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Bangalore , July 22

KARNATAKA Cleaner Production Centre is trying to bring finance closer to SMEs that want to adopt non-polluting techniques in their manufacturing units.

Depending on the size and the sector, an industrial unit may require finance of Rs 1-50 lakh but FIs do not have CP funding schemes. The arm of the State Industries & Commerce Department has organised a workshop of industries, FIs and regulators here on August 8 to drive home the need for funding of cleaner production (CP) practices, Mr R. Srinivas, KCPC MD, announced on Tuesday.

This could be provided as soft loans. A policy intervention in the form of possible subsidy is also being worked at. "We would involve all commercial, public sector and MNC banks, along with ICICI and SIDBI," he said.

The workshop will evolve feasible financial models that the lenders can adopt. "Even though CP technologies require a higher investment compared to good housekeeping, there is hardly any institution financing CP today. At the workshop, we want to project viable models that can make intangible CP results bankable for the FIs — for example reduction of greenhouse gases, water conservation or lower consumption of raw materials," he said.

The workshop, the first such in the South, is co-sponsored by the Asian Development Bank as part of its awareness programme. Karnataka has an estimated 700 units in the red or highly polluting industries. The workshop targets textiles, distillery, food processing, foundry, leather, mining, electroplating, coal and power projects, drug and chemical units.

KCPC, the first such regional CP centre set up in 1997 as a joint project of UNIDO and the National Cleaner Production Centre, has taken up two major foreign-funded demonstration projects for 12 industrial sectors.

The Swiss-funded and UNIDO backed Clean Technology Promotion Project with a $1.3-million aid aims to transfer clean technologies from Swiss and OECD countries to the auto component sector in Karnataka.

Under the Indo-Norwegian Environment Programme, KCPC is implementing CP for foundries in Belgaum and rice mills in Gangavathi. "Both of them are nearing completion. They have proven that CP practices can reduce at least 40 per cent of pollution and make a cost benefit of 25-100 per cent to the industry," Mr Srinivas said. These benefits, he said, show in a couple of years.

In the past five years, KCPC has received 1.04 crore of the Rs 1.5 crore corpus from the department.

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