CB BureauWith resource crunch posing a major challenge,
India needs to find new and additional financing avenues as well as technology
to ensure sustainable development, the Economic Survey for 2012-13 has said.
‘While it makes efforts to efficiently and expeditiously
bring price signals and other policy instruments into play, India could do much
more if new and additional financeand technology are made available through multilateral processes,’
states the Survey tabled in Parliament today.
A host of issues including erratic weather and natural
disasters along with poverty and hunger continues to be major concerns for policymakers,
especially in the developing world. Insisting that India is on the right
track in achieving environmental sustainability, the Survey notes that the
country has the right enabling environment besides a number of achievements to
its credit. At the same time, ‘the challenge is to identify the key
drivers and enablers of growth, be it infrastructure, transportation sector, housing, or agriculture, and to
make these sectors grow sustainably.’
‘While India has chalked out ambitious plans and policies to
tackle climate change and environment issues, given the scarcity of resources
and competing demands, finding the matching resources is a challenge,’ the
Survey warns. ‘Be it national or global, environmental decline andglobal warmingoccurred gradually over decades and centuries, picking up
pace with time. We must remember that the clock is now ticking on the needed
global action to combat and contain this decay,’ it goes on to state.
Further, the report says that though multilateral efforts onsustainable developmentand climate change have led to several positive outcomes,
there are still areas of concern in terms of safeguarding the interests of
developing countries in future deliberations. ‘This action should be
fair, just and equitable for all countries so that the future we want will be a
future in which there is ecological and economic space for sustainable
development for all,’ it asserts.