Jairam halts dam in Cong-ruled AP

The environment ministry has sent a notice to the Andhra Pradesh government asking why the clearance given earlier for the R11,000 crore Polavaram dam project should not be withdrawn since key conditions on which it was granted had been violated. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Nov 2, 2010, 03:02:12 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The environment ministry has sent a notice to the Andhra Pradesh government asking why the clearance given earlier for the R11,000 crore Polavaram dam project should not be withdrawn since key conditions on which it was granted had been violated.

The notice maintains Andhra had started dam construction without holding public hearings in the neighbouring states of Orissa and Chhattisgarh — which will also be affected to a small extent by the dam — as it was required to.

Polavaram on the Godavari river will, if built, be southern India’s biggest dam, providing irrigation to one-fourth of the state and drinking water to 25 lakh people across four districts. But from the start it has been shrouded in controversy for alleged violation of environment norms.

“Public hearing to ascertain views of the people who’ll be affected has been undertaken in two states,” said S. Bhowmik, additional director in the ministry in a letter to Shailendra

Kumar Joshi, Andhra Pradesh’s principal secretary (irrigation projects). The notice sets a deadline of 10 days for an explanation for the lapse. Read: If Polavaram dam is built

The dam has provoked much anger in neighbouring Orissa. It was because no hearings were conducted that the Orissa government contemplated moving the Supreme Court against the environment ministry clearing forest approval for the project in August 2010 and starting an agitation against Congress in tribal areas close to Andhra border.

Citing another violation, the environment ministry accused the state government of failing to get the environment clearance granted in 2005 amended after the Central Water Commission in 2009 put a condition that embankments will have to be build to prevent submergence of land in the neighbouring states.

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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