MoEF to get more hands to fight corruption

More people will get jobs in the environment ministry to improve transparency and reduce corruption in the project approval process.

Updated on: Jul 30, 2012, 01:19:48 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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More people will get jobs in the environment ministry to improve transparency and reduce corruption in the project approval process.

The ministry of environment and forests is mandated under law to decide on projects for four clearances - environment, forest, coastal and wildlife. With economy growing at an average of 7.5-8% in recent years, clearances to projects has become rather controversial mainstay of the ministry.

To make the entire clearance process transparent and less cumbersome, the ministry has come out with series of decisions with specific time-lines for its implementation in forest and environment clearance divisions.

The ministry has decided to open four new regional offices in the next six months and start electronically to eliminate reasons for delay in processing and reduce human interface, especially for forest clearances.

For this, the ministry has decided to create additional posts of deputy inspector general forests and additional inspector general of forests in the next six month along with adequate support staff.

The rules and procedures would be streamlined to reduce official discretion that can aid and abet corruption.

"We will have a system in next two months where projects would be processed in order of their receipt except projects of strategic and public importance," a senior ministry official said.

In addition, there would be a comprehensive check list of documents to be submitted while applying and objective norms to deal with violations of the approval conditions.

The ministry will also come out with a comprehensive policy in four months on monitoring of the conditions imposed for approving a project, including a provision of mandatory disclosure by project proponents in public domain of self-monitoring.

To make the entire forest clearance process transparent, the ministry has decided to place entire agenda and minutes of the Forest Advisory Committee in public domain within a stipulated period and have an electronic system to refer to maps and other data before deciding on projects to diver forest land.

"The minutes of the meeting will have to be prepared to prevent any possibility of post meeting change in decisions," an official note circulated by the ministry said.

In case of environment clearances, the ministry would upload all documents related to projects on its website to bring more transparency.

The ministry also wants that the decision on the projects should be given as per the time-period specified in the Environment Impact Assessment notification of 2006.

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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