Sustainability has become the catch word for India in 2012 and the 12th Five Year Plan was also launched with a focus on environmental sustainability and inclusive growth.
While the >Economic Survey for 2012-13 has lauded the direction of the Plan, it also warned on resource crunch, which could make India’s target of sustainable development difficult to achieve.
The Survey says that the most vital issue for India will be to raise new resources for meeting economic needs with its ambitious environmental sustainability targets.
“More often, it is the resource crunch which is the stumbling block for developing countries like India. While it makes efforts to efficiently and expeditiously bring price signals and other policy instruments into play, India could do much more if new and additional finance and technology are made available through multilateral processes,” it says.
While noting that key environmental challenges in India have been sharper in the past two decades, the Survey warns, “Climate change is impacting the natural ecosystems and is expected to have substantial adverse effects in India, mainly on agriculture on which 58 per cent of the population still depends for livelihood, water storage in the Himalayan glaciers which are the source of major rivers and groundwater recharge, sea-level rise, and threats to a long coastline and habitations.”
Besides environmental concerns, impacting health, natural ecosystems, and biodiversity, some environmentalists warn that these could also hurt the economy significantly.
The Survey, too, has flagged off increasing population, urbanisation, and growing demand for water and land and rising energy needs as causes for concern and needs urgent action, both domestic as well as global.
The Survey mentions that the initial assessment of the costs of adaptation of various policies for mitigation of further environmental degradation, in line with the National Action Plan on Climate Change, stands at around Rs 2,30,000 crore. It adds that this figure could even go up in the future.
The Survey adds that the challenge for India is to “identify the key drivers and enablers of growth, be it infrastructure, transportation sector, housing, or agriculture and to make these sectors grow sustainably.”