Lavasa illegal, may be razed: Green ministry

The much advertised, high end Lake City Project in Lavasa, 65 km east of Pune, never sought clearance from the union environment ministry and could be demolished, the ministry said in a show cause notice sent to the developers on Friday. It ordered them to stop all construction immediately. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Nov 27, 2010, 24:46:51 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The much advertised, high end Lake City Project in Lavasa, 65 km east of Pune, never sought clearance from the union environment ministry and could be demolished, the ministry said in a show cause notice sent to the developers on Friday.

It ordered them to stop all construction immediately.

The ministry also sought the Maharashtra government’s reply as to why construction was allowed to start without the mandatory environmental clearance.

Billed as India’s first hill city and spread over an area of around 25,000 acres, Lavasa has seen several controversies since construction started.

The environment ministry issued the notice following a petition from an alliance of activist NGOs, the National Alliance for People’s Movements — the same group that first raised the red flag over Mumbai’s Adarsh Housing complex (which turned out to be a massive scam).

Lavasa was required to take the union ministry’s permission following changes in the rules relating to project clearance in 2004. With these changes, the union ministry began playing a much bigger role in clearances than before.

About projects that had already when the new rules came, it was stipulated that if they had spent more than 25% of their total project cost they need take permission all over again from the union green ministry. Those who had spent less than 25%, however, were required to take clearance. Lavasa, which had spent only 5.33% of its total cost in 2004, thus needed to get sanction all over again from Delhi. But it never bothered to.

This meant that the entire project was illegal.

The company has been given 15 days to reply to the show cause notice. The ministry has also sought detailed maps of the project from Lavasa Corporation.

“We are still to receive it,” said Lavasa Corporation in response to an email from HT. “As and when such a notice is received we will respond after studying the same."

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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