Green ministry to nail erring firms

The environment ministry will set up an expert committee to identify companies, including ones in the coal sector, that have failed to start mining despite getting environment clearances.

Updated on: Sep 17, 2012, 01:22:40 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The environment ministry will set up an expert committee to identify companies, including ones in the coal sector, that have failed to start mining despite getting environment clearances. The move would also help the ministry strengthen its monitoring process.

The ministry has given clearance to extract 530 million tonnes of coal, but mining for only 200 million tonnes is underway. Many companies have failed to start mining despite getting clearances years ago. There is a stipulated time-frame within which the operation has to be initiated.

"No more clearances will be granted to the coal sector unless the existing approvals are utilised," a senior ministry functionary said. "Mining clearances will also be reviewed."

Ministry officials said that the committee would also look into ways in which the mining potential is utilised to its maximum.

"It will also suggest ways to improve the environment clearance process to avoid scams such as the one in Goa," a senior ministry official said.

Justice MB Shah Panel, in his report to the government, alleged that the environment ministry had issued environment clearances to the projects on the basis of wrong information provided by the state government.

Although the environment ministry believes that such a conclusion was reached without consulting it, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan has asked her officials to review all environmental clearances issued to the mining sector in Goa. "If we receive complaints from other states, we will look into the matter," she told HT.

The committee will start work by reviewing mining clearance given in Goa and the poor monitoring resulting in illegal mining to the tune of Rs. 35,000 crore. The committee will also study the approval and monitoring processes adopted by state governments.

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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