Green ministry shows red signal to IIT Indore

The dream of having an Indian Institute of Technology and an Indian Institute of Management in the same city has been shattered for the time being.

Updated on: Feb 22, 2011, 23:12:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The dream of having an Indian Institute of Technology and an Indian Institute of Management in the same city has been shattered for the time being. The environment ministry has rejected a proposal for setting up an IIT in Indore, which already has an IIM.

The Madhya Pradesh government had sought permission of the environment ministry's Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) for diverting 80 hectares of forestland to set up an IIT, which the HRD ministry sanctioned to the state in the 11th five-year plan.

Diversion of any forestland needs government's permission under the Forest Conservation Act, except one hectare of forestland for construction of buildings of public importance such as schools, hospitals, dispensaries and community halls.

The FAC rejected the proposal saying that diverting so much of forestland will damage the ecological balance in and around the city of Indore, the only city in India which could had the distinction of having both IIT and IIM.

"The proposal of the state government of Madhya Pradesh to diver forest land located in vicinity of an important city for setting up of a non specific project, such as IIT, without undertaking a detailed exercise to examine all feasible alternatives, may be rejected," the committee said, in its report submitted to environment minister Jairam Ramesh.

Agreeing to the proposal would have meant cutting down of 7,164 trees with a good density of 89.55 trees per hectare. "There is very less good forestland around Indore. This is a reserved forest of good quality," said a ministry official.

The worse was that the committee found the land in Hasalpur village indicated in the proposal for compensatory afforestation was not suitable to raise plantation. And, no alterative land for afforestation was mentioned in the proposal.

The FAC, however, gave some relief to urban development minister Kamal Nath as it approved an up-gradation of a national highway in his parliamentary constituency. For this, 48 hectares of forestland will have to be diverted between Amarwada and Narsinghpur.

Environment minister Jairam Ramesh was accused of blocking highway projects falling in Nath's constituency, when he was road transport minister. This is the first major project getting FAC approval after Nath was appointed as urban development minister.

The FAC also had some good news for Mayawati as it approved diversion of forestland for construction of eight-lane expressway on Upper Ganga Canal in five districts of Uttar Pradesh despite an adverse report by its regional office in Lucknow. Already, people have protested for acquisition of their land for the project in Ghaziabad.

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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