ITANAGAR: The Centre should evolve a new mechanism by taking the balanced views of the North Eastern states to tackle the growing challenges of variability and flexibility of climate change, Amitabh Kundu of the Centre for the Study of Regional Development School of Social Sciences, JNU said.
Addressing the inaugural session of a three-day national seminar on ‘Climate change, development and social transition in North East: Impact and issues’ at Rajiv Gandhi University (RGU) on Thursday , he said the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had committed a blunder in predicting early melting of the glaciers in its 2007 report.“But the 11th and 12th Five Year Plans reflect India’s concern as well as that of the prime minister-headed National Action Plan on Climate Change, as two out of its eight missions – Mission for sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem and Mission on strategic knowledge for climate change – are directly linked to the northeast region,” he pointed out. Regretting at limited interactions between the northeast and the Centre because of geographic isolation and low level inter-institutional linkage, he said though the northeastern states have been doing better of late they are much below the national average growth rate.
“If the Centre imagines that the planners’ responsibility ends with claiming transfer of high per capita fund to the region, it (the Centre) is becoming a living caricature of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” he said and wondered why the vibrant federal structure of India cannot take care of this problem. (PTI)