First Time a Chapter on Climate Change to be Included in the Forthcoming Economic Survey of India

R.Gopalan, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance said that in order to deal with the issue of Climate change and with the consequences, we will need not only enormous resources but also changes in our lifestyle especially among the better –off and livelihood security for the less well off. Shri Gopalan was delivering the Inaugural Address at the Workshop on Climate Change Financing here today. The workshop was jointly organized by the Climate Change Finance Unit of the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance along with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The inauguration of the Workshop was also attended by Mr Patrice Coeur-Bizot, UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative, Dr Kaushik Basu, Chief Economic Adviser(CEA), Ministry of Finance, Shri J.M Mauskar, Special Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forest, Government of India and Dr Dipak Dasgupta, Principal Economic Advisor, Ministry of Finance among others .

Speaking on the occasion, Dr Kaushik Basu, Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance said that the problem of global commons has been around not just today, but also earlier. The challenge is for building knowledge and cooperative institutions, he added.

Judiciously placed, at the brink of launching India’s 12th Five Year Plan and post Durban Conference, this workshop marked the second initiative of the recently set-up Climate Change Finance Unit in the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance in bringing together policy makers, Members of Parliament(MPs), professionals and academicians to deliberate on a range of issues on Climate Change Financing, spread across the four sessions of the workshop. The consultations would provide important inputs for the chapter focused on Climate Change in the forthcoming Economic Survey of India, as for the first time ever, an entire chapter would be devoted on this subject. The sessions focused on national priorities for addressing climate change, the role of private sector in generating funds to enable a lower carbon trajectory; and the role of the state and civil society in ensuring equitable and sustainable outcomes that do not pass on mitigation and adaptation costs to vulnerable communities. A key outcome of the workshop was better understanding of the financial issues related to climate change, at the domestic and the international level.

Shri Mauskar, Special Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests explained that India will encounter high cost in taking necessary steps for climate change mitigation and adaptation. He said that some financial mechanisms may enable mitigation costs to be borne by the private sector but this will be eventually passed on to the consumers. However the cost of adaptation needs to be borne entirely by public finances, making global financial transfers (grants, low interest loans) highly relevant, he added.

Participating in the scientific frontiers session, Dr R.K.Pachauri, Director General,TERI as well as Dr B.Mungekar, Member of Parliament(Rajya Sabha) stressed the key issues of equity and using knowledge to deal with climate change.

National Population Policy of India

It was long before procuring our Independence even that several discussion benches saw the onset of population policy. Much before Independence; in the year 1938 only a Sub Committee on population was set up by the National Planning Committee appointed by the Interim Government. The National Planning Committee passed a resolution in 1940 that stated the need for the state to adopt family planning and welfare policies in order to bring about a harmonious order of social economy. The resolution also stressed the need of limitation of children.

April, 1951 recorded further enhancements in this policy formulation as the First Five Year Plan labeled for an overt population policy and adjudged family planning as a pragmatic and essential step towards improvement in health of mothers and children. It was because in the plan, family planning was treated as a part of the health program and received a 100% funding from the centre government. And with each passing year, the amount of these funds has increased. The success of this family planning agenda was so dear to the heart of the government that even a separate department coined as Department of Family Planning was carved out in the Ministry of Health in the year 1966. This was done with an objective to reinforce the population control program.

This National Population Policy was further modified and re announced in 1977. In this new policy, what was reinforced was education and health. The latter component of the reformulated policy included the general as well as maternal and child health both. A voluntary family planning was also introduced here on. This also saw the change of the phrase from Family Planning to Family Welfare program that is maintained till date.

S&P downgrades many eurozone countries

Standard & Poor’s swept the debt-ridden European continent with punishing credit downgrades on January 13, stripping France of its coveted AAA status and dropping Italy even lower. Germany retained its top-notch rating, but Portugal’s debt was consigned to junk.

In all, S&P, which took away the United States’ AAA rating last summer, lowered the ratings of nine countries, complicating Europe’s efforts to find a way out of a debt crisis that still threatens to cause worldwide economic harm.

Austria also lost its AAA status, Italy and Spain fell by two notches, and S&P also cut ratings on Malta, Cyprus, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The downgrades on more half of the countries that use the euro could drive up yields on European government debt as investors demand more compensation for holding bonds deemed to be riskier. Higher borrowing costs would put more financial pressure on countries already contending with heavy debt burdens.

“In our view, the policy initiatives taken by European policymakers in recent weeks may be insufficient to fully address ongoing systemic stresses in the eurozone,” S&P said in a statement.