Our environmental policies: Explained

Our environmental policies: Explained

A scenic view from Kashmir Valley

India is a developing country and facing all such problems common to a developing country including that of environment. As a large section of India's population devoid of basic amenities, environmental issues remains largely unanswered. Though there is a long way ahead to achieve in this area, we can structure our policies and laws in such a way that will increase our pace towards our goal. 

Environment is a broad area made up of different biotic and abiotic factors. The question that what in the environment should be protected most should be essentially answered based on cause effect analysis. This will be based on many factors such as whether people directly use that particular source of water directly for drinking purpose, what is the fate of the of the pollutant if released, how does it affect  the surrounding ecosystem etc. All these questions converges to a simple question that what amount of population is affected, by what severity and due to what amount of pollutant. This analysis can be simply carried out by converting all the damages either to humans or to the other living beings into monetary values and then comparing that if protected what will have least loss. So a prioritisation can be made on the choices of the pollution reduction alternatives. For e.g., If an industry has a load of pollutant released in the liquid stream as well as that of gaseous pollutants. If the industry is located far upstream of the human settlement, them the water pollutant mainly released as BOD may not cause much harm as that of the air pollutant if worked out as said above and hence air pollution abatement given the first priority.

The above was the discussion related to the policy framing for the pollution abatement. Also a strong administrative structure is needed for policy implementation. In India, Public health and sanitation comes under state list of powers. The most of important tasks of public sanitation such as construction, maintenance and operation of solid waste disposal systems, wastewater and drinking water systems and others are done by urban local bodies in urban areas. Most of the times we see that the Urban as well as rural local bodies incapable of managing the solid waste resulting it lying on streets.

Also the garbage lying outside the boundary of Municipalities and Grampanchayats on the highways, agricultural fields, railway etc., remains unattended.

The local governmental bodies lack expertise and many times incapable of handling such kinds of large projects of constructing the facilities for this purposes. So here I advocate that the construction, maintenance task should be undertaken by the Public works department under a separate wing of expertise in this subject.  This is more advantageous form of policy implementation program as they task force have more experience and expertise in the same work and also they have more confidence to use newer and more efficient technologies whereas the agency doing it for the first time will go on the safer side and only try the old trusted technology though it may not be very efficient.

Water treatment plant at Malkapur(Karad Dist- Satara, Maharastra)

Although Maharashtra Jeevan Pradhrikaran in Maharashtra is state level departmental organisation working in the field of water supply and sanitation for planning, designing and operation-maintenance, all other tasks of public health and sanitation remains in the hands of local bodies and which are inadequately answered. Also Municipal Solid Waste handling rules, 2000 makes it for the municipalities to look after the collection, segregation and scientific disposal of the solid waste, some studies  says around 50% of our solid waste remains uncollected. This lies on the roadsides, open lands, railway tracks etc. If this responsibility is given to a state body as said earlier, they may plan and implement larger and smarter collection, segregation and disposal techniques which are not only environment friendly but also cost effective as they can be built for two or more adjoining towns or villages and also attract employment and eco-tourism.

Same is in the case for water and air pollution management, that policies work more effectively if we implement them at state level rather than at local level.