The Green National Accounts system which considers the environmental costs of economic development would be implemented at state level initially, Chief Statistician TCA Anant said on Saturday.
“It will be largely at the level of the state. later on, it can go finer ... We will have to engage with the states to figure out what will it take to implement,” said Anant, who is also Secretary in the Statistics and Programme Implementation Ministry, on the sidelines of an event.
Government in 2011 had constituted an expert group under the chairmanship of Pratha Dasgupta from the Cambridge University to develop a framework for green national accounts, identification of data gaps and preparation of a road map for its implementation.
On April 5, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had released the report prepared by the expert group.
The system of green national accounting would take into account the environmental costs of development and reflect the use of precious depletable natural resources in the process of generating national income.
Anant said the government will need data on forest, minerals, water, land, air quality, pollution to prepare a comprehensive data base.
Creation of “asset account” under this will hugely require this kind of data, he said.
“...The important areas are different for different states. You have to allow that differentiation also in the framework so that different states will pick up different elements,” he said.