While cautioning against the environmental repercussions of development, the Survey points out that the country's environmental scenario today is both a cause for concern as well as hope. It is imperative that there should be removal or even dismantling of distortionary policies like general subsidies on power, fertilisers or even water resources, which have encouraged overuse of natural resources.

While regulatory measures remain essential, new approaches for considering market choices in the protection of environment are being increasingly adopted by both the developed and the developing countries with an aim to give industries and consumers clear signals about the cost ofusing environmental and natural resources.

The Survey recommends a complete elimination of the subsidies which encourage misuse of the Commodities. For instance, power tariff charged is only a fraction of costs of generating power. Such subsidies encourage wasteful use of resources often creating or exacerbating environmental problems. Salination from over-irrigation is a major source of land degradation which is due to imbalance in the use of fertiliser nutrients which comes about particularly due to underpricing of such products. Low price of kerosene contributes to air pollution.

Greater use of economic incentives like prices and taxes need to be adopted to harmonise private and social interests towards protection of the environment. Open trade and investment policies that encourage technical innovations and transfer and a larger public participation in design and implementation of development programmes would go long way in sensitising the development process to environmental concerns, the Surveysays.Even though the country is the world's richest in terms of biological diversity as well as natural resources yet large-scale industrialisation, urbanisation, spread of communications as well as infrastructure have added to its difficulties, says the Survey.

With this, long-term strategic planning needs to focus more on further integrating environmental considerations into development policy making. In terms of financing sustainable development, the Survey says that an estimated $600 million would be required over the period of 1993-2000 to implement the Agenda 21 in developing countries, as per United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Given these imperatives, a high priority allocation for this sector needs to be emphasised in order to implement the mandate of on sustainable development programmes. For this, a greater involvement of the private sector and higher external aid would be required to garner higher investment in this sector.