Revitalization of Rivers in India Draft Policy - Isha Guru Jaggi Vasudev

Revitalization of Rivers In India
Draft Policy Recommendation
INDICATIVE BUDGET FRAMEWORK
The government, through its ministries and departments, is
graduating into outcome-based budgeting. Following from this, we
have presented an indicative budget framework in Appendix 6. We have
fine-tuned our outcome-based budget framework to the limited level of
the program we are proposing. We have divided the program into three
sub-programs, which contain all activities that are required to meet the
common objective of each, and an indicative budgetary framework is laid
out.
These sub-programs are:
Creation of awareness: For any policy to be successful, it is important
to generate awareness about three things - ‘Situation, Complication
and Solution.’ The situation in this case is the consistent degradation of
rivers in the country; the complication is the impossibility of agriculture
and life if the rivers are not revitalized; and the proposed solution is
afforestation. Clear communication of policy objectives will not only
create an acceptance for the proposed policy intervention but will also
help in obtaining the support of the general masses and stakeholders,
which is crucial to any successful policy.
Afforestation: The plantation of trees is the crux of the program. This
budget lays out the activities that need to be undertaken for achieving
afforestation in three different contexts - state-owned land, land owned
by farmers, and land owned by forest dwellers. Furthermore, this is a long
process and has been divided into a pre-plantation phase, which ideally
begins as soon as the government accepts the program. The second phase
is the plantation period, which, depending on the tree variety, may take
between 1 and 3 years to materialize. Post-plantation, there are some
regulatory functions that need to be performed on an on-going basis.
Creation of agro-based industry: The strength of this model is its
systems approach. It looks at rivers as a system of biodiversity, and
approaches its revitalization through the revitalization of all its facets.
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