Jairam Ramesh?s green activism may have made him a darling of the environment NGOs, but the Comptroller and Auditor General has put a spoke in the wheel by asserting these NGOs are not utilising government funds properly. The CAG has pulled up the environment ministry?s plan for greening India and preserving of biologically sensitive regions.
The CAG report to be placed in Parliament soon shows the environment ministry has cost the government about Rs 500 crore by not following up with hundreds of non-governmental organisations to whom it had given funds for projects like afforestation. The NGOs apparently took the first installments but did not return to show what they had achieved with the money and the ministry officials, too, did not ask them.
Jairam Ramesh?s ministry has acquired an enormous clout on deciding the fate of industrial projects. It has used the environment stick to block the big-ticket Posco project as well as all licences for new coal mining projects saying these are in the forest areas. It has, however, cleared a second airport for Mumbai this week, but after an 11-month delay. The ministry has stated its target is to raise India?s green cover to 33% of the geographical area from the current 23.84% as per the government?s India State of Forest Report, 2009.
However, the CAG report shows the ministry is not getting results from its afforestation plans as the existing project designs are flawed. It has shown no ability to monitor the results of the assorted tree plantation efforts undertaken either by itself or through NGOs, despite an annual budget of over Rs 1,500 crore and 77 field offices. This is because the areas farmed out to the NGOs were often small scattered plots of less than 20 acre, which were impossible to track using satellite data. The indictment is significant as, in May 2010, the government made a provision for Rs 44,000 crore to be spent till 2020 by the ministry for Green India mission.
Of late, the CAG has come down sharply on several government projects and programmes, including the auction of the 2G telecom spectrum as well as the cost of building infrastructure for the Commonwealth Games.
Apparently, it has also noted that the ministry has restricted itself to only identifying the biologically sensitive regions. The ministry has taken little action to improve or protect the regions by taking pro-active steps. Several industrial projects planned near the sites have landed into trouble because of such labels, but the ministry has made no effort to protect the regions, effectively throwing the onus on industry to move out or spend to protect the area.