“Recently we had a meeting at the Prime Minister’s office and we placed the proposal there,” said ML Meena, Principal Secretary, state environment department. He was speaking at the Environment Partnership Summit organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce at a city hotel.

Meena said the state had approached the Centre with a proposal for the conservation of Hooghly. Accordingly the plan for setting up a River Basin Management Authority has been cleared by the Centre.

He also said the state environment department will soon set up an environment compliance service centre. The service centre will act as an advisory body and help remove the bottlenecks that will make obtaining environmental clearances easier.

The centre, a first-of-its-kind in the state, will come up at a cost of Rs 12 crore at the state Pollution Control Board (PCB) office and will act as a nodal agency and will aid industries to solve their environmental management crisis.

Officials of the PCB pointed out that the centre will have details about the latest technologies available for a particular type of industry and will have a website where these details would be mentioned.

A prospective investor after approaching the West Bengal Infrastructure Development Corporation Ltd (WBIDCL) with his proposal for setting up an industry can come to the environment compliance service centre to get suggestions about non-polluting technologies that are available. If needed he can use the website to get details about the latest technologies available. However, suggestions made by the service centre are not binding on the prospective investors, officials added.