New Delhi : Congress MP Ashwani Kumar on Saturday criticised the Environment Ministry over its “flawed” regulatory regime and lack of enforcement of green norms and allegied “an environmental volcano is waiting to erupt.”
Kumar, who is the chairman of a parliamentary panel on Science and Technology and Environment and Forest ministries, termed the current situation as an “environmental volcano waiting to erupt anytime” and said the time to take action was now.
He said that the committee is not satisfied with the overall performance of government agencies for protection of environment. “Environment Ministry has a huge responsibility consistent with its massive mandate to secure the future of India. I am sorry to point out that in the last 15 months, nothing new has been done to address the challenges that were known to the ministry. “We (the committee) have said that whatever logistical difficulties of the Ministry are there should be corrected. The ministry should be helped in discharging its mandate. But there is absolutely no excuse for inaction,” Kumar told.
He said that this was something that people of India have a legitimate right to expect from government and appealed to both the Environment Ministry as well as Prime Minister Narendra Modi to treat the environmental challenge as the most important challenge of the century for the country.
“I am sorry to say that in our reports we have concluded that the Environment Ministry has failed to deliever. The TSR Subramaniam committee report which was seen as a way to review the exisitng architecture of law and policy on environment has been rejected by our committee unanimously,” he said. The panel, which submitted 15 reports, has recommended formation of a new committee to consider afresh specific areas of environmental policy after it found the objections raised by experts on the proposals of a high-level committee under Subramaniam constituted to review green laws as “valid”.
