Environment The Gaps Are Showing

THE disarray which attended the opening of the first-ever assembly of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Delhi last week may not, of course, quite mirror the status of activities in India addressing the globally acknowledged environmental challenges; it was nevertheless an indicator of some of the fundamental and, one might say, systemic problems which are besetting the implementation of environmental activities taken up under the GEF across the country. While India as the second largest beneficiary of the GEF, the multilateral financing mechanism for environmental projects came under some scrutiny at the meet, serious criticism has been voiced by the NGOs of the compromising role of the three agencies mainly responsible for the handling of GEF-the World Bank, the UNDP and the UNEP, especially the double-standards of the first. In a sense, the GEF meet has served to further emphasise the incompatibility of desperately essential environmental programmes and plans and the current directions of global economic policy. And while the New Delhi statement is no prescription for this particular problem, it is only through these small changes in statements and viewpoints that global policy changes can perhaps occur.