Environment has been given short shrift in the budget with finance minister P. Chidambaram concerning himself only with the thousands of tons of garbage being generated in our cities everyday. The budget focuses on the need to set up waste-to-energy projects in PPP mode. Unfortunately most of these plants have not worked, Sunita Narain, heading Centre for Scie-nce and Environment, critiquing Mr Chidamb-aram’s suggestion said.
“What we need is to incentivise municipalities that can segregate, recycle and reuse waste, not build white-elephant waste plants.”
With green and clean energy being an area of high priority, the government plans to provide low interest funds from the National Clean Energy Funds to IREDA.
Another major lapse has been the lack of financial allocation for the value of the standing forests. The 13th Finance Commission had stressed the need to compensate states to the tune of `5000 crore for the maintenance of forests.
But the budget has made no such allocation thereby missing an opportunity to built a genuine green movement in the country, Ms Narain said. Allocation of funds for the science and technology sector also appear to be far from satisfactory. Scientists and researchers had been expecting a major boost following Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speech at the Science Congress in Kolkata. Though Mr Chidam-baram has upped the allocation to `6275 crore to department of science and technology, `5615 crore to the department of space and `5990 crore to the department of atomic energy, these amounts are less than was anticipated. `1200 crore has been allocated to encourage research with the National Innov-ation Council being tasked to provide the road map. Dr T.V. Rama-sami, secretary, DST, said, “This scheme will encourage and refine innovations at the grassroot levels.”