Anil Madhav Dave will have to restore people’s faith in environment ministry

New environment minister Anil Madhav Dave will be expected to continue with the project approval pace of his predecessor Prakash Javadekar, but that is only half

Published on: Jul 7, 2016, 10:08:11 IST

By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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New environment minister Anil Madhav Dave will be expected to continue with the project approval pace of his predecessor Prakash Javadekar, but that is only half the story.

Newly-appointed environment minister Anil Madhav Dave takes charge at Paryavaran Bhawan in New Delhi on Wednesday. (PTI)

The biggest challenge for Dave, a passionate environmentalist who once rafted the course of the Narmada, would be to restore the faith of environment lovers in his ministry, which had come in for flak under Javadekar’s two-year tenure.

The Javadekar era saw a paradigm shift from being pro-environment to becoming a pro-industry ministry in the name of ‘ease of doing business’ while reducing community participation in environmental regulation, considered a bottleneck for growth.

Data released by the Centre for Science and Environment in May showed that about 30% of forest land diverted during Javadekar’s tenure was for mining purpose and rejection rate of projects in wildlife areas dramatically fell in the NDA regime as compared to the UPA’s 10 years.

Even if he wants, Dave may not be able to change any of this as it was driven by the Prime Minister’s Office.

That includes implementing online emission and affluent monitoring for industries, bills for disbursement of Rs 42,000 crore compensatory afforestation fund to the states and enhancing penalties for loss to environment and new rules for management of waste and plastic.

In addition, the Paris climate deal agreed on in December 2015 has to be ratified by this winter and its implementation rolled out.“I will continue with the work started by Javadekar,” Dave said, while taking charge on Wednesday. “Development and environment go together. They are not against each other.”

While the 59-year old Dave has worked on sustainable water and environment in Narmada valley, running a technical ministry with an annual budget of less than Rs 2,000 crore is a different ball game.

The commerce graduate from Indore with no prior administrative experience will have to bear in mind that the job he has taken has been highly controversial and no environment minister in the last ten years has been able to complete his term.

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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