Cement factory closed for environment violation

Three months after its regional office cited grave violation of rules, the environment ministry has finally woken up and got construction of a cement plant by Jai Prakash group in Uttar Pradesh stopped citing violation of the Forest Conservation Act and the Supreme Court orders.

Updated on: May 29, 2011, 23:39:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Three months after its regional office cited grave violation of rules, the environment ministry has finally woken up and got construction of a cement plant by Jai Prakash group in Uttar Pradesh stopped citing violation of the Forest Conservation Act and the Supreme Court orders.

The plant is close to Son river and Kaimur Wildlife Sanctuary in the Mirzapur and Sonbhadra districts of UP and covers an area of about 500 sq km as the core area of the sanctuary, with an additional 146.85 sq km area as reserve forest. Kaimur is believed to one of the last places to have supported the now extinct Asiatic cheetah.

It is a second such violation this year with the ministry revoking environment clearance of Nirma’s cement plant in Gujarat citing green norm violation.

The company Jai Prakash Associates Limited was constructing 2.5 million tones per annum cement plant in naxal affected Sonebhadra district of UP located just 2.1 kms from the Sanctuary.

The ministry’s regional office in Lucknow in January 2011 said that project was coming up at the site to be notified as reserve forest under the Forest Conservation Act, which is disallowed by the Supreme Court.

Sensing an adverse remark from the regional office, the Uttar Pradesh forest department had forwarded a proposal in January to get the project cleared from the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife.

While considering the proposal the ministry got alerted about the grave violation — construction has started without mandatory clearance of the forest advisory committee.

The board, however, got the site inspected before taking its final decision.

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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