Uttarakhand, jolted by floods and landslides last month, announced today it would become India’s first state to take into account ecological parameters with gross domestic product (GDP) to measure growth and prosperity. The state government said it has decided to introduce a novel concept called gross environment product (GEP) that will collectively reflect the ecological status of the mountain state’s air, forests, rivers, soil and glaciers. Environmental scientists have long argued that India needs to incorporate ecological measures while assessing economic growth and development. Uttarakhand said it would be the first state in the country to implement the idea. “This will be a mission (for) all state departments and agencies and reflected yearly in the state’s charter of growth,” the Uttarakhand government said in a statement issued tonight. “This is a historic decision,” said Anil Joshi, an environmental scientist and founder of the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organisation, who has been advocating such a move for nearly three years. “It will allow the state to assess GDP and GEP in parallel, track the relations between them, and take steps to improve the state’s ecosystem,” said Joshi, who met Uttarakhand chief minister Vijay Bahuguna today. The state’s decision to incorporate GEP in assessing prosperity comes three weeks after extreme rainfall triggered floods and landslides that devastated several towns, including Kedarnath, and killed an unknown number of persons. In April this year, UK-based economist Partha Dasgupta submitted to the Union government a report that outlines what would ideally be needed to prepare a “comprehensive set of national accounts” that incorporate environmental factors. The Indian government had asked Dasgupta in 2011 to develop a roadmap for India to compute its gross domestic product after accounting for environmental costs. In his report, Dasgupta has advocated the creation of new indicators that include three types of assets — physical capital (machines, buildings, or infrastructure), human capital (education and skills of the population), and natural capital (land, forests, minerals, and fossil fuels). This reclassifies certain goods and services and adds others that are currently missing from the accounts. The Uttarakhand state government said it will seek guidance from institutions such as the Forest Research Institute, the Central Soil and Water Conservation Research and Training Institute, among others, to incorporate the ecological parameters into its annual growth and prosperity assessments. “We expect that experts from such institutions will find a way to combine ecological parameters such as water in our rivers, the state of our glaciers and the quality of our air to compute GEP,” Joshi said. Joshi and other environmental scientists have cautioned that unplanned development, including construction to support tourism, in Uttarakhand has hurt the local environment and increased the state’s vulnerability to natural disasters. In 2011, the Union government had indicated that India might by 2015 begin computing its GDP after accounting for environmental costs.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Jul 2013 03:33:22 +0000
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