Industry friendly move?: Govt of India to provide green nod to projects begun without environmental nod

The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Government of India, is all set to go even more industry-friendly. A draft notification, uploaded by the MoEFCC for “feedback”, on its website has said that industrial projects which have gone ahead with implementation without environmental clearance would be provided green nod under certain "conditions".
Dated May 10, the notification, interestingly, does qualify as “violations” the “projects or activities requiring prior environmental clearance under Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2006”, and yet have gone ahead with “construction work, or have undertaken expansion, modernization, and change in product mix.”
Even then, it underlines, if the developers approach the the “concerned regulatory authority” as an after thought, ahd seeks EC “without prior environmental clearance”, their projects shall be “treated as cases of violations and shall be appraised for grant of EC.”
The previous Manmohan Singh government, too, came up with a retrospective clearance procedure in the form of an office order, but it was rejected by the National Green Tribunal (NGT). Insiders in the MoEFCC have been quoted as saying that the number of projects that may have come up without clearances are “around 400.”
Only, the notification says, the project proponent would have to “compensate” and would have to “implement the Environmental Supplemental Plan (ESP) to remediate the damage caused or likely to be caused, and take out the undue economic gain due to non-compliance and violation”.
The notification doesn't stop here. It says, the MoEFCC's ’s expert appraisal committee (EAC) or the state EAC, as the came may be, would have to refer such cases to an expert group, which would “assess” the monetary gain a developer may have derived and the damage caused to the environment because of non-compliance.
The expert group, the notification says, would “prepare an ESP for restoration of the damage caused to the environment and for further improvement of the environment.” As for the project proponent, he or she would have to “give the consent for implementation of the ESP”, which would be monitored by the expert group to ensure “satisfactory implementation of the ESP.”
Officially, the intention of the MoEFCC reportedly is to “help” make proponents to kick-start their projects which have gone ahead with implementation without EC to “ensure” that they comply by rules, rather than leaving them “unregulated” and “unchecked”.
Officials in the MoEFCC claim, this would not “encourage violations”, instead it it would such projects that violate environmental laws under “environmental regulations”, insisting that the notification is “in the interest of the country.”
Meanwhile, senior activists have taken strong exception to such a notification. Kanchi Kohli, legal research director at the Namati Environmental Justice Programme of the Centre for Policy Research, a Delhi-based think tank, has been quoted as wondering, “If the construction activity has taken place in violation of the notification, does this imply that the entire process of screening, scoping, public consultation and appraisal can be done post facto?”
According to her, “The outcomes of this process would be unduly favourable to the violator, encourage fait accompli and allow for the continuation of project activities unabated. Rather than being a deterrent, such a practice will encourage illegality”.

Comments

Ahmedabad's civic chaos: Drainage woes, waterlogging, and the illusion of Olympic dreams

In response to my blog on overflowing gutter lines at several spots in Ahmedabad's Vejalpur, a heavily populated area, a close acquaintance informed me that it's not just the middle-class housing societies that are affected by the nuisance. Preeti Das, who lives in a posh locality in what is fashionably called the SoBo area, tells me, "Things are worse in our society, Applewood."

RP Gupta a scapegoat to help Govt of India manage fallout of Adani case in US court?

RP Gupta, a retired 1987-batch IAS officer from the Gujarat cadre, has found himself at the center of a growing controversy. During my tenure as the Times of India correspondent in Gandhinagar (1997–2012), I often interacted with him. He struck me as a straightforward officer, though I never quite understood why he was never appointed to what are supposed to be top-tier departments like industries, energy and petrochemicals, finance, or revenue.

Powering pollution, heating homes: Why are Delhi residents opposing incineration-based waste management

While going through the 50-odd-page report Burning Waste, Warming Cities? Waste-to-Energy (WTE) Incineration and Urban Heat in Delhi , authored by Chythenyen Devika Kulasekaran of the well-known advocacy group Centre for Financial Accountability, I came across a reference to Sukhdev Vihar — a place where I lived for almost a decade before moving to Moscow in 1986 as the foreign correspondent of the daily Patriot and weekly Link .

PharmEasy: The only online medical store which revises prices upwards after confirming the order

For senior citizens — especially those without a family support system — ordering medicines online can be a great relief. Shruti and I have been doing this for the last couple of years, and with considerable success. We upload a prescription, receive a verification call from a doctor, and within two or three days, the medicines are delivered to our doorstep.

Dalit rights and political tensions: Why is Mevani at odds with Congress leadership?

While I have known Jignesh Mevani, one of the dozen-odd Congress MLAs from Gujarat, ever since my Gandhinagar days—when he was a young activist aligned with well-known human rights lawyer Mukul Sinha’s organisation, Jan Sangharsh Manch—he became famous following the July 2016 Una Dalit atrocity, in which seven members of a family were brutally assaulted by self-proclaimed cow vigilantes while skinning a dead cow, a traditional occupation among Dalits.

Environmental report raises alarm: Sabarmati one of four rivers with nonylphenol contamination

A new report by Toxics Link , an Indian environmental research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi, in collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund , a global non-profit headquartered in New York, has raised the alarm that Sabarmati is one of five rivers across India found to contain unacceptable levels of nonylphenol (NP), a chemical linked to "exposure to carcinogenic outcomes, including prostate cancer in men and breast cancer in women."

Boeing 787 under scrutiny again after Ahmedabad crash: Whistleblower warnings resurface

A heart-wrenching tragedy has taken place in Ahmedabad. As widely reported, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane crashed shortly after taking off from the city’s airport, currently operated by India’s top tycoon, Gautam Adani. The aircraft was carrying 230 passengers and 12 crew members. As expected, the crash has led to an outpouring of grief across the country. At the same time, there have been demands for the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, and the Civil Aviation Minister.

Tracking a lost link: Soviet-era legacy of Gujarati translator Atul Sawani

The other day, I received a message from a well-known activist, Raju Dipti, who runs an NGO called Jeevan Teerth in Koba village, near Gujarat’s capital, Gandhinagar. He was seeking the contact information of Atul Sawani, a translator of Russian books—mainly political and economic—into Gujarati for Progress Publishers during the Soviet era. He wanted to collect and hand over scanned soft copies, or if possible, hard copies, of Soviet books translated into Gujarati to Arvind Gupta, who currently lives in Pune and is undertaking the herculean task of collecting and making public soft copies of Soviet books that are no longer available in the market, both in English and Indian languages.

Revisiting Gijubhai: Pioneer of child-centric education and the caste debate

It was Krishna Kumar, the well-known educationist, who I believe first introduced me to the name — Gijubhai Badheka (1885–1939). Hailing from Bhavnagar, known as the cultural capital of the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, Gijubhai, Kumar told me during my student days, made significant contributions to the field of pedagogy — something that hasn't received much attention from India's education mandarins. At that time, Kumar was my tutorial teacher at Kirorimal College, Delhi University.

Search This Blog