Results: Environmental Sustainability

While the final weights assigned to environmental sustainability (12 per cent) is relatively lowcompared to physical infrastructure (20 per cent) and Costs of Doing and Establishing Business (18 per cent each), but this sub index is becoming an increasingly important national and international issue. An environmentally unsustainable growth path may have very marginal impact on the overall score but it would definitely drastically reduce the quality of life of the inhabitants and constrain the economic growth in long run.

Again in case of this sub-index the top performers have shown above average performance across most of the indicators. Nagpattam tops the table with overall score of (0.82) followed by Theni, Villupuram, Madurai and Ramanathpuram to form the Top five. Some of the districts such as Cuddalore and Tiruvannmalai have performed very well in terms of mean depth of water table, population growth and proportion of grazing to total land, but their poor scores in population density and inability to protect the forest cover has dragged their overall scores close to the average level.

Although the districts in bottom five in general show poor performance, they always have one or two indicators with extremely good scores. For instance, Tiruvallur has been ranked the last district in terms of overall sustainability but it has done exceptionally well in maintaining the ground water table. It is interesting to note that some of the best performing districts in overall level of economic governance have low environmentally sustainability scores. For Instance, Namakkal, Erode and Coimbatore district with exceptional overall EEI ranking of 2, 4, and 6 have worst environmental sustainability ranking of 25, 20 and 23rd respectively. This poses a significant policy challenge to the state: that is to balance economic performance and maintain environmental sustainability. It is here that a decentralised approach in planning could help, as local populace would demand better environmental standards.