Decision on Posco will have to wait

The environment ministry’s prohibition on land acquisition for $12-billion Posco’s steel plant in Orissa is looking to be a long haul.

Updated on: Oct 25, 2010, 23:14:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The environment ministry’s prohibition on land acquisition for $12-billion Posco’s steel plant in Orissa is looking to be a long haul. A ministry committee on Monday decided to seek the opinion of the tribal affairs ministry on alleged violation of the Forest Rights Act.

The Forest Advisory Committee, which is examining the fragmented report on alleged environment violations at Posco site, failed to decide whether traditional forest-dwellers existed at the site. The report, where the majority view was to scrap environment clearance was submitted to environment ministry Jairam Ramesh on October 18.

The FAC will ask the ministry to suspend the forest clearance that was granted to Orissa government for acquiring land for Posco’s steel plant in December 2009 till the tribal affairs ministry submits its views.

Two government panels, led by NC Saxena and Meena Gupta, had said traditional forest dwellers existed, a claim denied by the Orissa government citing historical evidence.

While all the stakeholders had provided evidence to support their claim, the FAC was in the fix as having accepted the contention of Saxena and Gupta committee reports would have resulted in questions being raised over FAC’s clearance to the project in December 2009.

As per the Forest Rights Act (FRA), the forest clearance cannot be granted unless the state government presents a consent certificate for the project from the local gram sabha.

However, Orissa government has not submitted the consent certificate claiming that FRA was not applicable. The FAC did not seek the tribal affair ministry’s opinion, though the matter had been raised before. On Monday, the issue was raised again and many committee members were of the view that FRA violation has taken place but the committee decided to take opinion from the tribal affairs ministry before taking a call on scrapping of the forest clearance approval.

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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