Neo liberal verbiage
The draft National Environment Policy (nep) released recently by the Union ministry of environment and forests (moef) identifies major environmental problems, outlines their causes and puts forward a set of principles to address problems. But glaring loopholes remain. The most obvious ones pertain to the draft's contradictions with current government policies and programmes. For example, nep talks of integrated management of individual river basins, while the government is actually trying to interlink river basins! There is no mention of direct regulation of groundwater extraction, only vague talk of "taking account of impacts of [free] electricity' for pump sets