Committed to facilitate ‘Ease of Doing Responsible Business’: Javadekar

ad
FICCI
FICCI_logo_indianbureaucracy

Mr. Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, interacted with industry members at a session organized by FICCI where he emphasized the ease of doing responsible business that his Ministry is committed to facilitate. The Minister focused on decentralization of powers to states; standardization of guidelines; re-categorization of red/orange/white industries based on pollution; and creating strong deterrence for non-compliance through civil penalties. He also noted giving approvals to 6000 kms of border roads under general approval window. He mentioned decentralized clearance under which state Governments have been empowered to grant approvals. Mr. Javadekar said that his Ministry has identified 24,000 major polluting industries of which 2400 have already installed real-time sensors to monitor air and water pollution. This effort has led to a decrease of 30% in industrial pollution into Ganges over last two years; He coined the phrase of Ease of “Responsible” Business and ended his speech my underscoring the motto of his Ministry, “Swachh Bharat; and Development Without Destruction”. Mr. Harshavardhan Neotia, President, FICCI appreciated the efforts of the Minister for his leadership in taking measures, particularly aimed at reducing time and transaction cost, and ensuring greater transparency and accountability in granting environment and forest clearances as the weighted average time taken in granting environment clearance has been reduced from 599 days to 192 days. He also highlighted some of the major issues faced by the industry like, multitude of clearances, lack of coordination between Centre and State Governments, cross cutting issues within Ministries, timely revision of laws, etc. In the context of India’s INDCs, Mr. Neotia made five key suggestions to the Minister:

1. Setting up of a Working Group to look at industry’s role in the implementation of India’s INDCs. Overall industry engagement and streamlining of industry inputs for INDC implementation process is absolutely critical.

2. Defining and clarifying inter-ministerial roles for INDC implementation and how industry can work with various programs and schemes.

3. Formulating a framework for capacity building of institutions and industry to help meet INDC goals.

4. Prioritizing existing as well as new climate friendly technologies that are transformative, for policy and financial interventions by government, financial institutions and private sector.

5. Mobilizing private and public capital towards low carbon growth by mainstreaming the climate context into financial sector design and interventions. Financing climate actions at the required scale and pace is of utmost priority and for that it is absolutely critical to build the capacity of our financial sector to effectively mobilize capital towards low carbon growth priorities.

Dr. Mukund Rajan, Chair, FICCI Environment Committee mentioned various industry-specific issues in the context of environmental regulatory regime. He highlighted industry’s concerns in the backdrop of recently notified waste management rules on waste management, plastic waste, electronic waste, and hazardous waste. He particularly raised concerns of Ministry’s Waste Rule Notification to phase out multilayered packaging in two years, which is difficult especially because of the absence of a viable option

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply