Despite NGT stay, UP govt goes ahead with construction of dam

Despite a stay on the construction of the Kanhar Dam in Maoist-hit Sonebhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, the state government has gone ahead with construction work of the controversial dam first envisaged in 1976.

Updated on: Jan 7, 2015, 24:45:10 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Despite a stay on the construction of the Kanhar Dam in Maoist-hit Sonebhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, the state government has gone ahead with construction work of the controversial dam first envisaged in 1976.

The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on December 24 had stayed any further construction on the dam site after a petition was filed, stating that the environment clearance granted to the project was not valid anymore.

The NGT had given the respondents two weeks to submit their reply and listed the case for February 13. Till then, the UP’s irrigation department was asked to stop construction work at the site.

The petitioners had claimed that the environment ministry in 2008 had issued a circular stating that projects where no construction had started but have environmental approval will have to seek approval against under the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of 2006.

The project was granted environmental approval in 1980 and the environment ministry had no record of when the dam project that will subsume land in neighbouring Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh apart from UP received approval for diverting forest.

The work for Kanhar irrigation project on downstream of river Pagan, originally approved by the Central Water Commission in 1976, had started a few months ago. The UP government wants to build a dam with initial height of 39.9 metre which will eventually be raised to 59 metre. The dam will store about 600 cusec water, the project report states.

As per the ministry circular, the UP government needed fresh approvals for the dam project which apparently had not been taken. The UPA government’s logic had been that the project did not require approval again as it was cleared before the EIA regime was implemented in 1994.

The UP government started the construction at the site on December 5, about 20 days before the NGT had to hear the case.

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

Get the latest India News, breaking headlines and real-time updates from across the country. Stay informed about politics, government policies, crime, weather and major national developments.