By IANS,
New Delhi: To encourage self-regulation among polluting industries, a national technical consultation for air pollutants on a market-based emissions scheme was launched here Thursday by Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh.
The minister said that the step would convince the market that his ministry was not against them.
“We are for market-led growth,” he said.
The minister termed the scheme as the first step towards enforcing environment regulation in a market-friendly manner and said that the country needed stricter and more robust environmental regulations.
“We had to find a way of regulating without regulations,” he said.
Under this market-based emissions scheme, the regulator will set overall cap and allocate permits to an industry. If an industry has excess emissions, it buys more permits and if its emission levels are below the set level, it can sell the permit to another industry.
The minister also clarified that the step was not a result of global negotiations on climate change, but was being done to tackle public health problem due to local polluters.
Also present at the consultation were environment department officials from Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Gujarat – leading industrial states where the pilot project has commenced.