Page 1 of 5

Journal for Studies in Management and Planning

Available at http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/

ISSN: 2395-0463

Volume 04 Issue 01

January 2018

Available online: http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/ P a g e | 926

Protection of the Environment & Natural Resources

for Sustainable Development in India

Keshari Nandan Mishra

Associate Professor, Department of History, H. N. B. Government P.G. College, Allahabad, Uttar

Pradesh, India

Abstract

Ensuring environmental sustainability the seventh Millennium Development Goal requires

achieving sustainable development patterns and preserving the productive capacity of natural

ecosystems for future generations. Both efforts in turn require a variety of policies that reverse

environmental damage and improve ecosystem management. The challenge has two dimensions:

addressing natural resource scarcity for the world’s poor people and reversing environmental

damage resulting from high consumption by rich people. Many environmental problems arise

from the production and consumption patterns of non-poor people, particularly in rich countries.

Rich countries consume a lot of fossil fuels and deplete many of the world’s fisheries, damaging

the global environment. They also use a lot of tropical hardwoods and products from endangered

species.

Keywords: MDGs, Environment, Policies, Natural Resources, Sustainable development.

Introduction

To ensure the sustainability of Earth and its

resources, including the development

prospects of poor countries, these harmful

production and consumption patterns must

change. Energy systems will have to generate

much lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Fisheries will have to be managed based on

ecological limits rather than heavily

subsidized free-for-alls. And international

rules of the game will have to mitigate the

overconsumption that endangers ecosystems

and certain plants and animals. But with

smart policies and new technologies, the

costs of these changes can be quite low.

Human well-being depends on natural

resources and environmental services that

help produce food. People rely on soils to

grow crops, grasslands to raise livestock and

freshwater and oceans to support fisheries.

Underlying much of this productivity:

genetic resources. Over centuries farmers

have generated crucial stocks of knowledge

and productivity by breeding livestock and

selecting, storing and propagating plant

varieties. Diverse genetic resources enable

farmers to adapt to environmental change by

creating new livestock and plant varieties

better suited to new conditions. In periods of

scarcity, wild biodiversity is also a source of

alternative food products.

From a Regulatory to a Participatory

Approach

Within the participatory approach, evidence

suggests that watershed development and

forest protection have been much more

Page 2 of 5

Journal for Studies in Management and Planning

Available at http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/

ISSN: 2395-0463

Volume 04 Issue 01

January 2018

Available online: http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/ P a g e | 927

successful in places where sufficient

biophysical and institutional incentives exist

or have been provided to the local people to

participate in such activities. Furthermore,

the commitment of communities to

watershed development projects has also

been significantly higher wherever the

beneficiaries themselves have contributed to

the costs of the project activities. Wherever

sufficient awareness has been created, and

the right incentives provided, people are

willing to contribute to the costs of watershed

development activities in their locality. It is

being argued and seen in other parts of the

world that markets for environmental

services are an efficacious tool for the

conservation of natural resources, without

compromising on the benefits that have been

traditionally derived from them in the nature

of goods.

This concept is based on placing imputed

values on various environmental services to

promote the conservation of natural resources

as well as meet livelihood needs in a

sustainable way. Thus, payments based on

these values, made and received as an

incentive for appropriate management of the

natural resource base, constitute what is

commonly termed as ‘markets for

environmental services’. Like other services,

such as forest biodiversity or carbon

sequestration, the hydrological functions of

land use in the form of watershed protection

services have also started receiving

significant attention. The value of better

access to reliable supplies of clean water and

reduced vulnerability to environmental risks

such as flooding and landslides are

increasingly being appreciated. Globally,

there has been development of systems for

payment for watershed services in several

countries

Potential and Constraints: Market-Based

Mechanisms Embedded In Collective Action

Markets for watershed protection services do

not always imply a monetary or even tangible

transaction between service providers and

service receivers. An exploration of the

potential for market-like arrangements

encompasses all incentive-based

arrangements, transactions, payments and

compensation systems (monetary or non- monetary) for watershed protection services

that are ‘market like’ in nature and have the

potential to develop into more sophisticated

mechanisms in the future. Given this and

learning from experiments from other parts

of the world, the potential of market-based

approaches as alternative, yet

complementary, solutions to existing

regulatory and collective action approaches

for the sustainable management of natural

resources has begun to be explored in India.

A preliminary scoping study of two states in

India, Himachal Pradesh (HP) and Madhya

Pradesh (MP), revealed that there is a latent

potential for the development of such

approaches. However, underlying this

potential are also several constraints, which

would need to be overcome.

At the Micro Level: Inter-Village

Transactions

In order to put in place inter-village

transactions/payment mechanisms as

incentives for watershed protection, a strong

awareness needs to be created about

upstream-downstream linkages in the minds

of the people. This awareness was found in

some villages in HP, where people traced the

drying up of fresh water springs (baodies) to

the degradation of forest vegetation

upstream. On the whole, however, this kind

of linkage is still very weak or absent in the

minds of the people. Usually, people are not

interested in issues beyond their village

Page 3 of 5

Journal for Studies in Management and Planning

Available at http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/

ISSN: 2395-0463

Volume 04 Issue 01

January 2018

Available online: http://edupediapublications.org/journals/index.php/JSMaP/ P a g e | 928

unless they are directly affected by them and

can ‘see’ the changes/benefits from\

watershed protection on the ground.

A Sustainable Livelihoods Approach to

Water Projects

For many years the domestic water sector has

focused on the achievement of health

benefits through supply improvements, based

on the premise that more and better water can

help to improve the health of individuals.

This approach has been consistent with the

provision of improved supplies by

governments and other agencies as part of a

strategy of meeting the basic needs of the

poor. In the last decade however, the wider

policy environment has moved towards self

financing and cost recovery on water

projects, where greater emphasis is placed on

community financing as a means of ensuring

cost recovery. The idea of water as an

‘economic’ good has been the driving force

behind this change. Whilst the end result is

still anticipated health benefits, the principle

that the ‘consumer pays’ is now more firmly

linked to sustainable supply delivery. This

shift in emphasis has various implications for

poverty reduction, not least of which is

whether or not poor consumers can afford to

pay.

Implications for Policy and Practice

Water as a natural asset forms part of the

asset range available to households and its

economic value as well as its cost needs to be

properly understood in order to understand

the linkages with livelihood strategies. This

is the case not just because this points

towards ways of strengthening asset bundles

through improving access to natural capital,

but also has methodological implications for

demand assessment. The structure of demand

for water within a community – particularly

demand over and above the survival level –

may be informed just as much by its

productive uses as by its routine daily

consumptive uses. Calculating anticipated

demand at the household and community

level may, therefore, require greater depth of

analysis of household livelihood uses (and

potential uses) than is commonly undertaken

by demand assessment. This also has policy

implications for notions of scarcity,

particularly in terms of the presence or

absence of other assets critical to gaining

sustainable access to supplies. Scarcity can

be determined by the unavailability of

physical and human capital as well as by the

absence of the water.

Underlying this paper has been the question

of what we need to know and how we need

to use knowledge. The systematising of

knowledge and its use has deep implications

for future policy and practice in the sector,

not least because the acquisition and use of

knowledge is frequently an elite based

process which, de facto, excludes the poor

and yet frames the development of formal or

informal policy towards the poor. Knowledge

environments, as they have been termed here,

refer to the knowledge systems surrounding

the various sectoral actors – communities,

households and individuals, government

institutions, the private sector and civil

society (predominantly NGOs) – and do not

refer to formal systems of knowledge on their

own.

At a community level, the research approach

would involve rapid assessment based on key

informants at local and sub-regional level

rather than lengthy (and costly) research

projects. Principal aims should be to

establish:

The impact of changing water availability in

terms of natural asset stocks on the range and

use to which other household capital assets is

put, including labour and financial capital

assets.