Relief with rider for units

Industries in the country's 43 worst polluted areas will now have mandatory third party monitoring. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Apr 2, 2011, 24:37:30 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Industries in the country's 43 worst polluted areas will now have mandatory third party monitoring.

Till now, the state pollution control boards were monitoring pollution levels, but there have been allegations of corruption. Third party monitoring has been made mandatory to allay such apprehensions.

The environment ministry issued an instruction in this regard on Friday while lifting a moratorium on allowing new industries in eight industrial clusters across the country.

The moratorium was lifted after the states submitted an action plan to reduce pollution levels in industrial areas such as Ghaziabad, Noida, Faridabad, Indore, Junagadh and Panipat.

A moratorium was imposed on 43 industrial clusters in March 2009 after pollution levels were found to be very high on the ministry's Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index. In all, 90 industrial clusters were surveyed. The index has been opposed by coal and power ministries, who termed it "unscientific" and an impediment in setting new industries.

Despite the opposition, the ministry prescribed the condition of a detailed action plan after consulting the industry bodies for abatement of pollution before lifting the moratorium.

"The state pollution control board will monitor the implementation of the action plans as per their schedule and ensure that there is no slippage either in terms of timeframe or activities to be completed relating to the action plan," the ministry order lifting the moratorium said.

To bring transparency in the entire mechanism, the ministry had stipulated mandatory release of the results of third party monitoring for people to know the exact situation. The monitoring will be conducted by expert bodies in consultation with local representatives.

"Industrial cluster wise committee comprising of various stakeholders including representatives of locals and experts in relevant fields will be set up to oversee the implementation of the action plans," the order said.

In all, eight conditions have been imposed for allowing new projects to ensure protection of the environment.

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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