Abstracts Business

Implementing Green Public Procurement in Indian Railways – Challenges and Strategies

by Sanjay Kumar

The role of Government as a consumer is increasingly becoming focal point of discussion on sustainable development. The government being one of the big consumers of products and services may use their purchasing power to drive their economic development without compromising the needs of future generation. The Green Public Procurement (GPP) aims at integrating environmental consideration in buying decision and provides unique opportunity to India to leapfrog on a sustainable growth path. The private sector in India has already taken steps for taking environmental consideration in their supply chain but sustainable procurement by the public sector in India is very far and few. Indian Railways, being big consumer of products and services, is ideally suited to start GPP pilot initiative that would identify the appropriate policy framework to foster development of green procurement in India. The objectives of this project is to identify the barriers within Indian Railways that hinder the inclusion of environmental aspects in public buying decision and devise strategies to overcome these barriers for successful implementation of GPP in Indian Railways. The hurdles analysis developed during European research project RELIEF and improved further from then on has been used in this research to find out hurdles for implementing GPP in the Indian Railways. The result of hurdles analysis reflects that prevailing procurement process do not incentivize adaptation of environmental criteria in procurement of goods and services. Besides, low level of awareness of stakeholders to green procurement not being aim of Indian Railways throws further implementing challenges. The multiplicity of overlapping guidelines needs to be harmonized to enable and facilitate GPP by incorporating intent of green purchasing in internal procurement guidelines. Simultaneously, the focus should be on development of environmental criteria and study on cost implication of green products and services. Although the challenges are daunting, the silver lining is the stakeholders’ attitudes are positive and they are aware of win-win opportunities that GPP practices and programs offers in the long run for the Indian Railways. Since the policy governing procurement of products and services is more or less same in all government agencies in India, the result of study provides a road map for implementing GPP in India.