Forests of Himalaya: Planning and Development

Development objectives reflect planning process, which consistently emphasized the necessity of promoting policies and programmes of economic growth and social welfare. The economic development of a country or region is generally expressed in terms of the growth of its income. The value of the final product excluding the value of inputs used in the process of production is termed as the Gross National Product (GNP). However, these indicators of economic development do not take into account the use and depreciation of the renewable or non-renewable natural resources. As environment being a multi-disciplinary subject involving complex themes like biodiversity, atmosphere, water, land, soil, human settlements, human activities and many others, it is quite difficult to collect, analyse and study relationships among these various components. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop an environmental-economics accounting system to maintain natural resource accounts in totality.