Chandra Bhushan - Associate Director
Industry & Environment

Chandra Bhushan just passed his engineering in Ahmedabad in 1993, when Anil offered him work at CSE. Anil visited his institute for a lecture. Till then, Anil never met Chandra Bhushan but a ten minute chat at institute convinced Anil about abilities of Chandra Bhushan & he is with CSE since then. Presently, Chandra is Associate Director, Industry & Environment.

He looks after research work of Green Rating Project, a major initiative of CSE, where CSE rates industries on basis of their environment emissions.

Click here for IndianNGOs.com coverage on CSE

December 19, 2005

What is unique about Green Rating Project?
GRP is a pioneer effort & perhaps till date remains only project where civil society rates industries. There was no rating, where NGO rated industries on environment performance. An attempt was made in USA, but that rating was done by commercial organisations.

And there is huge difference between ratings done commercially & by NGOs. All commercial ratings are based on published reports & other material given by company, whereas community ratings depend upon primary survey & research. GRP was first rating, where an inspector, we called him Green Inspector, went inside company & gathered material. It was a voluntary rating as company came forward & participated in it. It was also a public rating as companies those did not participate were still rated. In commercial ratings, only those companies were rated who wanted so.

When GRP was launched, were you sure of its success?
Not at all. We expected it would take enormous time to gather information as companies never gave information to government not least to NGOs. Further, we not only asked information, we asked them to allow us to enter factory & cross check information. When we sent first letters inviting paper producing companies to participate, no one turned up. It took almost a year to get all companies on board. We waited for their response & also started building information base on basis of secondary material. We surveyed adjoining areas & gathered information. As we picked momentum, everyone got on board. Once Paper rating was released in 1999 & GRP flashed around, our credibility established. Everyone realized we promoted good & pressurized bad companies.

GRP is based on voluntary disclosure. Does not that leave a possibility of fraud?
We developed process in a way that it minimized possibility of fraud. We prepared an elaborate & scientific questionnaire for companies. Then we completed primary survey to verify information. It was highly exhaustive process. There are few chances of wrong information by companies, but cross checks were inherent in our procedure.

Project Advisory Panel comprises of big names. How often do they meet? Does it hamper progress of GRP?
They meet once before ratings are released. But, they are provided & updated with information regularly. They have enough time to review our reports & send suggestions. Before release of ratings, Panel meets to clear ratings. However, while PAP exists to release ratings; Technical Advisory Panel holds continuous meetings to discuss upon findings.

So far GRP has rated 3 industries, released 4 ratings & on 16th Dec, we release rating of 4th industry, Cement industry. It takes almost one & half year to rate 30-35 companies of an industry.

What other challenges did you face in GRP? What perceptible change do you witness after GRP?
Biggest problem was to push industry. Rating was not an end in itself. End was requisite changes in industrial atmosphere. During process of rating, we undertake policy research to find drawbacks of existing policy.

GRP pioneered new thinking for regulation of industrial pollution. GRP ensured that apart for profits, companies competed on environment performance. It built a peer pressure amongst companies to gather environment credentials.

Secondly, there is a base line environment performance that every company is expected to achieve. Before GRP, base line was never realized. After GRP, achieving of this base line became critical. It built pressure on poor companies to improve. As became clear in second rating of Paper industry in 2004, several companies improved their standards, which performed poorly in first rating of 1999. There was greater awareness about chemical problems, water management. These five years witnessed huge changes in Paper industry.

What is the criterion to select a particular industry?
Our idea is to select a mainstream sector & where pollution is a concern. For instance, we took cement industry as cement is a polluting sector, there was a huge expansion in cement industry & multinationals came in. We take large scale companies only. Rating is a reputation tool & therefore for big companies it counts more than any small company.

Which industry you take next?
Power or Iron & Steel.

What is the status of Polluter Pays Principle in India, where polluting companies are asked to compensate society?
Incidentally, Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled in its favor.
Absolutely nothing. It is a mere imaginary policy. Government has no backbone to implement it. Polluter Pays Principle becomes effective if we have coherent policy to combat environment hazards. No such policy exists today. In fact, with current economic boom, government sees environment as a hindrance. Draft environment policy says everything but it has no provision to implement these. In fact, we do not price even our natural resources well. We have no policy for ground water use, for right price of water.

- Ashutosh Bhardwaj