NAC member Gadgil starts campaign against environment ministry

Caught in usual paradox, National Advisory Council (NAC) member Madhav Gadgil, has launched a campaign to push the environment ministry to make his report on Western Ghats public.

Updated on: May 7, 2012, 19:08:35 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Caught in usual paradox, National Advisory Council (NAC) member Madhav Gadgil, has launched a campaign to push the environment ministry to make his report on Western Ghats public.

Former environment minister Jairam Ramesh had appointed Gadgil as head of an expert panel to recommend measures to protect Western Ghats -- one of the country's most diverse biodiversity areas.

The aim was to declare no development or ecologically sensitive zones in Western Ghats covering three states of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. Gadgil held detailed discussions with all stakeholders including scientists on the new norms.

"With great sincerity we did our job," Gadgil said. "We conducted very wide ranging consultations with civil society, all state governments, environment ministry officials, elected representatives ranging from Gram Panchayat members to MPs and Ministers and CMs".

After a work of about two years, he submitted his report to the ministry on August 30, a month after Jayanthi Natarajan replaced Ramesh as an environment minister. Gadgil, who has served in the Sonia Gandhi headed NAC for the second term, was assured by the ministry that the report will be released in a function on September 19.

That did not happen.

The ministry sent the report to the state governments for their comments even though Gadgil's report contained their views and that was the initial reason cited for not releasing the report. "We have not received comments of all state governments," an environment ministry official explained.

The ministry even denied information about the report in RTI applications on the ground that it contained information that can jeopardize India's economic interests. But, information watchdog the Central Information Commission rejected such claims as the ministry had failed to justify its claim and asked the ministry to place the report on its website by mid-May.

The ministry has decided to move Delhi high court against the CIC order, which wanted the ministry to become more open and transparent. "Most public servants find the idea (of transparency) alien and also one that challenges their power and wisdom," information commissioner Shailesh Gandhi said in his order.

Hurt by the ministry's dogmatic view, Gadgil has taken an unusual step. He is using Gandhi's order to create awareness that how the ministry was preventing his report from being made public and blocking public debate on an important environmental issue. The veteran environmentalist also believes that no policy decision on environment can be taken without larger public consultation, which the environment ministry has tried to shun.

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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