Analysis of Current Five Year Plan
Is sustainability truly built into the 12th 5-Year Plan? | Politics of Biodiversity | Environm... Page 1 of 5
Is sustainability truly built into the 12th 5-Year
Plan?
Perhaps for the first time, environment and related livelihoods issues figure in several chapters of a 5-Year Plan approach paper. But it is far from achieving the kind of integration of environment, economy, and livelihoods that is required if India is to meet its obligations to its people, to nature, and to international agreements, writes Ashish
Kothari
‘Faster, More Inclusive, Sustainable Growth’: this is the title of the draft Approach Paper for the 12th 5-Year Plan, prepared by India’s Planning Commission. The 11th Plan was about “inclusive growth”; now, sustainability has been added. Does the draft present a coherent vision of development that is sustainable and equitable (leaving aside for the moment, the deeper question of whether sustainable growth is itself an oxymoron; in a world with finite resources, growth cannot be endlessly sustained).
In 2007, in a review of the 11th Plan Approach Paper, I wrote: “15 years back, at the Earth Summit in Rio, India along with other nations committed to a path of sustainable development. In 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, this commitment was reiterated through a unanimous Political Declaration. Just before that, at the turn of the millennium, countries had also framed the impressive Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), one of which was to “ensure environmental sustainability”. While a number of countries have slowly moved towards meeting this commitment, India seems to be even further away from it than it was before this millennium began. This appears painfully apparent when one examines the Approach Paper to the 11th 5-Year Plan, recently put out by the
Planning Commission.”
It is five years later, there is much greater global and national awareness of the unsustainability of today’s
Is sustainability truly built into the 12th 5-Year
Plan?
Perhaps for the first time, environment and related livelihoods issues figure in several chapters of a 5-Year Plan approach paper. But it is far from achieving the kind of integration of environment, economy, and livelihoods that is required if India is to meet its obligations to its people, to nature, and to international agreements, writes Ashish
Kothari
‘Faster, More Inclusive, Sustainable Growth’: this is the title of the draft Approach Paper for the 12th 5-Year Plan, prepared by India’s Planning Commission. The 11th Plan was about “inclusive growth”; now, sustainability has been added. Does the draft present a coherent vision of development that is sustainable and equitable (leaving aside for the moment, the deeper question of whether sustainable growth is itself an oxymoron; in a world with finite resources, growth cannot be endlessly sustained).
In 2007, in a review of the 11th Plan Approach Paper, I wrote: “15 years back, at the Earth Summit in Rio, India along with other nations committed to a path of sustainable development. In 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable
Development in Johannesburg, this commitment was reiterated through a unanimous Political Declaration. Just before that, at the turn of the millennium, countries had also framed the impressive Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), one of which was to “ensure environmental sustainability”. While a number of countries have slowly moved towards meeting this commitment, India seems to be even further away from it than it was before this millennium began. This appears painfully apparent when one examines the Approach Paper to the 11th 5-Year Plan, recently put out by the
Planning Commission.”
It is five years later, there is much greater global and national awareness of the unsustainability of today’s