ZERO DEFECT – ZERO EFFECT

I am sure readers from India and those who take keen interest in the country would be able to recall from where I borrowed this phrase. Yes! You guessed it right. While addressing the nation on occasion of Independence Day, the Prime Minister of India, Sh. Narendra Modi, gave a clarion call to global industries to make India a manufacturing hub. In the same breath, he urged them to imbibe a culture of ‘ZERO DEFECT–ZERO EFFECT’. The emphasis was not only on producing quality products but on producing products that have both high quality and zero impact on environment.  So when one of the participants of the recent webinar I presented, wanted to know outlook for implementation of sustainable procurement policy in India under new government, without a second thought, I replied – I am upbeat! That is because, what could be a better endorsement for sustainable public procurement (SPP) in India than one from the Prime Minister; that too a PM who has just received an overwhelming mandate from the country. Can we not now say that political support for SPP is granted?

Let us try and analyze the phrase in relation to SPP. Based on common knowledge of English, it is not beyond the comprehension of even a layman. By ‘ZERO DEFECT–ZERO EFFECT’, he obviously meant product sustainability; i.e. products that, without compromising the intended quality quotient, have minimum impact on human health, environment and society.  This is precisely what SPP stresses: promoting products, services and works that have minimum impact on human health, environment and society by integrating sustainability criteria into buying decision. At the cost of repeating myself (and it cannot be stressed enough), with government sectors spending about 30% of trillion-dollar GDP of India on procurement of products, works and services, they are perfectly placed to use SPP policy as a tool to achieve the PM’s vision of making India a manufacturing hub that ensures ‘ZERO DEFECT–ZERO EFFECT’.

I am sure someone in the government must be taking note on how to transform the PM’s words into policies and programmes on the ground. So where do you think they should begin? Therefore, I would suggest they brainstorm on a question asked by one of the participants during the webinar I mentioned before – what is the biggest impediment for implementing SPP in India? My answer then and now is the same i.e. comprehensive legal framework for SPP. A company/organisation/country may show good SPP results without a policy in the short run, but for long-term sustainability gains there is no shortcut to having a clear and consistent policy that helps procurers necessarily make good procurement decisions.

At least that is what we learn from the experiences of SPP implementation world over. The EU Directive 2004/18/EC asked Member States to take measures to support the implementation of GPP. The guidelines also gave an indicative EU level target that, by 2010, 50% of all public tendering procedures should be compliant with endorsed common EU GPP criteria. In USA, President Obama, through Executive Order 13514 in 2009, made it mandatory to include sustainability criteria for 95% of all applicable new contracts. Other countries such as Japan, China, South Korea etc. have taken the same route.

Compare this to our draft Public Procurement Bill 2012 (now lapsed) which stated that environmental criteria of a product may be considered in the subject matters of tender. I feel this is like a muzzled guard dog with neither bark nor teeth. By merely allowing and not making it mandatory for pubic authority to include sustainability criteria in procurement decisions, the impact is going to be negligible. With the bill now lapsed, it would make sense to make inclusion of environmental criteria mandatory for at least those products whose market has matured in India. The related challenge would be injecting a fresh life into Eco Mark scheme.

I hear some positive news coming-forth from Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has identified India as a project country for implementing Sustainable Public Procurement and Ecolabelling (SPP-EL) project. The ministry has constituted a multi-stakeholder Project Steering Committee for this project’s implementation. It is an excellent opportunity for the committee to leverage UNEP’s experiences in SPP implementation during the Swiss-led Marrakech process. Putting in place legal framework for SPP will create the clarity, certainty and confidence among stakeholders for long-term sustained actions. It shall show how rhetoric (affixing ‘Climate Change’ to MoEF) and ambition can be turned into robust targets and thus real change towards low-carbon solutions, while still being economically competitive for becoming a manufacturing hub of the world.

For me – environmental sustainability of our economic development – this was the greatest takeaway from the Independence Day speech of our prime minister, evidently a man of great prudence. Jai Ho!!!