With an eye to mainstreaming sustainability, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has reached out to the United Nations Development Programme to suggest ways for greening rural development schemes and programmes.
“We are spending Rs 99,000 crore this year on rural development programmes and it would be a shame if we don’t mainstream green objectives in these programmes. Rural development programmes offer a huge opportunity to deal with green concerns and challenges at the local level, even as India continues to engage in negotiations at the global level,” Ramesh said.
The UNDP will commission a study, which is to be submitted by July, to define the concept of ‘greening’ and identify broad set of ‘green’ outcomes. It will also suggest specific results that can be achieved through the rural development programmes. The study will also provide an action plan on how these results can be achieved and gather evidence on ‘green’ results from India and other countries.
Green outcomes would encompass efforts to improve the quality of the ecosystem-water in surface bodies and strengthening water cycle, improving quality of vegetative cover, improving extent and quality of soil cover, arresting and reversing soil degradations.
It would include ways to enable ecosystems to adjust to and recover from extreme weather events such as droughts and floods, coastal storms and landslides. Another aspect would be strengthening livelihoods based on environmentally sustainable use of natural resources including improved land use planning and management practices.
Suggestions would also touch upon ways to reduce the ecological footprint of interventions through efficient use of energy, materials and natural resources, increased use of renewables and of locally available materials, reducing the generation of environmentally polluting substances. As well as increase the carrying capacity of ecosystems, including capacity for carbon sequestration and soil carbon storage.
The UNDP in its recent report, “One Planet to Share”, have called on governments of the Asia Pacific region to raise rural resilience. Given the important role rural areas play in the region as “food supplier and carbon sink”, the report stressed on the need for ” greater investment in infrastructure, institutions and capacities to ensure that the rural poor will gain resilience to climate change…extreme climate events can wipe out crops, reduce opportunities for employment, increase food prices and destroy property…They can also lead to deaths, injuries and diseases-and place additional burden on poor households.”
The greening of programmes relating to rural development, sanitation and drinking water, therefore are key to building rural resilience.
The UNDP commissioned study will provide recommendations for integrating “greening” considerations in the current rural development programmes as well as strategies for integrating rural development and environmental objectives.
Options for implementing strategies to facilitate, green outcomes, including Innovations Fund, incentives, outcome indicators and training, will also be considered in this study.
