ECO-Products International fair in New Delhi, India to Promote Green Consumerism and ECO-Culture Across Nations

Source: washington bangla radio

By Sameer  Pushp

New Delhi, India, Feb 9, 2011 (Washington Bangla Radio / PIB-India) Growing population resource imbalances and looming threat of global warming demands rising concerns for sustainable living, the choice is to go for eco-powered technologies, eco-products and clean eco-energy.  The need of the hour is to adopt an eco-powered life style and provide clean eco-energy with zero co-generated pollution. Clean energyenergy efficiency products and exchange the newer, cleaner and greener technology with the rest of the world. generation products wean you off the polluting or wasteful forms of energy and ensure our eco footprint enough to stomp out global warming.  As India graduates into a pulsating and growing economy, we are mindful of the pressing need to go for clean and green products. We also realize that the traditional methods and principles may become increasingly ineffective, therefore, need is to augment eco-productivity both at micro as well as macro level to realize our global competitive edge. Hence, India is organizing The 7th Eco-Products International Fair (EPIF-2011) to showcase its eco and

EPIF-2011 – to be inaugurated by Shri Anand Sharma, Minister for Commerce and Industry – from 10th to 12th February, 2011 in New Delhi at India Trade Promotion Organization (ITPO). This fair is being jointly organized by Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Asian Productivity Organization (APO) –Tokyo, National Productivity Council (NPC), and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). This edition of EPIF would spin around the theme – “Green Productivity for Sustainable Energy and Environment”- with a parallel International Conference on the theme.

At the core, EPIF-2011 will revolve around eco-efficiency considerations and energy efficiency perspectives, which will be supported  by  principles  of  ecological  economics  and impinged by equations  of eco-financing and  investments  and returns  cycles. Strategic action by firms and stakeholders including consumers is increasingly focused on eco-design initiatives including product improvement, product– redesign, functional innovation and system innovation, etc. With a growing pull arising from accent on green procurement by firms and public sector entities. The future-scopes are green consumerism and green growth dynamics and emergence of eco-cities and eco-industrial parks that would foster an eco-culture across boundaries within one earth.

Eco-products are  defined  as  “products  and services  that   comply  with environmental regulations or are environment-friendly, reflecting manufacturers’  voluntary  efforts to  care  for  the environment.”  If we take a glance at the budget of India, at present, the contribution of renewable energy to the total energy production is under 4 percent.  The share of renewable energy in India’s energy output can increase to 10 per cent by 2015 and 15 per cent by 2020. As our conventional  energy  resources  are  getting  scarce, renewable  energy  sources  have  assumed  greater importance. So we need to change fast to balance our growing energy need and sustainable life.

EPIF-2011 is one of the largest international environment exhibitions in Asia and it will be showcasing the most advanced environment friendly technologies, products and services that enhance sustainable productivity and competitiveness. This Fair would provide opportunities to explore business collaborations and promote awareness of environment friendly products and services. This Fair will establish Green Purchasing Network and the launching of Eco-labelling schemes. A significant development would be to promote eco-materials, eco- components and eco-products; in this process, India will not only be helping environment but also be gaining a green corporate image in the market

The broad range of expected benefits that may arise from EPIF-2011 are:
·    Enhanced  scope  for  networking,  marketing  and  sales opportunities  with  global  Eco-product  producers  and information & media coverage to the products/services of the exhibitors  and  potential  ideas  for  innovative  green entrepreneurs.
·    Obtaining greater awareness and knowledge for identifying and using eco - products/services in day to day life for citizens and society at large.
·    Stimulating  industry,  governments  and  public  agencies  in devising/formulating schemes and policies to promote green procurement  mechanism  and  use  of  clean  and  green technologies.
·    Bring in focus on carbon and water - foot print actions for sustainable energy and environmental considerations.
·    Would lead to the release of  products produced by Asian Productivity Organization, Tokyo.

The lifeblood of EPIF-2011 is the concepts of sustainable development and sustainable living. Benefits of these energy efficient technologies and products ranges from: reduced production and operating costs to reduced environmental impacts. EPIF -2011 seeks to achieve not only ecological but sustainable harmony between growth and development. Our globally shared concern is we live qualitatively and each one uses his/her own share endowed by nature.  India by hosting EPIF-2011 is taking a strong step in this direction. More and more these kinds of events will promote a mass culture of sustainability which is without doubt a prudent investment for the future generations.

- PIB Features

Disclaimer:  The writer is a freelance journalist and the views expressed by the author in this feature are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of PIB or WBRi.

Maha to set up Agro Economic Zones on lines of SEZs: Minister

Source: one india
Nanded, Feb 11 (PTI) Maharashtra is planning to set upAgro Economic Zones in the state on the lines of SEZs to boostagro processing industry in districts where agriculture andfarming form the backbone of the economy, Agriculture MinisterRadhakrishna Vikhe-Patil said today.

Buzz up!
Speaking at "Nanded Ahead", an investors meet organisedby the government, Nanded Chambers of Commerce and Industryhere, the minister said the agro processing policy would beannounced soon.


"The agro economic zones would be set up in districtsdepending on the kind of agriculture produce grown," he said.

Vikhe Patil said the Marketing ministry has already setup Terminal and Electronic markets to boost agro processing.

"The agro processing zones will be on the lines of SEZsand Nanded is a good alternative. Development is notrestricted to any particular region. Local entrepreneurs playa every important role in growth of the region and the needof the hour is to expand the MIDCs to accommodate more andmore local industries," he added.

Vikhe Patil called for the need to remove the mentalblock of being backward.

"What is important is that we need to look forwardtowards the road ahead," Vikhe-Patil, a close aide of formerChief Minister Ashok Chavan said.

Chavan is the chief patron of the two day ''Nanded Ahead''convention.

Vikhe-Patil attributed the development of Nanded toChavan and described him as a visionary leader.

The meeting assumes significance as it is being held inthe backdrop of the CBI naming Chavan as one of the accused inthe Adarsh housing scam and the former Chief Ministerattending a meeting of legislators, supporting him in anapparent show of strength. .

Contradictions of ‘development’ in contemporary India

Swapna Banerjee-Guha, 7 February 2011

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit?

About the author

Swapna Banerjee-Guha is Professor of Development Studies in the School of Social Sciences, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Most recently she published Accumulation by Dispossession: Transformative Cities in the New Global Order (Sage Publications, 2010).

Is India moving on a path towards segregating society, enclaving economic space in a way that essentially excludes the majority from the development orbit? A large number of Indians from various cross-sections are currently enraged about this crucial question. While official outlets make frantic efforts to project this tendency as a contradiction between modernity and backwardness and label anyone questioning the validity of the above development model as ‘anti-development’ or ‘unlawful’, innumerable lived experiences go on reflecting heightening inequalities and the increasing expendability of the poor.
Take the case of the resource-rich tribal heartland of Jharkhand, Orissa, Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh located in central and eastern India. Mining areas in these states are enthusiastically being leased out to global corporations leaving the poor tribal community homeless; common lands and waste lands in several states that have been traditionally providing livelihood and survival means to the poor are being taken over to make Special Economic Zones; rich coastal areas with enormous bio-diversity are being handed over to corporations like Dow Chemicals for making chemical hubs; natural resources like rivers are being privatised for industrial and commercial purposes, like the Sheonath river in Chattisgarh.  Examples abound. This ‘development’ process that rests heavily on displacement, dispossession and destruction of the environment is creating an irreversible production structure in favour of the rich that is actively supported by all major international financial institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank and the like and facilitated by the neoliberal Indian state.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.
Specific areas in India – large and small, rural and urban - are being identified as global economic regions to carry out modern hi-tech corporatised activities. Essentially global, these new economic spaces (location choices are made by investing corporations) are carved out from existing agricultural areas, forest lands, mining areas, fishing zones, peripheries of metropolitan regions, villages, even slums and dilapidated areas inside cities. In the process of converting these spaces into newer ones, large numbers of farmers, agricultural labourers, fishermen, in short a huge section of economically active but poor people are being displaced and dispossessed leading to fierce resistance struggles, inviting in response, state atrocities and violence.
The phenomenon has become pan-Indian: whether in Raigad in Maharashtra, Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal, in Jagatsinghapur-Kalinganagar in Orissa or Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh, the patterns are comparable. The official argument says that as the State is not financially capable of providing ‘world class infrastructure’ in a short time, it is necessary to invite private capital to provide it initially in chosen pockets that will boost economic growth in the surrounding regions. While private capital undertakes this task, it becomes obligatory on the part of the State to offer them concessions and subsidies, in exchange. Land acquisition for such global spaces is undertaken by invoking a Colonial Act of 1894 that says that the State is the ultimate owner of land and can take over any tract for ‘public purposes’ by paying reasonable (sic) compensation. Enclave development, once a mainstay of the colonial state, has made a glorious come back in contemporary Indian economic policy.

The vociferous state 

This newer form of capitalist development depends on global finance and technology and a supportive neoliberal hegemonic discourse. It goes beyond the previous practice of disaggregation and production relocation in areas with lower social reproduction costs to an altogether newer design of total appropriation of space for a novel exploitation process. Set to mutate all existing social relations, it further modifies the non-Fordist labour process, transforms relations between the dominant and the dominated and alienates space-economies from their respective social realities to construct an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory. The common collective interest and the public good start getting negotiated away by ideological, political and economic power-plays that privilege individual accumulation, subordinating the common people and their rights in a way that is even used to underpin justifications for state violence.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.
Resting on a contradictory framework of inclusion (of the few) and exclusion (of the many) it materialises a multiscalar, uneven development involving integration of selective regions and sections of societies in a globalised market framework. A destructive ensemble of obsoletism and reconstruction diffuses across the old spaces, displacing the existing use values and altering the discursive as well as the material geography of such spaces, creating a solid, material background for intense conflicts. A typical neoliberal construction of space, place and scale is taking place in India that is reconstructing a new geography of centrality and marginality, making the issues of production and capitalisation of space extremely crucial. The resultant landscapes of conflict invite resistance and contestation from below by those whose livelihoods get jeopardised and who are systematically marginalised by the state apparatus in diverse ways that expose their vulnerability in the current order.
To identify the causal factors, one needs to look at the direction of India’s current economic momentum. There has been a far-reaching shift in her economic policy, facilitating ingress of global capital in all economic sectors, downsizing labour, outsourcing economic activities, and promoting an aggressive urbanism based on gentrification and privatisation. Based on exploitation of the product of labour, pillage of nature and expropriation of social property, such policies have a close connection with international financial institutions, the global corporate sector, and quite significantly, the major capitalist countries. The State, backtracking from its previous role of a provider takes a neoliberal stance, becoming a vociferous facilitator of private capital pitching heavily on a ‘politically neutral’ practice of developmental governmentality. While the country’s growth roars ahead at an annual 8 per cent, growth in regular employment in recent years is found to have exceeded not even 1 per cent. Quite logically India accounts for the largest number of homeless, illiterate and ill-fed people in the world.

Jharia coalfield in Jharkhand. Demotix / Poul Madsen. All rights reserved.
Amidst the euphoria of creating a free market, in practice the contemporary policies are resulting in a dramatic intensification of a coercive disciplinary form of state intervention to impose a market rule that subjugates the majority and protects the ‘strong’.  This is taking place on an aggressively contested institutional landscape  in which newly emerging ‘economic spaces’ stand in conflict with inherited regulatory arrangements, providing a political arena through which subsequent struggles over accumulation by dispossession and its associated contradictions are getting articulated and fought out at various scales questioning the prevailing development path of the country, assuming a national character, often supported by pan-Indian coalitions of regional resistance groups, broadly/basically left oriented but not belonging to mainstream left parties. The resultant negotiating strategy of the neoliberal state creating multi-level contradictory spaces of conciliation, coercion and atrocity is significant in exposing the porosity of the state apparatus.
One needs to emphasise that the contextual embeddedness of the current exclusionist economic policy in India, produced at national, regional and local scales, are not only getting defined by the nexus of policy regimes, disciplinary political authorities and their regulatory practices, but also by resistance struggles, consolidated grassroots movements and mobilisation of progressive forces that are challenging the state sponsored corporatised development paradigm. Peripatetic global capital in collision with state power may exhibit its authority in controlling spaces and territories for some time, but the ongoing struggles clearly point at an emerging discourse in search of an alternate paradigm, based on a democratically oriented sustainable development practice.

For references and full development of issues see:
Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (1997). Spatial Dynamics of International Capital, Orient Longman, Hyderabad.
Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2002). 'Critical Geographical Praxis: Globalisation and Socio-Spatial Disorder', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.37 (44 & 45), pp. 4503-09, Mumbai.
Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2008): ‘Space Relations of Capital and Significance of New Economic Enclaves: SEZs in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 43(47), pp. 51-60, Mumbai
Banerjee-Guha, Swapna (2009): ‘Contradictions of Enclave Development in Contemporary Times: Special Economic Zones in India’ Human Geography, Vol. 2(1), pp 1-12, Massachusetts
Bhaduri, A (2008): 'Predatory Growth', Economic and Political Weekly,  Vol.43(16), pp.10-13, Mumbai.
Bourdieu, P (1998): 'The Essence of Neoliberalism', Le Monde Diplomatique, December 1998.
Brenner, N and N. Theodore (2002): ’Cities and Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, Vol. 34, pp 349-379
Conway, D and N Heynen (2006): 'The Ascendancy of Neoliberalism and Emergence of Contemporary Globalisation' in Denis Conway and Nik Heynen, (eds.)., Globalisation's Contradictions, Routledge, U.K.
Cox, H (1999): 'The Market as God: Living in the New Dispensation',Atlantic Monthly, March, pp.18-23.
Gill, S (1995): ‘Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism’, Millennium, Vol. 24, pp 399-423.
Harvey, D (2005): A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, New York
Sanyal, Kalyan (2007): Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, Routledge, New Delhi.