India's Largest Database on New Projects
Green audit by 2015
29 September 2010: The MoEF is likely to come up with ‘Green audit' – that will give numbers to environmental impact of development. It is likely to a reality by 2015 and India will be one of the few nations to have it.
The ministry opines that the imbalance between implementing economically beneficial industrial projects and preserving fragile environment was partly because the country does not have a system to factor in the environmental cost of industrial activity.
There is the GDP to quantify national income and the NDP (net domestic product) to gauge the use of physical capital. If one can report both GDP and a green domestic product, we will get a better picture of the trade-offs involved in the process of economic growth.
Various indices have been mooted, such as a Gross Nature Product suggested by renowned environmentalist, or the World Bank's metric called ‘adjusted net savings' that counts investments in human capital, depletion of natural resources and damage caused by pollution.
For the period 1970-2001, if the per capita GDP growth rate for this period was generally accepted as 2.96 per cent per year, it falls to 0.31 per cent if read with environmental costs.
According to World Bank's measure, the gross national savings as a per cent of GDP was around 34.3 per cent in 2008 but will fall to 24.2 per cent if the adjusted net saving is applied.
Source: Hindu Business Line