Climate change centre for IAS trainees in Mussoorie

Environment and climate change will now be a part of the basic training of India’s top administrators.

Updated on: Jun 3, 2012, 22:47:53 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Environment and climate change will now be a part of the basic training of India’s top administrators.

The government has decided to set up a specialised centre on climate change at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) at Mussoorie in the northern state of Uttarakhand.

The academy provides training to newly recruited Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers and offers specialised in-job courses for IAS officers at different levels. Several new courses on emerging areas in India have also been initiated in the academy in the last few years.

Latest feather in the cap is the specialised centre to attune IAS officers to the danger of climate change for India and how administrators can help in fighting the challenge which is expected to impact every region in the country.

A recent environment ministry study has indicated that the threat of climate change in India is real and adapting to the fast-changing weather will be key to fighting global warming. For that, administrators at the ground level need to know about its threats and ways it can be dealt with in a cost-effective manner.

To ensure that, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and LBSNAA have tied up to put in place an academic learning centre on climate change and environment issues.

“It will be a comprehensive knowledge base with implementable tools for administrators,” said Caitlin Wiesen, Country Director of UNDP India at a recent function.

Officials at the academy said the centre is still at a “nascent” stage and will take some time before it comes up. The centre will help the academy in widening the scope of its existing courses and start some new courses.

The climate change centre is a specialised unit coming up at the academy. The IAS officers will be receiving specialised training on rural strategy, urban management, gender equality and disaster management through these centres.

Even before the climate change comes up, the academy has tried to be a model office for future administrators. It has turned into a complete paper-less office with electronic file movement system, where even the key decisions are taken on electronic files.

“We also have all our educational resources on digital format to reduce the use of paper,” an academy official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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