Rajesh Sinha

New Delhi: Pollution costs India nearly four per cent of its GDP and 200 million person days of work. About Rs36, 000 crores are lost each year due to water related diseases.

Making his point with more such startling statistics, Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC) chairman Veerappa Moily on Friday spoke of the need for a bottom-up approach, with decentralisation and empowerment of local governments as a must for sustainable development.

With climate change ushering in a host of aggravating environmental problems that have begun to affect society and economy, prominent experts and policy makers at a conference on Vision 2025, organised by The Energy and Resource Institute (TERI) called for wholesale restructuring of policy and governance to address the problem.

Emphasising the need for equitable and environment-friendly growth, Moily said urban and rural local bodies should be fully empowered to deal with all types of civic services, adding that centralisation of even basic municipal functions such as water supply and sanitation into the hands of water boards and authorities has led to a massive decline in the role and status of local bodies, which is now sought to be reversed.

He said people must be made stakeholders in the environment through awareness campaigns. The poor have to be turned into agents for environmental restoration by involving them in say forest management, waste management, recycling and so on in manners that create incentives for them to use natural resources in sustainable manner, Moily held.

He said that for a country of India’s size and population, “not to speak of its poverty levels”, environmentally sustainable development is not a luxury but a necessity. “I mention poor in particular because of their greater dependence on natural/common resources,” he added.

Source : DNA