15 IAS officers belonging to State cadre will attend it
A five-day course In forest and environment conservation, scheduled to begin in Coimbatore on Tuesday, is all set to take 15 officers of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) belonging to the State cadre back to the classroom.
The course will be conducted in the heritage building of the Tamil Nadu Forest Academy, which is nestled in the salubrious environs of the city famously known as Manchester of the South. Only recently, the Academy celebrated its anniversary.
The participant IAS officers are from different batches — 1986 to 2003. As a perceptive official puts it, the idea is to mainstream forest and environment considerations in the development process as IAS officers are essentially development managers.
This is for the first time that such a course is being organised in the State. When the proposal was mooted, Chief Minister Jayalalithaa approved it, the official says, adding that Chief Secretary Debendranath Sarangi, who headed the Environment and Forests Department a few years ago, played a role in devising the course.
There will be nine lectures on a range of issues such as the implications of various laws, role of joint forest management in forest restoration and poverty alleviation, ecotourism, marine biodiversity conservation and the role of public interest litigation in environmental conservation.
There will be three panel discussion sessions, one of which will deal with key issues in wildlife conservation.
Field visits
Two days have been set apart for field visits by two groups to Mudumalai Tiger Reserve and Anamalai Tiger Reserve.
At a brief event on Tuesday morning, Principal Secretary (Environment and Forests) C.V. Sankar will inaugurate the course.
Apart from the deliberations on nature, there will be an hour-long yoga session in the evening.
Keywords: forest and environment conservation
It is hoped that the state will now also plan for training its civil
servants on how best to conceive and manage Public-Private
Partnership projects. That will help to hasten the progress of infra
projects, reduce the general complaint that PPP projects are skewed
towards the greedy private sector and also conserve public assets and
garner public revenue.Let us remember that even with a full fledged
public debate it is only the civil servants who have the full facts
and figures before them on the project and other related areas who
can offer a salutary advice to the ministers for their decision. A
better trained corps of civil servants will certainly help the state
to implement PPP projects properly and fruitfully./e
Kudos to the state govt. for starting such useful measures.
Some ministries seem to cite this hurdle ought to be asked whether
threy did all these exercies before branding environmental concerns as
‘hurdles’. It has been noticed that project promoters often avoid and
violate established practices of good governance, transparency and
participation in political and adminsitrative decision-making, either
out of ignroance or because they see such practices as
counterproductive to getting projects started. Civil society does not
have the same say in this arena of public life as it does in others;
citizens are typically kept at a substantial distance from
megapropject decisionmaking (For example, in a classic case of Mumbai
where UPA has given massive funding for NavaSheva –Sewri Transharbour
link, the state of proceedng ahead with a road project dropping an
earlier proposal of road-cum rail bridge. NO reason whatever has been
told to the people. Read this valuable despatch alongside a report that appears elsewhere in
the media that finance minsitry is going to the cabinet on how to handle
the eonvironmetnal and funding 'hurdles' to infr development,. Training
courses sush as this are vital. The vital aspects of environmental
impact shoudl not be given short shrift just because decision makers
are anxious to get the projects started. Wish good luck to the institute
for widening such courses.
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