Need to operationalise green indexing of govt programmes

In India, the implementation of a large number of developmental and infrastructure programmes have often led to environmental degradation. Very often, environmental damage is recognised post-implementation of a programme or a project.

The Government of India has Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and clearance requirements for large projects. Even this is a flawed process since most of the projects are cleared anyway. Of late, there have been efforts to further dilute the EIA.

(*Prof N H Ravindranath, Retired Professor, IISc, is the other author of this article.)