Report from India: Do you want to hear the good news? or the bad?

["Kirk R. Smith" <krksmith@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

How about the good?

On Jan 17, in Delhi, there was an event to make the official announcement 
that a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the Governments 
of India (GOI) and the USA on environment and health.  In attendance were 
Gov. Christine Whitman, Administrator of the USEPA, and senior officials of 
the EPA and US Embassy as well as the country directors of both UNICEF and 
WHO.  The GOI representatives included cabinet secretaries of the Ministry 
of Environment and Forests, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Labour 
along with the head of the Indian Council of Medical Research (equivalent 
to NIH), the heads of relevant agencies (such as the Central Pollution 
Control Board), and several directors of national health 
laboratories.   There were even senior advisors, although no members, from 
the Planning Commission.  At the request of Indian colleagues, I was also 
invited to attend, somewhat to the annoyance of the US delegation I am afraid.

This 2-hour event can only be called a major landmark along the pathway of 
putting third-world IAQ issues on national and international 
agendas.   Every single presentation from the Indian officials plus the WHO 
and UNICEF directors, placed IAQ as one of the principal priorities for the 
next five years in India.  This view has also been reflected in several 
recent national documents, including the 11th Five-year Plan, the official 
blueprint for all activities of the GOI, which is normally used to set 
annual budget priorities.

And now the bad.

The same just-submitted Five-year Plan announced the end of the national 
improved stove program run by the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy 
Sources (MNES).  Started in 1981, the National Program for Improved Chullas 
(NPIC) was a pioneering effort to address the energy problems of the 
poorest households.  Globally, only China has ever mounted such a national 
effort and in some ways the Indian program was even more ambitions for it 
reached essentially into every one of the 600 districts nationwide in 
disseminating some 30 million stoves by 2000.  Although obtaining mixed 
results overall, the NPIC had come in recent years to be flexible and 
adaptive enough to learn from past mistakes and had started to take 
measures to significantly alter its methods and improve its record.

Officially, the stove program can be continued at the state level, but in 
reality no more than 1 or 2 of the 27 states are likely to do so without 
leadership and funding from the central government.  Privately, officials 
of the NPIC state that there is essentially no chance that MNES will again 
take up the program during the upcoming 5-year period.

What an irony.  Just at the point that IAQ is accepted into the agenda by 
the mainstream health and environment authorities, the single most 
important intervention mechanism in place is abandoned.




----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Kirk R. Smith
Chair, Environmental Health Sciences
SPH, 140 Warren
University of California
Berkeley CA 94720-7360
Phone: 510-643-0793 Fax: 510-642-5815
http://ehs.sph.berkeley.edu/krsmith/
Krksmith@uclink4.berkeley.edu

Senior Fellow, Environment
East-West Center, Honolulu HI

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