Legal cover to post-1980 plantations may soon go

The government is planning a change in the definition of forests to withdraw legal cover for any man-made plantations or green zones notified after 1980, as part of a new environmental regime aimed to improve ease of doing business in India.

Updated on: Jan 5, 2015, 03:54:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government is planning a change in the definition of forests to withdraw legal cover for any man-made plantations or green zones notified after 1980, as part of a new environmental regime aimed to improve ease of doing business in India.

The Centre is also looking to change the process of filing appeals with the National Green Tribunal, India’s green watchdog that has been accused by the environment ministry of exceeding its brief while deciding on environmental approvals.

Environment minister Prakash Javadekar told a news channel earlier this week that there would be "a new green regime in 2015", confirming amendments to five key environmental laws will be introduced in the upcoming budget session of Parliament that begins late February.

If they go through, no approval under the Forest Conservation Act (FCA) will be required for clearing green areas that came up after 1980 or forests on private land. Cutting down trees planted along highways, railway lines and other projects will also not require prior approval from the Centre and state governments. For example, the large number of trees planted by the Delhi Metro near Najafgarh will lose their green law protection under the new regime.

The approval process under the FCA is considered a major reason for delay in execution of projects.

The current definition of forests, as determined by the Supreme Court, includes any area with trees including compensatory afforestation, where agencies plant trees to make up for the loss of greenery incurred during projects.

The definition, however, created a lot of confusion in forest regulation and led to a large number of litigation over clearance of schemes, a ministry official said. The government now aims to end this ambiguity.

The way out was devised by the TSR Subramanian committee that said only those green areas notified as forest before October 25, 1980 — when the FCA came into force — should be treated as forest for purposes of approval and clearance.

This exercise is part of a bigger overhaul in India’s green regime to reduce the scope for judicial intervention and improve the country’s business climate.

Five laws – the Environment Protection Act, the Forest Conservation Act, the Water Act, the Air Act and the Indian Forest Act — stand to be amended.
To dilute the powers of the NGT, the government proposes to introduce another layer for appeal against ministry approvals, similar to the mechanism in the Right to Information Act.

In the new regime, the first appeal against an approval will have to be made with the environment appellate board comprising senior government officials. Only then can a second appeal against the board’s decision be filed with the national green watchdog.

The government is also looking at diluting the provision of mandatory consent of gram sabhas for a project.

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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