Prime minister Manmohan Singh on Sunday, July 24, announced setting up of an independent environment regulator that would lead to a complete change in the process of granting environment clearances.
“We hope to establish an independent regulator — the National Environment Appraisal and Monitoring Authority — soon. Staffed by dedicated professionals, it will work full time to evolve better and more objective standards of scrutiny,” the PM said at the international seminar on global environment and disaster management, law and society in the national capital.
“A major challenge ahead is to put in place a legal and regulatory framework which is effective in protecting the environment but without bringing back the hated licence permit raj of the pre-1991 period,” he added.
Singh said India’s safeguards are now far more stringent and well defined than they were two decades ago. He said the government has strengthened the legislation pertaining to environment and a law for creating special environment tribunals that will also help by lessening the burden on the courts.
He also praised the judiciary for enforcing laws to ensure that environmental concerns were neither diluted nor dismissed.
“The task ahead is to design a system of intellectual property rights which provides adequate incentives to invest in the development of new environment-friendly technologies and at the same time ensures these technologies become available to poor countries at affordable cost,” Singh said.
Recounting steps taken by his government for solar energy, energy efficiency, sustainable habitat, sustainable agriculture and water conservation, he said: “All these will lead us to a low-carbon growth path. These are steps that we have decided to take on our own. We are not waiting for an international consensus to evolve.”
