Anna vs Ramesh on project clearances

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday described social activist Anna Hazare's comparison between the controversial Adarsh and Lavasa projects in Maharashtra as "inappropriate", saying the violations in the two projects were under different environmental regulations. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jul 8, 2011, 23:49:25 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Environment minister Jairam Ramesh on Friday described social activist Anna Hazare's comparison between the controversial Adarsh and Lavasa projects in Maharashtra as "inappropriate", saying the violations in the two projects were under different environmental regulations.

Ramesh's response came in reply to a letter written by Hazare to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, in which he charged the union environment ministry and the Maharashtra government with buckling under political pressure to go soft on the "irregularities and violations" in the Lavasa hill city project near Pune.

"Lavasa is an example of arbitrary and irresponsible exploitation of law, corruption, and political pressures that are aspects of the many scams in the country," Hazare wrote.

"While the environment ministry approves of demolishing the unauthorised Adarsh building under provisions of the Environment Protection Act, 1986, it approves of Lavasa under the same Act. What kind of a law is this?" he asked.

In his reply, Ramesh told Hazare: "Adarsh is a CRZ (coastal regulation zone) violation case. CRZ clearance is (necessary) for a specific site. Lavasa is an environmental violation case. Environmental clearance is (required) for a project. The scale and scope of the two are quite different."

Ramesh also contradicted Hazare's claim that the ministry had given environment clearance to the Lake City Project of Lavasa Corporation Limited near Pune.

"Lavasa has not got the formal and final environmental clearance as yet," he said.

The minister accused the social activist of making unsubstantiated allegations against the ministry and said it would have been better if the facts had first been cross-checked with him.

Hazare said in his letter that the probe conducted against Lavasa had confirmed the allegations of environmental norms having been flouted.

"Following the people's andolan (campaign) against Lavasa, many inquiries were conducted and much of the accusations of the protesters were proved to be true," he wrote.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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