Hurdle for New Mumbai airport

The Union environment ministry has asked the Maharashtra government to conduct a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) of Navi Mumbai, the site of the state’s new international airport.

Updated on: Aug 4, 2010, 24:39:09 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Union environment ministry has asked the Maharashtra government to conduct a Social Impact Assessment (SIA) of Navi Mumbai, the site of the state’s new international airport.

SIA studies the effect of the project on livelihood of the locals and their possible displacement. It is also required to state the steps that are likely to be taken to prevent adverse impact of the project on the locals.

Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel had accused the ministry of delaying the Navi Mumbai airport on environment grounds. He said the new airport was a necessity as the present international airport at Santa Cruz was getting congested.

While denying the charge, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh had said that the ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC), the statutory body that gives environment clearance to plans, was examining the project.

The EAC, at its meeting in July, threw another bombshell on the state government when it said that the mandatory SIA was not done.

“The committee observes that that SIA study has not been carried out as per the National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy 2007, issued by Ministry of Rural Development,” the EAC minutes said.

The SIA is mandatory to be carried out with the Environment Impact Assessment of the project, which was not done in case of the Navi Mumbai airport. The committee has now asked the state government to conduct the inquiry.

The panel also wanted to know whether any alternate sites for developing the airport were examined or not.

The panel said the project will be examined only when the new information sought is provided, which the officials said will take some time to collect.

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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