Govt okays mining project in elephant reserve

Environment ministry has obliged his Cabinet colleague and steel minister Beni Prasad Verma by approving an iron ore mining project in the middle of India’s best reserve for tuskers, Singhbhum Elephant Reserve in Jharkhand.

Updated on: Feb 5, 2014, 11:14:50 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Environment minister Veerappa Moily has obliged his Cabinet colleague and steel minister Beni Prasad Verma by approving an iron ore mining project in the middle of India’s best reserve for tuskers, Singhbhum Elephant Reserve in Jharkhand.

The Steel Authority of India’s Durgaiburu iron-ore mine in Saranda forest division of Jharkhand will now get 635 hectares of forest land after the nod by an environment ministry committee last month.

The ministry’s statutory Forest Advisory Committee, which only can sanction diversion of forest land for other uses, had cleared transfer of only 274 hectares for the project and made the diversion of the rest conditional on approval to a wildlife management plan.

But the Cabinet Committee on Investments in April 2013 asked the environment ministry not to link the approval with the management plan.

The ministry obliged and assured a special meeting of the FAC within a month. But that didn’t happen till January this year.

Soon after Moily took over, Verma sought his intervention for clearing the project. The ministry promptly removed the conservation plan rider.

In doing so, however, it has put itself in spot because it will have to approve Arcelor Mittal’s 1.6 million tonne iron ore project in the same reserve if it applies the same rule.

The SAIL’s contention was that more forest land will increase the mining capacity to 10 million tonnes per annum.

The steel giant also assured to abide by the wildlife management plan being funded by it.

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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