CRZ Plans: Paryavaran Mitra notes Gujarat govt "indifference" towards holding public consultations

By A Representative
Gujarat’s well-known environmental NGO Paryavaran Mitra has asked the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) to transparently hold public consultations in the coastal areas for preparing state-level Coastal Zone Management Plan (CZMP).
In a letter to the GPCB member-secretary, the NGO director Mahesh Pandya has said that this is necessary in accordance with the state’s Coastal Regulatory Zone (CRZ) Notification, 2011. Following the preparation of the draft CZMP, it would be obligatory to get it approved from the Government of India’s Ministry of Environment and Forests and Climate Change.
Taking objection to the state government’s and GPCB’s indifference towards preparing CZMP, Pandya has said, so far, the GPCB has still not put details of public consultation on its website, nor does it has put a summary of the CZMP draft on the site. In fact, says the letter, the Gujarat Ecology Commission and the Gujarat Coastal Zone Management Authority has also not put up a summary of the CZMP draft. “They have only released a map, which is not easy to decipher for a common person”, he says.
In an email alert to Counterview, Pandya says, just five of 13 coastal Indian states have so far prepared CZMP, adding, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) in its recent order has given August 31, 2018, as the last date for prepared CZMP for all the states. So far the state government has announced public consultation on August 3 in Dwarka and on September 5 in Dwarka.