Using Information for Better Environmental Management in India

This article from id21 argues that improving environmental awareness is a key aspect of environmental management. Increasing environmental awareness can lead to changes in individual behaviour, such as choosing to eat less resource-depleting food, and societal changes, such as pressuring governments to improve environmental policies. In India, creating an environmentally aware society may lead to patterns of conservation usually only found in countries with higher income levels. Changing people’s environmental values requires education. This will involve collecting and disseminating a range of environmental information and making it more widely available, an activity that can be enhanced by new information technologies.

To be effective, education programmes require up-to-date information on the impact of human activities on the environment. Governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community organisations all collect important environmental information. Within the government the greater potentials of technology and increased participation in international environmental agreements have resulted in a greater emphasis on recording and formalising the environmental resources of India, in terms of local environmental knowledge and management practices. NGOs also play a key role in the process of information dissemination. NGOs have contributed to environmental management in India in several ways by:

• influencing government policy through lobbying
• monitoring industry compliance with environmental standards
• conducting environmental education among small businesses
• assessing environmental standards among various sectors of the economy and encouraging improvements
• forming partnerships with communities to establish participatory management of resources
• formalising and recording traditional knowledge and resources
• disseminating environmental information more widely, especially in rural areas and to uneducated people

By highlighting the social aspects of environmental management, NGOs influence environmental management effectively. Considering the importance of environmental information, more must be done to encourage these practices. This should include:

• increasing the collection and dissemination of all environmental information, to include information such as legal challenges to government policy and formal pollution monitoring.
• using new information technology (such as the internet) to make environmental information more widely available and accessible.
• supporting and encouraging the activities of NGOs in all aspects of environmental management.