By TIOL News Service

NEW DELHI, APRIL 06, 2013: EXPRESSING his delight in joining the International Workshop on Green National Accounting for India, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh while addressing the gathering also mentioned -

+ This event is particularly timely and relevant in view of the launch of India's Twelfth Five Year Plan, which has faster, more inclusive and sustainable growth as its core objective.

+ I believe India can and should take a leadership role in clarifying the concept of sustainable development.

+ Natural resources are limited and final and one needs to decide how to use these scarce resources optimally, both from the economic development and the sustainability perspectives.

+ Globally, environmental degradation is manifesting itself through the loss of fertile soils, desertification, decreasing forest cover, reduction of fresh water availability, and an extreme loss of bio-diversity. These are serious consequences, and it has become clear today that economic development must be environmentally sustainable.

+ Through planned economic development, India aims to attain economic growth and poverty alleviation, and doing so in a sustainable manner.

+ The poor need to be fully factored in when we deliberate the calculus of growth, which can be sustained only if natural resources are managed on a sustainable basis.

+ Current literature considers mainly two methods for accounting of environmental services in national income accounting. One suggests the extension of conventional national income accounts by developing satellite accounts of environment and natural resources. The other suggests extension of input-output tables for the economy as a whole.

+ In this regard, the work done by Prof. Partha Dasgupta and his colleagues in developing a conceptual framework for an “ideal” system of economic measurement is truly seminal.

+ The Government of India has taken several initiatives aimed at greening the Indian economy. For example, we have set up a National Clean Energy Fund by imposing a cess on coal and have also created a Compensatory Afforestation Fund.

+ India's National Action Plan on Climate Change provides a clear strategy for addressing the challenges posed by climate change.

+ A new initiative that is worth mentioning is the programme of the Ministry of Rural Development for “greening” rural development.

+ I am sure that the deliberations of your Workshop will succeed in delivering practical solutions to the problems of measuring the interaction between the economy and the environment.