Maha told to take action against Lavasa

Delight of industrialist Ajit Gulabchand of getting environment clearance for Lavasa lake city project near Pune, promoted by his company Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), was short-lived. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jun 11, 2011, 01:38:22 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, Delhi

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Delight of industrialist Ajit Gulabchand of getting environment clearance for Lavasa lake city project near Pune, promoted by his company Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), was short-lived.

Hours after he told a meeting of shareholders in Mumbai on Friday morning that an environment ministry committee had approved the first phase of the project, the ministry issued an order asking the Maharashtra government to take action against construction of flats in 681 hectare of the first phase of Lake City project without environment clearance.

The timing of the action order comes within 10 days of the Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) deciding on recommending conditional environment clearance to the entire first phase without raising the issue of construction in 681 hectare.

More Trouble

The ministry’s order asking for initiating action was based on the visit by Naresh Dayal, EAC chairperson, in first week of January, 2011.

Dayal had found construction of flats in 681 hectare of the total 2,000 hectares of the first phase of project without mandatory environment clearance. In February, the company finally applied for environment clearance from the ministry.

“The construction/developments are violation of Environment Protection Act, 1986,” Bharat Bhushan, said in his Friday’s order, without referring to EAC’s final recommendation.

The action to be initiated under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, could mean either demolition of the structures raised or a penalty for the same.

The EAC clearance

On May 31, the EAC had given its nod for the project with 34 conditions, including 5% of the project cost to be earmarked for corporate social responsibility and a policy for corporate environment responsibility, which environment minister Jairam Ramesh had described as “name and shame” regime.

In this, the company will be required to report environmental violations to its board and place it on its website.

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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