States ‘empowered’ to speed up environment clearances

In further streamlining of the environment clearance process, the Centre may give more powers to the state governments to issue environment clearance considered to be a roadblock to quick take-off of the projects. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jul 5, 2013, 01:00:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In further streamlining of the environment clearance process, the Centre may give more powers to the state governments to issue environment clearance and exempt more activities from mandatory public hearing considered a roadblock to quick take-off of the projects.

The environment ministry’s Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification of 2006 had classified projects depending on its capacity or land requirement into category A and B.

The category A projects are cleared by the environment ministry and category B by the state governments.

While there is a clarity on environment clearance process for category A projects, confusion has arisen on category B projects in absence of clarity on which projects require mandatory public hearing or not.

As per the EIA notification, projects classified as B1 require public consultation and B2 don’t require any environment clearance and public consultation. The notification however fails to clearly state which projects are B1 and which are B2.

The confusion was further compounded by the ministry in May 2012 when it delegated the powers to issue environment clearance for minor minerals in area of less than 5 hectares to the state governments but did not specify whether they require public consultation or not.

“We have sought a review of entire categorization of activities listed for approval by the state government,” an official said, adding that Nagpur based National Environment Engineering Research Institute has been asked to submit a report.

The expert committee under the chairmanship of director NEERI is said to have finalized a draft report to enlist category B projects as B1 and B2. Several small scale projects from mining to construction would fall in the category which does not require any environment clearance.

The committee has also been asked review classification of projects which the Centre and the State governments have to examine. Many projects which are considered by the Central government would be delegated to state governments with additional conditions.

The committee was constituted after different state governments presented before the Prime Minister’s Office seeking more flexibility in clearing projects and wanted that only projects of national importance should be considered by the environment ministry.

Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi has been seeking powers for the state environment impact assessment authority to clear all other projects not labeled as national projects.

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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