Govt not to allow hydel projects in Uttaranchal

Amid rising protest over allowing 600 MW power project in Loharinag Pala in Uttaranchal, the Environment ministry will shortly come out with a comprehensive policy on whether to allow more hydel projects in the state or not.

Updated on: Jul 24, 2010, 01:01:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Amid rising protest over allowing 600 MW power project in Loharinag Pala in Uttaranchal, the Environment ministry will shortly come out with a comprehensive policy on whether to allow more hydel projects in the state or not.

Till the comprehensive assessment is done, there would be a so-called moratorium on new hydel projects on tributaries of river Ganga in Uttaranchal. The BJP government in the state had planned over 300 hydel projects on various tributaries of river Ganga.

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh told members of National Ganga River Basin Authority, on Friday that allowing Loharinag Pala hydel project was a “political necessity” as the National Thermal Power Corporation had spent over Rs 600 crore on the project.

The minister apparently did a lot of explaining on why the dam was allowed even though he admitted that the dam could cause ecological damage in the Bhagirathi river basin. “We would be advising NTPC on minimising the environment loss and would be monitoring the project development work,” he said at the meeting.

The non-official members of the authority had opposed granting approval to Loharinag Pala dam saying the dam will impact the flow of river Bhagirathi, a tributary of river Ganga.

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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