Green Cess is a deterrent, not a revenue instrument

The Assam government adopting the Green Cess policy is a laudable and justified move to assert environmental accountability. However, without strict enforcement, the policy may become ineffective. The Assam Green Cess Policy, 2026, is anchored on the ‘polluter pays’ principle and marks a decisive intent to make environmental violators bear the real cost of ecological damage done by their actions and activities. Rampant illegal mechanised sand mining in rivers across the state, under the very eyes of district authorities and the Environment and Forest Department in various parts of the state, lays bare a persistent and widening gap in enforcement within the prevailing administrative ecosystem. Bridging such a gap remains crucial to achieving the policy objectives and perceptible outcomes.  A policy may have strong intentions, but it can only gain legitimacy through uncompromising implementation and adequate enforcement in practice. This calls for strengthening the enforcement mechanism, which can be possible only through rigorous monitoring and inspection against polluters.  The policy lists second-hand vehicles, stone-crushing units, brick kilns, imported timber, and red/orange category industries for levying the cess. Economic growth and infrastructure push in the state have led to expansion of these activities. Therefore, placing these activities under scrutiny for violation of environmental norms is not only logical but also a timely and essential regulatory step in the right direction. The policy proposes to collect revenue through electronic mode on a dedicated portal and utilise the green cess for ecological restoration and conservation, climate adaptation and resilience, afforestation and biodiversity conservation, flood mitigation and environmental restoration, and groundwater recharge, among others. While the long list of activities for utilising the green cess offers new hope for enhancing funding for environmental initiatives, it also requires a robust mechanism to ensure effective resource deployment and transparent, justified use. It is essential that paying the green cess does not become a pay-and-pollute licence and the permission granted for approved activities is not misconstrued by a polluting unit as a permission to cause more ecological damage for increasing profit margins. Only a strong monitoring and inspection regime that combines human oversight with transparency facilitated through the application of digital technology can detect such violations and prevent misuse of policy’s provisions. The prevailing enforcement gap in oversight mechanisms allows industries and individuals to violate environmental norms with impunity and should serve as a hard lesson for bridging the gap. Breaking the nexus of corrupt government officials, employees, and polluting industries remains crucial to restore credibility under the new policy regime. An important provision under the policy is levying volumetric green cess on commercial, institutional and industrial sites assessed at per cubic extraction of underground water, which will be in addition to the registration fee for drilling wells and the annual renewal fee for the No Objection Certificate. Depleting the groundwater table due to overextraction has deepened worries of freshwater availability in the long run. If the profit earned from using groundwater significantly exceeds the levy that the extractor is required to pay, the green cess policy will be ineffective in providing regulatory deterrence, as the violator will simply consider the levy a part of their business costs and absorb it. Such a situation requires a science-based assessment of the actual ecological damage in order to establish a levy amount that effectively deters polluters from causing irreversible harm and ensures compliance with the policy provisions. Understanding how climate change impacts have deepened the ecological damage and environmental pollution resulting from industrial and other activities is essential to deciding pragmatic measures and strengthening science-based estimation of the damage cost. Rapid growth in real estate and an increase in the construction of government and institutional buildings have pushed the demand for bricks. Regulating the brick kilns has become an urgent necessity to balance this rising market demand with environmental safeguards against pollution. Imposing a green cess based on the annual production capacity of bricks by a unit or benchmarked against the certified quantity of topsoil/clay extracted under the framework of this policy can be an effective deterrent only when it is ensured that a unit does not exceed the capacity under the cover of weak oversight. The widening demand-supply gap largely drives the disproportionate rise in profit margins in the construction industry compared to the production cost of construction material. Ignoring this reality will lead to a cess amount so low that they cease to carry any deterrent value and fail to curb pollution. The green cess policy can achieve its true purpose only if it is not allowed to slip into becoming another revenue instrument. This calls for setting the policy paradigm right – levying a green cess to prevent further ecological damage as articulated in its intent and not allowing it to drift into a mere revenue exercise or an annual accounting of how much money has come to the state’s coffers from polluting entities.