CB Bureau‘In the last few months, I have tried to set the ball rolling, so that by 2015, at least, we can have a system of green national accounting,’ Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh has said.
The minister said this while delivering the 11th ISRO-JNCASR Satish Dhawan Memorial Lecture – ‘The two cultures revisited: Some reflections on the environment-development debate in India’ – at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Pune on September 29.
‘But as yet, we have no system to convert gross domestic product into green domestic product that would reflect the use up of precious depletable natural resources in the process of generating national income.
‘Economists all over the world have been at work for quite some time on developing a robust system of green national accounting, but we are not there as yet.
‘Ideally, if we can report both gross domestic product and green domestic product, we will get a better picture of the trade-offs involved in the process of economic growth,’ Ramesh emphasised.