Green national accounts to be at state level initially

NEW DELHI: The Green national accounts system for taking into account the environmental costs of economic development would be implemented at state level initially, a government official said today.


"It will be largely at the level of the state. Later on, it can go finer ... we will have to engage with the states to figure out what will it take to implement," chief statistician and secretary, statistics and programme implementation ministry TCA Anant told reporters on the sidelines of an event here.

Government in 2011 had constituted an expert group under the chairmanship of Pratha Dasgupta from the Cambridge University to develop a framework for green national accounts, identification of data gaps and preparation of a road map for its implementation.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh released the report prepared by the expert group.

The system of green national accounting would take into account the environmental costs of development and reflect the use of precious depletable natural resources in the process of generating national income.

Anant said the government will need data on forest, minerals, water, land, air quality, pollution to prepare a comprehensive data base.

Creation of "asset account" under this will hugely require this kind of data, he said.

"...the important areas are different for different states. You have to allow that differentiation also in the framework so that different states will pick up different elements," he said.

He also said recommendations have been made to the Finance Commission so that states start compilation of data.

"We have in the recommendations to the Finance Commission...that the states should start measuring things. Once it is filtered through the various processes of the government, various agencies of the government will take note of this and they will start incorporating it," he said.

The need for green national accounts emerged as there was a growing recognition that contemporary national accounts were becoming unsatisfactory basis for economic evaluation, the report said.

"The qualifier 'green' signals that we should be especially concerned about the absence of information on society's use of the natural environment," the report added.