Social justice in first Natl Environment Policy

New Delhi, May 28: The country has now its first National Environment Policy in place with social justice and poverty alleviation, economic growth and environmental conservation as its three main planks.

The policy has an inbuilt system of review and accountability.

All strategies for conservation of natural resources were so far seen as antithetical to growth and removal of poverty, but the first national environment policy works on the premises that economic growth and efforts for social justice can go together with conservation, Secretary Ministry of Environment and Forest Pradeepto Ghosh told UNI.

Another major difference with past policies is that there is an inbuilt system of yearly review.

''Every year, we will have to go to the Cabinet to give an account of what we have done for implementation of the policy, and every three years changes in the policy are to be considered and after 10 years, we will have a complete restructuring of the whole policy'' he said.

''So far there were only a set of policies, but no comprehensive policy. The old approach saw the environment as an end in itself, but now we have linked it to sustainable development,'' he added.

The dominant theme of the policy is that while conservation of environmental resources is necessary for livelihoods and well-being of all, the most secure basis for conservation is to ensure that people dependent on particular resources obtain better livelihoods from the fact of conservation than from degradation of the resource.

Environmental degradation is a major causal factor in enhancing and perpetuating poverty, particularly among the rural poor, when such degradation impacts soil fertility, quantity and quality of water, air, forts and wildlife, the policy notes.

It lays great stress on economic efficiency. This principle requires that services of environmental resources be given economic value. One of its main implication is that the ''polluter pays''.

The impact of acts of production and consumption of one party may be visited on third parties who do not have a direct economic nexus with the original act. Such impact are termed externalities.

If the party responsible for pollution does not pay the cost, the entire sequence of production or consumption is inefficient. In such a situation economic efficency may be resorted by making the perpetrator bear the cost.

The policy will, therefore, promote the internalisation of environmental costs.

As far as redressal of grievances is concerned, the policy lays stress on civil liability which is different from criminal liability on which the existing redressal system was based.

Civil or legal liability would deter environmentally harmful actions and compensate the victims of damages. Conceptually, the principle of legal liability may be viewed as an embodiment in legal doctrine of the ''polluter pays'', itself deriving from the principle of economic efficiency.

Decentralisation is also one of the main feature of the policy.

It advocates ceding power to state and local authorities so as to deal more effectively with environmental problems at the level at which they arise.

The policy says that state and local governments would be encourage to formulate their own strategies or action plans consistent with the national policy.

UNI