Meeting Notes 13 June 2008 at Air Quality Cell

Environment Status Report

Ajay presented the work done thus far for the ESR 2008. The discussions at the Jan 10 meeting were revisited, where it had been stated that the ESR framework would be reorganized. The main points of reorganization are:

1. The purpose of the ESR has to be clear – it should reveal the health status of the population linked to the state of services and the environment
2. Overview chapters for a comprehensive picture of the city, including key sectors
3. Certain data sets have to be presented disaggregated at ward-level so that actions needed to be taken by corporators are clear, and these can in turn be linked to ward level municipal budgets and plans
4. It is important to create the framework in the next few weeks, even if data is not there. The purpose of this is to identify data gaps and put in place appropriate data collection systems
5. Descriptive material, detailed data tables, references etc are valuable information and the ESR is a good way of making such information publicly available and these may be included. However, the key actionable aspects may be presented as a separate section for facilitating monitoring and follow-up
6. A point was raised about lot of the information in the ESR being irrelevant, such as tourist sites, flights operating out of Pune and list of Malls - Commissioner agreed that all such material can be removed from the report. However, a lot of the development related data could still be included, albeit in the form of appendices.

Sharad Mahajan raised issue of printing the ESR on recycled paper and this was accepted

Aneeta, Ranjit and Himanshu would help Ajay evolve the ESR framework.

Update: This group has met and a new framework is to be made available by Ajay shortly.

Biodiversity
The following aspects were suggested for inclusion in the ESR:
1. Aggregate and per capita green zones and reservations
2. Status of aquatic ecosystems
3. Number of municipal gardens and per capita garden area, and change over the last few decades
4. Naturalness of municipal gardens
5. Tree plantation and tree cutting
6. Status of selected rare species
7. Status (incl mapping) of biodiversity hot specks

Anchal and Sanskriti are to help develop a section on Biodiversity

Update: The above have been incorporated in the Biodiversity framework draft, which is posted on http://pcef.blogspot.com

Non-motorized Transport
Dinesh reported that an NMT cell has been created at PMC. This group has been meeting regularly. Several implementation tasks have been identified which PMC is to take up.

Schools
Ranjit reported that three areas have been identified by the School Group for focusing effort:

1. Testing of learning attainment – a set of tests is being developed to be discussed with the school dept and administered in July; while testing is done by PMC, the effort from the School Group would be to improve testing systems and to monitor efforts to improve quality
2. Infrastructure status – the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and PMC have been gathering this information, and the School Group would like to monitor whether improvements are being made based on this data – are schools moving up from being ‘C’ to ‘B’ and ‘A’, as well as by examining and improving the level of data gathered
3. Out of school children – again, this data is gathered by SSA and PMC, but there may be constraints in the data gathering methods as certain sections of the children population may not be getting counted (such as children of construction labour families, children employed as resident domestic help). The School Group would like to help improve systems reaching out of school children including the alternative education schemes, funding, the capacities of NGOs providing non-formal education etc

The School Group has had a number of meetings to clarify its role. It has revamped the format of the Annual Report of the School Board, so that it now focuses more on outcomes and not just on activities, as it did before. Besides the new format seeks to emphasize the important aspects & indicators wrt Schools, and to drop or dilute the less important ones. The School Group will now encourage the School Board to adopt this format to prepare its next Annual Report.

MC suggested that Schools be taken out of the purview of the PCEF and the individuals/ organizations interested in contributing to school improvement should join the monthly meeting forum already initiated by PMC.

Update: The School Group is requesting an appointment for next week with the Education Officer, Chair of School Board and MC to discuss the above and to request inclusion in the monthly meetings

DC Rules
MC suggested that the DC Rules group work in coordination with the Planning Cell and especially Mr Gohad and Mr Vikas Bhandari.

Update: The DC Rules group is discussing whether the earlier task they had taken up – of simplifying existing DC Rules – should be done or not, as in any case, the new DP will have a new set of rules. It may be better to focus the discussion on what the new DC Rules should be. A meeting is being arranged by Anagha for end of June/ early July

PCEF Work Scope
The PCEF will now focus on ESR, Biodiversity and Water. Groups and individuals interested in Schools and DC Rules should work with the other forums as suggested above.