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Setting Environmental Standards
This paper analyses the process by which the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, sets new regulations or revises existing ones and compares the Indian processes with those in the United States and the European Union. The processes examined include regulations related to coal-fired thermal power plants and water. The Indian process is ad hoc, opaque, and has limited scope for public participation. This can lead to inappropriate standards, lack of legitimacy of standards, and absence of widespread acceptance, all leading to ineffective implementation. The paper discusses these critical deficiencies and suggests improvements.
This paper is based on a part of the work carried out by the author as an academic visitor to the Stranded Assets Programme (now Sustainable Finance Programme) at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford. The author would like to thank Ben Caldecott, director at the programme, for providing him with the opportunity to conduct this research. He also wishes to thank Philippe Cullet, Pete Harrison, and Ashok Sreenivas for their comments on the draft of this paper, as well as Jinda Sandbhor for assistance with the research.
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