FAC turns clearing house for proposals in prohibited zones

The environment ministry’s forest advisory committee (FAC) has almost become a clearing house for projects in once no zones for industrial activity - tiger and elephant corridors and dense forest areas, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 25, 2013, 23:19:36 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The environment ministry’s forest advisory committee (FAC) has almost become a clearing house for projects in once no zones for industrial activity - tiger and elephant corridors and dense forest areas.

As the environment ministry has failed to identify forests where industrial and mining activities would not be allowed, the FAC is having a field day in giving approvals to the projects in the last few months since the committee has been constituted. The term of three independent members expired last year after which the ministry, in the later part of 2013 replaced them with new ones.

Since then, the FAC approval rate has crossed over 98% as compared to around 95% in 2011. “The problem with FAC is that it has stopped saying no to any project,” an ecologist associated with the committee earlier said.

More than that, the FAC had made extra effort to ensure that the projects are cleared. A case in point is of clearing mining projects in a tiger corridor in southern Madhya Pradesh which were rejected by the National Tiger Conservation Authority. The FAC constituted its own committee and overruled the NTCA concerns and gave approval to 12 coal mining proposals. The approval to these coal blocks were pending for close to two years.

The FAC employed a strange logic to allow mining in elephant corridors in Jharkhand and Orissa. It said that the green area was not notified as being used by the tuskers to move from one region to another. This was despite sufficient evidence of elephants invading nearby villages because they were unable to use the corridor for mining purposes. The committee over-looked the ecological foot-prints and agreed with the state governments pushing for mining.

If that was not enough the FAC has started a new concept of opening scrapped projects and then allowing them by putting weak conditions.

In the last meeting, the committee allowed at least four projects which were rejected by the earlier FACs. The FAC allowed Kalu river drinking water project with futuristic cumulative impact assessment and failed to explain why it was overturning the earlier rejection.

In case of a hydel project in tribal district of Lahaul in Himachal, the FAC adopted a similar wishy-washy and over-looked the fact that 11 hydel projects have already been cleared on river stretch. The committee clearly went by the views projects by the state government over-looking the adverse impact of the project on local wildlife.

The committee did not raise any objections for exploratory drilling in dense forest area of Hasdeo-Arand in Chhattisgarh, once declared a no-go area for mining, and asked the environment ministry to decide on basis of recommendations of a Group of Ministers (GoM). The FAC being a statutory body constituted under the - which are less than 30% of green cover of India - or not.

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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