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Indian Government and Environmental Management

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After reading this article you will learn about the role of Indian government in
environmental management.

The Government is the supreme manager of environment and it is the duty of

the government-to manage the security and sovereignty of air, water and land.
Today, the magnitude of the pollution problems due to rapid growth of
population, industrialization, urbanization and motorization, especially since
1960’s prove to be so serious that they require to be tackled only through public
policies.

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The reason for this being that the private market system fails to allocate
environmental resources efficiently due to the pervasiveness of pollution costs
external to private decision makers. Environmental quality is a public good and
the economic efficiency in environmental resource allocation necessitates the
intervention of the government. Generally, there are 2 approaches available for
pollution abatement policy.

They are:

1. Discouraging pollution through altering the market incentives

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2. Through regulatory intervention, in the absence of market incentives.
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The aim of the first approach is to design the pollution abatement methods to
eliminate the divergence between private costs and social costs. The second
approach of tackling environmental pollution problems is the imposition of
mandatory controls and standards on emission sources.

Altering market incentives include methods such as imposing pollution taxes or

effluent charges and pollution fines upon the generators of pollution and
providing subsidies for promoting waste treatment and recycling materials. The
regulatory intervention relates to the way of passing of pollution control
regulations, legislations and to establish environmental standards.

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Following are some of the important measures adopted by the government of

India in protecting the environment:

Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development have been the

cornerstones of the policies and procedures governing the industrial and other
developmental activities in India.

Ministry of Environment & Forests has taken several policy initiatives and
enacted environmental and pollution control legislations to prevent
indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and to promote integration of
environmental concerns in developmental projects.

One such initiative is the Notification on Environmental Impact Assessment

(EIA) of development projects issued on 27.1.1994 under the provisions of
Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 making EIA mandatory for 29 categories of
developmental projects. One more item was added to the list in January 2000.
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EIA isCookie
a planning
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tool that is now generally accepted as an integral component of
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sound decision-making. The objective of EIA is to foresee and address potential

environmental problems/concerns at an early stage of project planning and
design.

EIA/EMP should assist planners and government authorities in the decision

making process by identifying the key impacts/issues and formulating
mitigation measures. Ministry had issued sectored guidelines some time ago.

A compendium of the procedures and questionnaires entitled Application Form

and Questionnaire for Environmental Clearance was published in September,
1999 in association with the Confederation of Indian Industry.

As part of the continued efforts to ensure transparency in the procedures of

environmental clearance and to assist the project authorities in improving the
quality of EIA documents, this Manual is now being brought out by the Ministry.

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The Manual has been designed to cover the whole gamut of issues like regulatory
requirements, the EIA methodology including baseline studies, identification of
key issues and consideration of alternatives, impact analysis and remedial
measures in a systematic way.

It also delineates the process of reviewing the adequacy of EIA and EMP reports
and post-project monitoring. To make the Manual comprehensive and self-
contained, information pertaining to legislative regime, base line data
generation and monitoring, thumb rules for pollution control measures etc. have
been annexed to the main text.

It has been our experience that EIA documents are often voluminous but much of
the base-line information included in these is not fully utilised in the impact
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Other measures that have been adopted by the government in environmental
management and currently in operation all over India include:

i. Effluent Charges:

It is one of the fiscal tools which when used correctly will induce the firm to
decrease output of effluents. This in turn helps remove the zero-price criteria of
the producers associated with the use of the natural resources of the country.
The imposition of these effluent charges firmly establishes the public ownership
of air and water resources and determines the price that must be paid for their
use.

ii. Pollution Fines:

An important strategy of environmental pollution control creates cost burdens

on polluters and also serves as an incentive for adopting safety measures in the
production activities over the country.

iii. Subsidies for Better Environmental Quality:

The subsidies that can be offered by the government acts as an opportunity cost
in terms of foregone revenue and also has the effect of internationalizing the
social costs of waste discharges. The polluter treats waste reduction as another
marketable good and therefore, more firms try to improve their efficiency in
their effort to maximize their ‘subsidies’.

iv. Other Regulatory and Legal Measures:

There is an increasing effort working to improve the legislation laws that protect
our environment supported by well drafted regulations and enforcement
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The legislative
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rights, pollution control and abatement, forest protection, wildlife conservation,

rural and urban planning, industrial licensing, development planning, use of
toxic chemicals, disposal of solid wastes and effluents to name the most
important few.

The government, however, must place more stress on government expenditure

on environmental protection that must move up to support the concept of
‘sustainable development’ that the countries around the globe are striving to
achieve. Environmental management must also acknowledge the fact that
increasing population and poverty are mainly related to the over utilization and
depletion of natural resources.

Therefore, people’s awareness and their active participation on environmental

issues is a “must”. For instance, the “chipko” movement in our country has
played a vital role in safeguarding forests in Himalayas.

Environmental education particularly relating to environmental impact

assessment (EIA) as discussed earlier is necessary for better environmental
management. Voluntary agencies and NGO’s must also be encouraged to help
solve the environmental problems of our country.

The environmentalist movement has been weak in India. This is so despite the
pro-nature, pantheism in Indian culture and the Gandhian outlook to life.
Though its antecedents are to be traced to it’s counterparts in the West and
developed countries elsewhere, like Japan, it came up in the seventies and
assumed recognizable proportions during the eighties.

Initially, after independence, the primary attention of the governments and the
people was riveted on development through a planned strategy. As the
development plans proceeded and development in some concentrated areas,
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environmental problems that arose in the wake of industrial development,
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urbanization and increase in the population of our country.
Uprooting of agricultural landholders from the villages in which they had settled
for generations due to irrigation and hydroelectric projects, water logging and
salinisation of agricultural lands due to continuous irrigation and fertilizer use,
unsettlement of the tribals on account of deforestation, the growth of slums and
extinction of greenery due to over-urbanization, pollution of air and water due
to industrial wastes, increase in noise pollution were some of the environmental
problems which cropped up all over the country and engaged the attention of the
planners and the people.

Thus, the rise of environmentalism in the country has been slow and belated to
meet the advances and pace of development in the country. The movement has
been localized, sporadic, transient and weak, and basically, treated
symptomatically.

Thus, the root of the problems lies in the fact that there has been a lot of
complacency in development planning, as the planners never figured out the
consequences of their plans would also have negative externalities which would
be devastating and wide spread.

The awakening in the United Nations to the urgency of environmental protection

and the insertion of a constitutional provision of a direct principle of State Policy
regarding the guarding of the forests and wildlife of the country (Article 48 A),
more or less coincided.

An independent Department of Environment, Forests and Wildlife exist to deal

with the environmental issues of our country. Various enactments have entered
into the statute book to safeguard environmental protection and suitable actions
are being pursued.
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longstanding and ever growing. Without the constant prodding and support of
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the movement in India, these problems will take a long time to be treated and
solved.

Development planning by the government must be preceded by foreseeing of the

environmental problems ahead of time, not trailing behing it. The government
must confer and consult with the environmental groups to avoid a time lag
between the occurrence of the problems and their solutions. The environmental
groups have to combine and assert their concerted strength and this is where
NGO’s come into the picture.

The government should evince sympathy to their causes as they keep the
conscience of the people burning bright. This is the core element of development
planning for any country. Development and environmentalism are not opposed
to each other as some may conclude; they are complementary.

Any development oriented plans must perform its objectives without disturbing
the equilibrium of the regional ecosystem. Environmental planning and
management on the one hand and development planning on the other, are
interlinked as the former gives the solutions to a better surrounding and the
latter provides the solutions to a better way of living.

The importance of environmental planning and development of resources need

to be over emphasized for a nation like India with so much socio­economic stress
and strains. Knowing that all development activities depend upon natural
resources for inputs (source), and for disposal of waste (sink) and that
environmental problems are created either when inputs demanded are beyond
the regenerative capacity at the source and\or. when wastes overwhelm the
recycling and\or absorptive capacity at the sink, the traditional planning process
with
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sell my personal available in perpetuity and in abundance is no longer
tenable. Indeed, it is abundantly clear now that the planning exercise must be
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attempted within a regime of “Limiting Resources”.
Moreover, the pressure on the sources and sinks is determined by the efficiency
of the process, which in turn depends among other things, on the kind of
technology applied. Policy initiatives are, therefore, imperative towards
efficiency improvements in technology to achieve reduced pressure on the
resource base, both on the source and sinks sides, and result in increased
production of goods and services.

The first Industrial Revolution led to a worldwide emphasis on adoption of

industrialization as the quickest route for rapid economic development
accompanied by large-scale import of technologies – obsolete and not-so-
obsolete – by developing countries.

Selection of technologies in India, like elsewhere, was based on the criteria of

“Lowest Initial Capital Investment”, resulting in a basketful of technologies
which are obsolete and which create increasing pressure on the natural resource
base.

Seeing the excessive wastage of natural resources, accompanied by a staggering

backlog of air, water and land pollution, the Government of India came out with
a Technology Policy Statement in 1983, which simply stated that:

“Our future depends on our ability to resist the imposition of technology which
is obsolete or unrelated to our specific requirements and of policies which tie
us to systems which serve the purposes of others rather than our own, and on
our success in dealing with vested interests in our organizations;
governmental, economic, social and even intellectual which bind us to
outmoded systems and institutions.”

Time and again, it is stressed that the available natural resources are not
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prime importance for the national growth. Of all the energy sources, hydel
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energy ranks next to solar energy and wind energy in environmental friendly
option.

These are the natural resources that we can utilize efficiently and in our quest
for integrated development and growth for our country. Research and
development is of primary importance for any development plan and
investments must be made after performing an accurate cost-benefit analysis.

In recent years, in all the planning processes, emphasis has been placed on
integrated planning, but the concept of integrated area development and the
methods of achieving it have not yet been set forth clearly.

The concept of integrated area development refers to three types of integration,

i.e., functional, spatial and time which are again interrelated in various complex
forms. Integrated area development refers to the appropriate locations of social
and economic activities over a physical space for the maximum rather optimum
use and ex­ploitation of physical and human resources available in the region for
its balanced development.

It provides a most suitable matrix for de­centralization of basic and necessary

socio economic activities by locating them at viable places. To achieve these
objectives, it is essential to divide any development oriented plan into rural
planning and urban planning as the requirements and attributes of each region
differ from the other.

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