What was the impact of Indian economic liberalisation on the environment?

Read the given passage and answer the following questions based on that.

Almost 40 years ago — a group of peasants in a remote Himalayan village stopped a group of loggers from felling a patch of trees. Thus was born the Chipko movement, and through it the modern Indian environmental movement itself. The first thing to remember about Chipko is that it was not unique. It was representative of a wide spectrum of natural resource conflicts in the 1970s and 1980s — conflicts over forests, fish, and pasture; conflicts about the siting of large dams; conflicts about the social and environmental impacts of unregulated mining. In all these cases, the pressures of urban and industrial development had denied local communities to access the resources necessary to their own livelihood.

In the West, the environmental movement had arisen chiefly due to the desire to protect endangered animal species and natural habitats. In India, however, it arose out of human survival. This was an environmentalism of the poor, which married the concern of social justice on the one hand with ____________________ on the other. It argued that present patterns of resource use disadvantaged local communities and devastated the natural environment.

Back in the 1970s, when the state occupied the commanding heights of the economy, and India was close to the Soviet Union, the activists of Chipko and other such movements were dismissed by their critics as agents of Western imperialism. Slowly, however, the sheer persistence of these protests forced the state into making some concessions. In 1980, a Department of Environment was established at the Centre, becoming a full-fledged Ministry a few years later. New laws to control pollution and to protect natural forests were formed. There even talk of restoring community systems of water and forest management. Meanwhile, journalists and scholars had begun more systematically studying the residue (I) of environmental degradation on social life across India. In 1991 the Indian economy started to liberalise. The dismantling of state controls was in part welcome, as it had stifled innovation and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the votaries of liberalisation mounted an even more savage attack on the environment than did the proponents of state socialism.