Sanjay Vashist

Inspite of improved environmental legislation, strengthening institutions involved in environment and sustainable development, and in general, increased national action and commitment for Agenda 21 implementation, current analyses indicate that governments and people have to do much more to ensure sustainable development of resources and the community. Thus, there is a growing consensus to assess our implementation strategy and to take collaborative steps to resolve the existing problems and weaknesses. The ten-year anniversary of Rio in Johannesburg in September 2002 provides a timely opportunity to review our progress in implementing sustainable development over the past decade, and re-chart its path.

The Process

Development Alternatives carried out assessment of India’s implementation strategy by involving multi stakeholders. The assessments were primarily carried out through a series of consultations across the country. Fifteen consultations were organised in different States of the country like Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, West Bengal, Kerala, Maharastra, Gujarat, Orissa and Delhi. Participation was ensured from various stakeholders including Government authorities, local legislators, grassroot NGOs, community leaders and individuals. The response of the participants was very enthusiastic and supportive. The consultations were focussed on assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the current implementation strategy and to identify the critical issues having an impact on livelihoods and day to day activities. Finally actions to be taken to address the critical issues were identified in the form of recommendations by the multi stakeholders involved in the process.

In most of the consultations, it was found that there is a low level of awareness on Agenda 21 among the community. The strengths and weaknesses in implementation of the national strategy or planning process were identified and assessed by various groups of stakeholders. Though many projects were initiated by government co-ordinating agency (MoEF) towards sustainable development, very few stakeholders knew about the country’s commitment and strategy. The country’s strategy is all about people’s participation in planning and implementation. Though people’s participation was found to be sufficient in most of the activities, due to weak implementation strategy the benefits of interventions could not be enjoyed by the society at large. As a policy barrier, it was felt that the introduction of Panchayati Raj complicated the administration of an area as an elected legislator as well as a Member of Parliament represent the same administrative area. Due to this, the responsibilities were not clear and therefore accountability of the initiatives taken was not there. In the multi-stakeholder assessment the participants mentioned that information on various programmes and progress made on it is not available to the common people, which is a major lacunae in national policies. The stakeholders consider this information gap as one of the main causes for lack of monitoring sustainable development programmes. Convergence of efforts of different stakeholders was found totally lacking and considered to be a major impediment for efficient implementation of programmes. In India, Agenda 21 has been interpreted as an environment related initiative and thus very little impact is visible in economic, institutional and social sectors because MoEF has been the co-ordinating agency. More work has been done in environ-mental sector in terms of policies, legislation, people’s participation and awareness.

The prioritised three critical issues and an emerging issue identified after the consultations were:

All the critical issues influence each other and it is important to address all three together to ensure sustainable development.

Unemployment

Unemployment has been identified as the most critical issue due to its direct impact on household economy. Though government has initiated many employment generating schemes like Jawahar Rojgar Yojna (Jawahar Employment Scheme) and Food For Work (FFW) in the rural areas but such schemes could yield minimal positive results. The state governments have also encouraged industrial growth to generate more employment opportunities for rural poor but educated youths. Various types of subsidies have been provided to promote industrial development in order to generate large number of employment opportunities but still it is the most critical issue for different groups of stakeholders. Also, there is no specific regional and international agreement on combating unemployment. Other agreements and conventions address the issue indirectly. The issue has not been focussed with a primary objective and as it can be addressed through all programmes, there is no accountability among the implementing agencies. The clarity of responsibility to the implementing agencies in the context of this issue is not sufficiently visible. As regards the impression among the implementing agencies and stakeholders regarding Agenda 21, it is a programme to improve the ecological environment. Thus, to address the issues there are no separate resources allocated and implementation is being carried out by sharing the resources from various thematic programmes.

Stakeholders recommended that common people should be involved in all stages of planning and implementation, so that programmes for sustainable development address critical issues like unemployment. Education is no more a means to get a job or establish one’s own enterprise. It is important to provide ‘purposeful’ education like technical/vocational education. In India, commercial agriculture is not being carried out on a large scale and has been a practice to fulfil subsistence food requirement only due to which it is not acknowledged as an enterprise. This image of the primary occupation has prevented educated rural youths to adopt it as a livelihood. The job vacancies for schools, medical centres, etc in the villages should be filled by selecting the rural educated youths to encourage other youths. Small-scale industries should be promoted in rural areas. Proper marketing channels should be established so that the producers can increase their earnings.

Education should be recognised as a basic right of every human being. It should be a process of ‘discovery’ of one’s inherent potential to the maximum. It should prepare an individual to play a participatory role in the growth of humanity in harmony with the environment. The stakeholders identified education as one of the key issues because it reduced unemployment and played an important role in monitoring development programmes. The education system was reported to be faulty and did not encourage entrepreneurs. It was not serving its purpose in making people self reliant and self-supportive, and not directed towards sustainable development in spite the fact that it is the strongest tool to initiate it. Government has come out with a policy in their Rajiv Gandhi Rojgar (Employment) Yojna (Scheme) that no permission would be required to open primary schools. The intention is to further broaden the base of primary education. However, after granting this permission, the government should not absolve itself in its commitment to provide support and facilitate in the running of such schools. In most of the private schools one of the selection criteria is to interview the parents. Such a bias would be detrimental to the admission of intelligent children whose parents are not educated. Government has initiated many educational programmes to increase the enrolment in schools and also literacy levels in the country by way of introducing mid-day meals in primary schools, letting poor parents allow their children to attend schools, introducing non-formal education classes in rural areas, imparting free education, etc.

In order to ensure maximum attendance, a suggestion was made that government should provide grain to poor parents on the basis of the child’s attendance. This would encourage the parents to send their children to school. A major concern among the stakeholders was that the existing infrastructure is not being utilised and there is no accountability among the government staff due to lack of effective monitoring mechanisms. For example, in one of the consultations the participants informed that there is a school equipped with all the necessary infrastructure with one teaching staff but since he has to travel a long distance, he is absent most of the time. On the other hand, there are buildings and teachers but the interest to study among the students is absent. The parents prefer their child to work or look after their younger siblings. The teachers prefer staying in towns rather than in rural areas. However, in spite of these impediments there has been substantive growth in the number of school-going children, especially among the girls.

Agriculture is considered the primary occupation of around 70 per cent of country’s population but this percentage is reducing at an alarming pace. It is becoming a losing enterprise due to degradation of natural resources. Scarcity of water for irrigation, soil erosion, unavailability of good seed varieties, absence of information on new technologies, etc. are a few barriers identified in the consultations for making agriculture sustainable. However, on availability of water for irrigation there were mixed reactions. In one of the consultations, the participants mentioned that water is abundant and the water table is high. But with land fragmentation and increase in population, there is a major problem. Inherited land is passed on to sons and individual holdings get so much reduced that agriculture is not a viable proposition. Institution of co-operatives could be the answer. Youths in the villages are without any employment because resources have deteriorated and agriculture is no more a sustainable enterprise. Marketing of agricultural produce was another constraint as a large share of the profit went to middlemen operating the marketing system. There is a mismatch between research in the research institutions and its practical applicability or the outcome of research is too complicated to be understood by the farmer, resulting in its non-utilisation. Information on weather conditions, market prices of crops and other promotional schemes launched by the government is not available.

The country has signed a few international conventions or agreements having an influence on agriculture e.g. Biodiversity Convention, Convention on Combating Desertification, International Plant Protection Convention, etc. These conventions or agreements have had an impact on the state of agriculture but it is important to address internal pressures mentioned earlier to make it sustainable. There is separate agriculture ministry in the country working on the various aspects of agriculture but due to lack of co-ordination with other related ministries like MoEF, an integrated approach could not be introduced. The bureaucratic attitude of the government officials has been a major hindering factor towards sustainable development. Lessons can be learnt from MoEF, where there has been an attitudinal change among the officials and the earlier gap between staff and communities has been bridged to a large extent. This sector has been exempted from any type of tax by the government, which makes it a high potential sector for large-scale livelihoods.

Government should encourage co-operative societies so that the middleman can be removed and the farmers can get good price for their produce. The practice of introducing support prices on various crops by the government has been a good practice to encourage the farmers to continue agriculture. Participants identified few limitations that make agriculture a risky enterprise and by addressing these barriers sustainable development of the sector will be ensured. The barriers are unpredicted weather conditions, fluctuations in prices of crops in the market, perishable commodity, rigid mind set of the farmers in adopting technologies, non availability of soft loans to farmer or a long process to be followed for approval of loans, exploitation by middlemen and marketing of the produce. Since large areas in the country are under dry land farming, more emphasis of research should be on inventing new techniques and technologies for dry land farming. Educated rural youths should be encouraged to undertake it as livelihood because maximum benefits could be availed by them. Awareness campaigns should be carried out to spread information on new technologies in the sector.

Strengthening Local Institutions – An Emerging Issue

The example of Panchayati Raj was cited as an initiative without any preparation. The original idea was to transfer power to the people but because of lack of knowledge and awareness of the decentralised approach, few selected people are enjoying its benefits. The participants in the consultations showed faith in the Panchayati Raj system and added that the process of decentralisation is a key to any type of implementation because local institutions so established enjoy the respect and faith of the community. However, the system needs to be made an effective tool to trigger and promote sustainable development. After implementing the Panchayati Raj for a certain number of years, it is important to remove the barriers and to encourage participation of communities for self-development.

Panchayati Raj can be successful after improving the awareness levels and empowering the rural people. Right to Information should be an obligatory component of every programme. More stress should be given on inter-personal campaign for creating awareness. It was stressed that the planning process should start from the grassroots and implementation should be done together with the government and the grassroots representatives. The original concept of Panchayati Raj of Mahatma Gandhi was a 5 tier system (village, block, district, state and national) and would have ensured 80% representation from rural and 20% representation from urban areas. But the existing system is of three tiers (Village, Block and District) and hence the system has lost its impact. The role and responsibilities should be spelt out and disseminated very clearly to all the stakeholders to increase their accountability and ownership towards the activities.

Way Ahead

One major solution to all four priorities mentioned above - eradication of poverty, arresting population growth, regeneration of the natural resource base and improved productivity of the economy - lies in the widespread creation of sustainable livelihoods.

The creation of sustainable livelihoods requires fundamental changes in the choice of technology, financing systems and the functioning of the marketplace. It also needs strengthening of the institutions of local governance, which must now be designed to create a sense of ownership by the local people over the resources on which they depend for their livelihoods, and the decision systems that guide their lives.

Local, (especially grassroots) empowerment will enable every man, woman and youth, including indigenous people and the socially disadvantaged, to participate in decision-making. It will promote social accountability and will be sensitive to all living creatures and the environment. Local empowerment will also facilitate the right attitude towards learning, preserve our heritage, health-care and family norms. It will encourage development and application of locally appropriate science and technology that is relevant and improve lifestyles without hurting the environment. It will reduce strife and promote social harmony, economic well being and peace. q