Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the occasion of World Biofuel Day 2018 on August 10, announced to establish 12 modern biofuel refineries worth ten thousand crore rupees across the country.
- According the PM,this will provide employment to 1.5 lakh youth.
- He said that biofuel can bring revolutionary changes in the lives of the farmers and that the government is making a huge investment towards converting biomass into biofuel.
- As per the Prime Minister, the government is targeting ten per cent ethanol blending in petrol by 2022 and 20 per cent by 2030. He said, record production of ethanol has happened in the last four years.
- The Prime Minister also said that the government is trying to reduce dependence on CNG import and soon it will promote CNG vehicles in the villages. He said, the Centre is also working to make BioCNG from farm waste.
PARIVESH
- On this occasion, Prime Minister launched web portal PARIVESH (“Proactive and Responsive Facilitation, by Interactive and Virtuous Environmental Single-window Hub:PARIVESH), a single window for environmental, wildlife, forest and Coastal Regulation Zone clearances.
- PARIVESH is a Single-Window Integrated Environmental Management System, developed in pursuance of the spirit of ‘Digital India’ initiated by the Prime Minister and capturing the essence of Minimum Government and Maximum Governance.
- The entire process of submitting the application and tracking the status of such proposals at each stage of processing.
- with PARIVESH, MoEFCC has become more of a facilitator, than a regulator.
- “PARIVESH” is a workflow based application, based on the concept of web architecture. It has been rolled out for online submission, monitoring and management of proposals submitted by Project Proponents to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEFCC), as well as to the State Level Environmental Impact Assessment Authorities (SEIAA), to seek various types of clearances (e.g. Environment, Forest, Wildlife and Coastal Regulation Zone Clearances) from Central, State and district-level authorities.
- The system has been designed, developed and hosted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, with technical support from National Informatics Centre, (NIC), New Delhi.
- The main highlights of PARIVESH include – single registration and single sign-in for all types of clearances (i.e. Environment, Forest, Wildlife and CRZ), unique-ID for all types of clearances required for a particular project and a single Window interface for the proponent to submit applications for getting all types of clearances (i.e. Environment, Forests, Wildlife and CRZ clearances).
- PARIVESH offers a framework to generate economic growth and strengthens Sustainable Development through E-Governance.
- With automatic highlighting of non-compliance by the system, PARIVESH helps in improving the overall performance and efficiency of the whole appraisal process.
- PARIVESH also helps the processing authorities, as it has a Single Window System for Central, State and District level clearances, auto-generation of agenda (based on first come, first served principle), minutes of the meetings and online generation of approval letters, resulting in ease and uniformity in processing of clearance applications, online submission and monitoring of compliance reports including geo-tagged images of the site by regulatory body / inspecting officers even through the Mobile App for enhanced compliance monitoring.
- The facility of Geographic Information System (GIS) interface for the Appraisal Committee will help them in analyzing the proposal efficiently, automatic alerts (via SMS and emails) at important stages to the concerned officers, committee members and higher authorities to check the delays, if any.
- “PARIVESH enables project proponents, citizens to view, track and interact with scrutiny officers, generates online clearance letters, online mailers and alerts to state functionaries in case of delays beyond stipulated time for processing of applications.
