUSTAINABILITY ENERGY EFFICIENCY GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES
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