Green Tribunal stops GMR’s hydel project in Uttarakhand

MoEF approved the project despite rejection by FAC twice.

Updated on: Feb 15, 2012, 21:01:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

In a major setback to the environment ministry, the National Green Tribunal has put the forest clearance given to a hydel project on Alakananda river in Uttaranchal on hold.

The ministry has given forest clearance to the project despite the Forest Advisory Committee, a statutory body, rejected the project promoted by GMR, twice on the ground that it would harms wildlife living in forests that will get submerged because of it.

The Wildlife Institute of India had clearly said that the project would adversely impact snow leopard and other animals. The WII study was commissioned by the ministry.

The 300 MW Alaknanda-Badrinath hydro project is located in the buffer zone of Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve which has two core zones the Nanda Devi National Park (NP) and Valley of Flowers. Both the core zones are inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Site.

But, the ministry approved the project on basis of the final report of Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, mandated to carry out cumulative impact assessment of all hydel projects in Ganga river basin in the hill state of Uttarakhand.

HT was first to report in December 2011 that the ministry has cleared the project despite objections. After the report, a local activist Vimal Bhai filed a petition in the tribunal challenging the ministry’s forest approval.

Admitting the petition, the tribunal instructed the environment ministry not to allow felling of any trees without its permission.

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

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.