By IANS,
New Delhi : India’s natural resources should be used in a sustainable manner with unique and cost-effective solutions, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said Friday.
Inaugurating the Green Conclave 2010, a day-long symposium organised by the National Geographic channel, he said: “We have to use our resources in a sustainable manner by finding out-of-box solutions which are cost effective.
Giving an example, Sibal said when he was science and technology minister in the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, experiments were conducted to convert into ethanol the tonnes of wheat and rice husk dumped every day.
“Such out-of-box solutions which are cost-effective, are needed for the country,” he said, noting that in Brazil, sugar was converted to ethanol in a big way, but “this could not be applied in a poor country like India where sugar is mostly used for consumption”.
The minister said the challenge in India was to make the poor population reach a level of prosperity and also sustainable development and urged that a balance be kept between the two.
Sibal also said that the way the exploitation of resources was taking place, there would be no one left in the next 600 years from now to know what happened today.
“At the rate we are exploiting the environment, no one would be left to find out what we were doing now. The people who exploit environment should understand that the more one exploits, the more you jeopardise your own life,” he added.
Noting that environment and pollution have no territorial boundaries, he stressed the need for global efforts to combat them and said symposiums like this conclave would create a platform where one can discuss these problems on a wider range.