Changes come through public awareness

If you want to boost the morale of your workers, make them happier working and make them want to work longer hours in the office, what better way than to call in the experts who know how to do it. Sanjay B. Shah is the director of Institute of Environmental Management (IEM), that is working to create an awareness by giving training in environment in the industrial sector; and that also includes the office working environment. Armed with a MBA in human resource management from the Graduate School of Management, University of Dallas, Irving, Texas, USA; coupled with his towering presence, charm and a voice to match; Sanjay seems passionate about being a part of the team that is aiming to bring about attitudinal changes in the industrial sector in Nepal. Responsible for a number of key operations in the institute, he is upbeat about the future of the institute. He talked recently about the work the institute is doing with The Independent. The excerpts:

Q: Tell us about this institute.

A: This environment sector support programme started in September 1999. This is a joint programme of the government of Denmark and the government of Nepal. This programme is constituted only on industrial environment and on working environment on industrial sector. In the current form this is a five-year programme. This is the first of its kind in Nepal. There have been sporadic or some specific cases done by others, but this is a whole programme.

Q: What are its objectives?

A: The objective of the programme is to make the environmental policy action and plan, adopted by the government in 1993 effective and to interpret it. The EPA has five goals, and this is one of them.

In its current form, this programme has four components to cater to specific items within Nepal Environmental Policy and Action Plan (NEPAP). The component four that is institutional strengthening of environmental authorities, is the one which is intricately involved to the government strengthening their capacity for legislation, policy formulation standard, implementation of standards and all those kind of things.

Component No. one is the training, education, but it also has a future mandate. After the programe is completed, if there is an agreement that there is a possibility of catering to the special field of the industrial environmental management.

The programme has an overall budget of about Rs. 1.4 billion over five years and this budget is divided among the several components of the programme. Each component has a specific task, but the component No. 1 is inter-linked with all the other components in providing training and education to all the components.

The main reason of having IEM is because we have very few experts in industrial environment management and they have very limited exposure.  So, the idea is to train people and to make the capacity of Nepal in the human resource sector especially focussing on industrial environmental management.

In the first phase of the training programme, the experts will come from outside, but for each foreign expert we will have one local consultant. They will work together with the experts and in the second phase of the training programme there will be no foreign expert. That is the idea of creating human resources within the country.

The overall idea of the programme is the capacity enhancement or the capacity development in the government as well as in the private sector. This include entrepreneurs, industrialists and the likes, to be able to cope up with the industrial environmental issues, manage it and control it.

Q: How have you designed the budget?

A: Of the overall budget, 75 per cent of our expenses will be focussed on these activities in the private sector.  The remaining 25 per cent will go to the government and in aspects like rules and regulations.

As such the programme is aimed at catering to the needs of the industries straight away. There are two aspects to the training. One is to do the actual training and the other is the institutional building process at the same time. Because we have to become an institution of our own.

Q: Who are your stakeholders?

A: Among our stakeholders, it is the FNCCI, FNCSI the three national level trade unions, DECONT, GEFONT, NTUC and of course the government. The government is the three direct ministries - Ministry of Population and Environment, Ministry of Labour and transport management and Ministry of Industries, commerce and supplies.

As per the prograMme document, the ownership of the Environment Sector Programme Support (ESPS) lies with HMG, but DANIDA is the actual implementor here. We also have a programme office at the Ministry of Industry, because during the development phase of the programme there was no Ministry of Population and Environment. Actually it took 8 years for the programme to come and we had to do a lot of paper work between the ministries. Even till now, most of the major focus of activities and responsibilities rest with the Ministry of Industry. But we are slowly beginning to work more with the Ministry of Population and Environment.

One of the components is sub-shared by Ministry of Industries and the Ministry of Population and Environment.

Q: What will be your major work?

A: Our major work lies with making people aware, and if people come to us about what can be done for any specific purpose, we can design a programme for them. And we want to do in such a way that our work remains sustainable.

We have concentrated so much on the private sector and we want to make them aware so that they focus on consumers because nowadays changes come through public’s awareness and consumers’ demands and not merely through the imposed regulations.

Unlike many others, we have targetted specifically on the urban sector and our target has to be very private sector oriented.

Q: What are your future programmes?

A: Presently, we are doing training programmes. What IEM will do is specific industry-focussed clean up production such as in textile or carpet industry. Presently, we need more exposure so, the present activities are some sort of mixing up training with practical implementation. For instance, if an industry faces a problem, find it and come out with some concrete ideas to resolve it. After this phase the IEM will begin replicating these training programmes on certain specific industries. We may even go district wise. The biggest challenge is to create awareness because it is a new programme.

We have found through our training, need analysis and thorough visits to industries is that lack of awareness is basically because lack of knowledge and even if they have knowledge they don’t have sufficient back up. When we talk about environmental concept people always think of cost. But we want to show people that being environmentally friendly in the real sense is not necessarily costly. It may be true in some industries, but not in all cases.

Our another aim is to work in tandem with country’s developmental policy. But we can’t burden the industry by putting very high standards. Because on one side we need economic development and for that you have to sacrifice certain things and you can’t put very high standards that it could cripple the industries. This will make the cost so high that the industries itself will die down. If that happens the economy will die down. So, it has to be a balanced act.

Q: When was the IEM started?

A: It started in January, 2000. From day one we wanted to do some activity and we want to become an independent autonomous institution. So, we have an arrangement with Industrial Enterprises Development Institute (IEDI). IEDI was formed through an act of parliament. Under that act they are allowed to create institutions under them. So, we are operating under their legal framework, but they have no financial or administrative control over us. We can issue certificates and awards under their institution’s legal framework.