The Union budget has only made cosmetic gestures to improve the health of the people by increasing the outlay for traditional systems of medicine. But there is no effort to mitigate growing pollution from motorisation and industrialisation to reduce serious health risks to public health. CSE has shown repeatedly through its studies how pollution leads to ill-health and even premature deaths. If the finance minister was concerned about the health of citizens he should have been very harsh with both polluting industry and the automobile lobby. Sinha has sure missed the CNG bus and on top of it his excise concession to diesel engines upto 10 horse power will probably see Indian cities teeming with three wheelers running toxic diesel fouling up urban air and increasing health risks.

In terms of a green fiscal measure all that we get from the budget is a reduction in subsidy on urea. But this would amount to literally scraping at the bottom of the barrel for traces of something green.

The Finance minister and the planning pundits in the Ministry of Finance have yet to learn the innovative approaches of taxing the bad and dirty to make the economic growth path as sustainable as possible. This first budget of the millennium had provided Yashwant Sinha with the opportunity to introduce green taxes in India. Green taxes are definitely the need of the hour in India. Governments all over the world are realising that there is a need for fiscal mechanisms to control market forces and that it is possible to increase revenue through green taxes to meet the pollution abatement costs.

Today the Delhi government has taken the credit for arrested trend in air pollution in the Capital due to some important decisions taken like introduction of unleaded petrol, low sulphur diesel and CNG. Yet we are far from winning the battle as levels of the most dangerous pollutant – respirable particulate matter, has increased by almost 10 per cent over 1998 and the peak level exceeded standards by a shocking 7.2 times. This is lesson enough for the government that the need of the hour is hard fiscal decisions. CSE study has shown that India’s economic growth has come at a terrible price. While India’s GDP has grown 2.5 times between 1975 and 1995, industrial pollution load has increased 4 times and vehicular pollution load has increased a shocking 8 times. But policy makers have consistently ignored the cost of death and disease due to an environmentally unsound development path.