Environment impact assessment changed 100 times in less than 7 years

India’s environment approval process is not as independent and based on science as it may appear. The reality is that politics plays an important role in deciding the fates of important projects and the environment clearance process changes every time a new minister takes charge.

Updated on: Nov 11, 2013, 02:06:53 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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India’s environment approval process is not as independent and based on science as it may appear. The reality is that politics plays an important role in deciding the fates of important projects and the environment clearance process changes every time a new minister takes charge.

The Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification, the bible for the environment approval process, has undergone changes more than 100 times in less than seven years of coming into force.

The same has been the fate of the new EIA document, which has been changed repeatedly either on court orders or by the government. The result: contrary interpretations every few years.

For instance, the ministry prohibited expansion of projects without environment clearance and then changed its stand within two years to allow expansion of up to 25% without approval. Similarly, in 2010, the ministry decided to make disaster management an integral part of the EIA. Two years later, it was scrapped as the ministry termed it an infringement on the rights of local municipal bodies.

For many who track the environment clearance process like Pushp Jain, director of the Delhi-based EIA Resource and Response Centre, the frequent changes of interpretation of the EIA have resulted in ad hocism and confusion in the country’s environment policy regulation.

The main reason for the mess in environment clearance is that India — unlike the US and other developed countries — does not have an independent expert body which is at an arm’s length from the government for appraising and approving projects.

In India, the expert appraisal committee (EAC) for different sectors functions under the environment ministry with the environment minister having powers to overrule its recommendations. “The EAC has becoming a parking lot for retired IAS officers,” said Himanshu Thakkar of South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.

Then environment minister Jairam Ramesh declared in 2009 that an independent environment approval body on the lines of the United States Environment Protection Agency would be set up to make the approval process politically neutral. Four years down the line the proposed body called the National Environment Appraisal and Monitoring Authority remains a pipe dream.

What ails India’s environment regulation is the poor quality of the EIA reports, the scientific document on the basis of which the ministry decides the fate of a project.

Ritwik Dutta, an environmental lawyer, blamed the EAC for allowing faulty EIA reports, saying it should be responsibility of the “examiner” to find out whether the student was cheating or not. “Here, the EAC is willing to pass everyone,” Dutta said.

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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