Green court faults ministry for nod to Vedanta

An environment court has said the environment ministry had erred in granting environment clearance to Orissa Mining Corporation for mining bauxite in Niyamgiri Hills for Vedanta Resources.

Updated on: Sep 18, 2010, 01:06:29 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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An environment court has said the environment ministry had erred in granting environment clearance to Orissa Mining Corporation for mining bauxite in Niyamgiri Hills for Vedanta Resources.

The corporation was given the clearance in August 2008 for mining 1 million tonnes of bauxite for Vedanta Resources’ aluminum refinery in Kalahandi district of Orissa.

The clearance was granted on the basis of an environment impact assessment (EIA) report of Vimta Labs, which was never placed before the Dongria Kondh tribal community for consideration.

This, as per the EIA notification of 1994, was a violation as the clearance can be granted only on the basis of a report that has been circulated during public consultation.

Instead, an earlier EIA report of Tata AIG was circulated among the tribal community during public consultation, which was not the basis for granting the clearance.

In an affidavit before the authority, the ministry admitted that it granted clearance based on the EIA report of Vimta Labs and other reports while complying with a Supreme Court order on granting “clearance as per law”.

The Vimta Labs report had studied the impact of mining in Niyamgiri hills, related to data between May 2004 and November 2004, a year after the public consultation conducted by the state government.

The ministry, however, tried to explain that it followed the procedure laid in the EIA notification of 1994.

“It is clear that Vimta Labs report of 2005, on the basis of which the environment clearance was granted, was never in public domain for people to express their views,” the sole member of the authority J.C. Kala said in his order on Friday. “Leading to non-compliance of ministry’s (EIA) notification.”

The authority had suspended the clearance and asked the ministry to revisit it. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh cancelled it in August on the ground that forest clearance given to the project was faulty as provisions of the Forest Rights Act and Forest Conservation Act had not been met. If a project is coming up on forestland, obtaining a forest clearance is mandatory before seeking environment clearance.

Uttarakhand project in trouble

The National Environment Appellate Authority has the quashed environmental clearance to a hydro project in Uttarakhand as it would cause huge displacement and damage local ecology.

The authority, in its order on Friday, said “tying the river through dams at intervals that restrict it natural flow would amount to playing with the sentiments of millions”, and therefore Ganga should be allowed to maintain its natural flow. htc

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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