Jayanthi Natarajan brought in to speed up clearances, sacked for delays

The UPA government brought in Jayanti Natarajan in place of Jairam Ramesh in July 2011 to provide steam to the economy by approving blocked projects. Over two years later, she was sacked for sitting on project approvals - the same reason Ramesh was shown the door.

Updated on: Jan 31, 2015, 01:23:24 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The UPA government brought in Jayanti Natarajan in place of Jairam Ramesh in July 2011 to provide steam to the economy by approving blocked projects. Over two years later, she was sacked for sitting on project approvals - the same reason Ramesh was shown the door.

When her successor Veerappa Moily assumed charge he discovered that over 100 projects - small and big - were lying on her table for months despite approval from the ministry's statutory bodies - the expert appraisal committees and the forest advisory committee.

Moily did not find any reason on many of these files for the delay and gave his approval to about 70 projects in his first 15 days in office, which were estimated to be worth Rs 5 lakh crore.

Natarajan had, however, refuted the charge claiming that the environment rules provide for deemed approval if the minister fails to decide on the project within a period of 30 days.

"False propaganda was being spread against me and was the reason I quit the party," she told HT over phone.

The Rs 52,000 crore worth Posco's steel plant in Odisha, the biggest foreign direct investment in the country, which had been hanging fire for almost a decade, was among the major projects approved by Moily. The minister also approved Adani Power's projects in Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

The minister also approved Adani Power's projects in Rajasthan and Maharashtra.

He approved environmental and coastal regulation zone (CRZ) clearance to RS 5,187 crore deep water container trans-shipment port at Vizhinjam in Kerala. The 1,600 MW supercritical thermal power project of Ennore SEZ in Tamil Nadu, Chennai Petroleum's 16.7 km crude pipeline and Hinduja's power project in Visakhapatnam were also approved.

Like Natarajan, Moily also did not approve bauxite mining in Niyamgiri Hills for Vedanta's aluminum factory in Odisha as Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi had described himself as "sipahi of tribal" and assured them that he will not allow the scared hills to be plundered.

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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