Insufficiently Green:
While the budget focuses on ideas like “business environment” and “growth ecosystem”, certain things stand out in the 2022-23 Union budget for anyone interested in the relationship between economy and ecology.
Positive:
- There is a slight increase in the budget of the Ministry for Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) from 2021-22’s revised estimate of Rs 2,870 crore to Rs 3,030 crore.
- Increased focus on natural and organic farming, and on promoting millets.
- Measures like use of biomass for power stations, boost to batteries, energy-efficiency measures in large commercial buildings, and sovereign green bonds are a welcome step.
- Renewable and “clean” energy has received substantially higher allocations.
- It is encouraging to see the budget proposing a “paradigm shift” towards sustainable urban living. A committee is to be set up to advise on this.
Issues:
- Total allocation is a meagre 0.08 per cent of the total budgetary outlay.
- The outlay for areas like the National River Conservation Plan, tackling air pollution, which is widely acknowledged as a national emergency has actually declined.
- Completely missing is a focus on rainfed farming that involves 60 per cent of the farming population and is ecologically more sustainable than artificially irrigated agriculture.
- While focus is on “chemical-free farming throughout the country,” but there has been a massive chemical fertiliser subsidy of Rs 1,05,222 crore.
- Focus on mega-parks in solar/wind energy, nuclear power, and large hydro that have serious ecological impacts.
- The National Climate Action Plan gets an abysmally inadequate Rs 30 crore. And there is no focus on a “just transition” that could help workers in fossil fuel sectors, like coal, to transition to jobs in cleaner, greener sectors.
- The proposed 25,000 km increase in highways will further fragment forests, wetlands, mountains, grasslands, agricultural lands and bypass most villages. Eg: For instance, the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, given over Rs 40,000 crore, will submerge valuable tiger habitat.
- The budget misses out on a major shift to “green jobs”. This includes support to decentralised (including handmade) production of textiles, footwear, and other products.
- The Deep Ocean Mission and the Blue Revolution allocations are oriented towards commercial exploitation rather than conservation and sustainable use.
Conclusion:
The budget should have focused on the chance to shift towards decentralised renewable energy with less ecological impacts and greater community access.
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