Environment ministry to cut clearance red tape

NEW DELHI: In its effort to sync environmental goals with the Centre’s agenda of improving ‘ease of doing business’, the environment ministry will come out with a fresh classification of industries by early next week.

Under the new classification, 241 industries will be classified under four categories — Red, Orange, Green and White (a new class) — based on their air-, waterand soil- polluting potential. It is expected that the move will help deal with red tape. Though the first three categories have been in existence for long, the categorisations were made mainly on the basis of the size of an industry and consumption of resources. The pollution due to emission and effluents, and its impact on health, was not considered a primary criteria.

The fresh ‘uniform’ classification is, however, done by Central Pollution Control Board on the basis of pollution index criteria and environmental issues such as generation of emission, effluent and hazardous waste.

“Idea of this rationalisation is also to make it sync with the Centre’s ‘Make in India’ agenda where the manufacturing sector gets a boost while taking care of environmental concerns.