Javadekar to hold chintan shivirs across India to explain govt’s environmental stance

Environment minister Prakash Javadekar will start nationwide consultations — called chintan shivirs — where he will meet forest officials and talk about the government’s move to change environmental laws and the need to adopt traditional ways of conserving nature.

Updated on: Jan 17, 2015, 21:46:02 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Environment minister Prakash Javadekar will start nationwide consultations — called chintan shivirs — where he will meet forest officials and talk about the government’s move to change environmental laws and the need to adopt traditional ways of conserving nature.

This will be Javadekar’s first nationwide consultation since taking charge as minister in June 2014 after which the NDA government made more than 40 changes in environmental regulations.

“The idea is to have an open house with 150-200 forest officers in different age groups and take their feedback on what they think is wrong with the country’s environment management and ways to improve it,” said a Javadekar aide. “The minister will also emphasise that foresters should propagate the traditional Indian way of living has been environment friendly.”

The chintan shivirs come at a time when the environment ministry is pushing a new environmental regime by amending five environmental laws to boost ease of doing business in India, a move activists say will reduce environment protection measures.

“The amendments proposed would be disastrous for our environment and should not be pursued at all,” environmental lawyer Ritwik Dutta told a Parliamentary Standing Committee last week.

Javadekar said he wanted to hold the chintan shivirs to change the ministry’s negative image its policies has given it as well as to make environment regulation transparent and accountable.

“My idea was opposed by some officers but I have decided to go ahead with it,” he said.

The minister spoke about a broad-based consultative process at the Indian Science Congress in Mumbai this month, saying that ancient Indian scientific theories were based on centuries of observations.

“We should draw upon the knowledge of ancient Indian science concepts and explore possibilities of their application in the modern world,” he said.

The minister also directed officials to hold an exhibition at the ministry’s headquarters on conserving environment using Vedic methods.

“We are in touch with some Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh affiliate organisations to put up demonstrative models on Vedic ways of conserving nature,” a ministry official said.

The first chintan shivir will be held at Bengaluru on February 8-9, where a motivational speaker will address forest officials and other issues will be discussed, including cleaning rivers, social forestry and air pollution. The minister plans to hold four such sessions in different parts of the country.

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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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