Noted environment expert Chandra Bhushan today said that India's environment policy was "pro-rich" that puts growth over environment, while claiming that Jawaharlal Nehru would have resisted the "decimation" of scientific institutions working in this field.
Speaking on the theme 'Justice' during a seminar on Nehruvian ideals, Bhushan, the Deputy Director General of Center for Science and Environment (CSE), termed climate change as the biggest "injustice".
"The institutions of science have been decimated in our country. There is also no faith on regulatory institutions and the organisations outside the government have been made meaningless. Our environment policy is pro-rich where first comes wealth or growth and then environment," Bhushan said.
He observed that unlike Nehru, today's leaders lacked the capacity to change their opinion on environmental issues on the face of new evidences.
"Nehru is often crticised for hailing big dams as the temples of modern India. But we often overlook that he changed his approach towards gigantism in the later years...We should remember Nehru from the perspective of how little harm he did to our society," Bhushan said.
Wilson Bezwada of Safai Karamchari Andolan, one of the other panelists, highlighted the scourge of manual scavenging in his speech.
"This is an issue no one is ready to talk about. We cannot ignore the social realities on ground," he said.
JNU professor Archana Prasad spoke on the need to defend the "right to strike" for the welfare of the working class while Delhi University professor Aditya Narayan Mishra slammed the NDA government for imposing a "uniform syllabus" on universities across the country.
"JNU has been called anti-national. Let me be further anti-national and oppose the anti-labour laws," Prasad said.
The premier institute of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was recently called a haven of "anti-nationals" by RSS mouthpiece 'Panchjanya'.
