In a bid to get industry on the UPA’s side before 2014 general elections, environment minister Veerappa Moily has cleared Posco’s steel plant in Odisha as part of his project clearing spree – which even includes some in critical wildlife areas.
In a bid to get industry on the UPA’s side before 2014 general elections, environment minister Veerappa Moily has cleared Posco’s steel plant in Odisha as part of his project clearing spree – which even includes some in critical wildlife areas. The Vedanta aluminum project in Odisha’s Niyamgiri, on the other hand, got thumbs down after the locals rejected the proposal in the country’s first environmental referendum.
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Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi had opposed Vedanta project, saying he would ensure that the voice of people was heard. Moily went by the view of the locals and accepted the Forest Advisory Committee’s recommendation.
In case of Posco, Moily delinked the $13 billion steel plant and its port and gave approval only to the plant with a condition that 5% of the project cost would be spent on social welfare. The company said it would mean an additional investment of $600 million.
The Posco project had got environment clearance in July 2007, which was scrapped by the National Green Tribunal in 2012. In June 2013, the ministry’s expert appraisal committee had given a go ahead for the approval of the project.
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Moily said the approval was granted a week ago. The decision comes days before South Korean president Park Geun-hye is to begin a four-day visit to India on January 15.
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Moily said the approval was granted a week ago. The decision comes days before South Korean president Park Geun-hye is to begin a four-day visit to India on January 15.
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The minister had given clearance to around a dozen projects, including a couple of hydel projects in ecologically fragile north eastern India since he was given additional charge even as the ministry sought comments on a new regulation to improve verification and monitoring regime for projects seeking forest clearance.
The regulation provides for satellite mapping of forest areas to detect encroachments and violation of approvals, self and state government monitoring mechanism and a process to initiate action against defaulters.
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.
