Green warrior

BACKSTAGE

One does not always talk of bureaucrats and scholars in the same breath. But with Environment Secretary Prodipto Ghosh, that is not impossible. In fact, he throws himself into the bracket of scientists and academics at the slightest opportunity he gets to mingle with that set. As happened recently when he announced the government's intention to lease out wastelands to industry to grow plantations. It would improve the forest cover to the desired level of 33 per cent, he said. The bill would otherwise have been a neat Rs 60,000 crore.

Maybe such a passionate pursuit of linking forest cover with economics could have come only from a person like Ghosh who is known to have vigorously pushed this""matched in his passion only by that of the paper industry tycoons who have been asking for forest wastelands to grow eucalyptus and acacia to meet their growing pulp demands.

Ghosh describes himself as a multidisciplinary professional specialising in the interface of the disciplines of engineering, economics and policy analysis. With a PhD in economics and policy analysis, this chemical engineer from IIT Delhi has been additional secretary in the department of economic affairs in the ministry of finance, economic advisor to the Prime Minister, environment specialist with the Asian Development Bank besides having been consultant to FAO and UNDP.

This background has sure contributed to this neat wedding between economics and environment that he has managed through the proposed forest for industry policy. However, it is not getting him unanimous praise. Environmentalists at the Centre for Science and Environment, for instance, said this was diverting income that would have gone to farmers from the paper industry. What is the harm in farm forestry, they ask.

Those who espouse the cause of the rural poor see the forest department as a land shark and say wastelands could have been distributed among the landless. But Ghosh has an answer. The industry is to be allowed inside wastelands only in partnership with local communities, he says.

Little dissent was heard from the audience who heard him announce the proposal which is to go before the Cabinet soon. It was a conference to mark India becoming a member of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), a conclave of scientists, social scientists and system analysts. Ghosh was once a member, as he fondly recalled.

Tifac, a part of the department of science and technology was the Indian representative to join IIASA and for Ghosh it seemed like the greatest thing to happen. It was about the broadening of horizons, of engineers and astronomers able to communicate and so on.

R K Pachauri, the director of TERI where Ghosh worked on deputation long ago, says that his wasteland plan was not a bad idea. If you confine it to the wasteland, why not? Of course, it was not a brain child of Ghosh's, but it was something close to the secretary's heart, Pachauri adds.

The next thing the country could expect from this engineer turned environment researcher turned bureaucrat is a policy on climate change. For as Pachauri recalls, Ghosh, 'a bright individual and a great scholar' after his days at IIT Delhi did research on climate change at Carnegie Mellon University!

But retirement beckons and his ministry is yet to open its mouth on climate change. How much can a secretary do, asks Pachauri who heads the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Ghosh, the author of 40 research papers and several books on environment and development, however, is unstoppable. Next on his agenda: Eco tourism, a national data base on forest produce and a natural resource counting system that would show exactly how much is the worth of the forests.