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The key points
that emerged during the deliberations were: |
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1.
Concept of Gross National
Happiness (GNH) is actually the real measure of progress as compared
to GDP and we need to focus on natural debt and natural capital
rather over emphasizing on national debt and national capital. |
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2.
The real challenge in
implementing programmes for the conservation of lakes,
rivers and ground water has been the lack of coordination
and ownership between the different agencies that are
involved in its implementation. |
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3.
When different
governments are involved in the implementation of schemes, there is
also a need to ensure that there is political will amongst
governments to ensure implementation together. |
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4.
There was also a need for
the government to review the low levels of budgetary priority given
to environment programmes in the country as the social cost of
pollution is very high as compared to the potential cost of
preventing it. |
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5.
There is also a need to
strengthen truly representative public participation in governmental
programmes which is currently lacking |
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6.
We need to recognize the
reality that a large number of livelihoods of citizens are dependent
on water bodies and hence any solution that we propose should take
this into consideration while introducing programmes for
conservation. |
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7.
We must move towards a
comprehensive river basin approach for curbing river pollution as
our conventional town based approach has not been effective enough. |
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8.
There is a need to have
provisions in the legislations |
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for maintaining
minimum amount of water/flow in the lakes |
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setting standards for
nitrogen and phosphorus as measures of water quality |
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9.
The traditional,
indigenous and local knowledge can be used with community
participation to save rivers and lakes. |
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10.
There is an urgent need
to recognize the strength of traditional methods of conservation and
focus on natural methods and efforts to solve problems of
conservation |
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Finally
Supreme Audit Institutions need to carry their mandate of
environment audit forward and be more proactive in the field of
environment audit. This would require a shift from just highlighting
non compliance issues and towards more performance related
evaluations on a concurrent basis. |
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