Environmental enforcement and small industries in India: Reworking the problem in the poverty context

Environmental enforcement in India has been nd hoc and generally ineffectiv e. Environmental agencies have been more active in recent years, targeting small and medium industries. A sanction-based strategy is used to enforce e nvironmental standards. This study shows that the present policies have sev ere limitations, are counterproductive to long-term environmental managemen t and are anti-poor. A solution to these problems may be a participatory an d interactive approach to enforcement backed by a package of incentives and penalties. This requires a combination of sanction and compliance-based st rategies. The shift, however, is fettered by an uni-dimensional conceptuali zation of what is fundamentally a multidimensional problem. (C) 2000 Elsevi er Science Ltd. All rights reserved.