A government panel has cleared 130 projects, including mining pits, power plants and a defence testing site, close to protected wildlife areas.
The go-ahead was aimed at addressing industry’s concerns over stalled projects and the panel ensured that adequate safety measures were put in place, a senior ministry official told HT Tuesday.
"We have not stopped the projects for unnecessary reasons as it used to happen in the past," the official said. "Precautions have been taken to ensure that there is minimal adverse impact on wildlife. All projects approved have national importance."
Limestone quarrying has been allowed at five spots close to Gujarat’s Barda sanctuary — a habitat for endangered spotted eagle and crested hawk eye — in Porbandar. The mines will feed a public sector company’s unit that has come in for severe criticism for discharging affluents into a nearby water body, say the minutes of the meeting, accessed by HT.
The projects were approved on the condition that the unit would get a treatment plant and not discharge any pollutants in the water body, the official said.
Three limestone mines will also come up within 6 km of Mukundra Hill Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan.
Notified in 2013, Mukundra is the third tiger reserve in the desert state. Environmentalists had protested when mining was allowed in the state’s Sariska reserve.
A truncated National Board for Wildlife standing committee -- comprising two independent members -- met in August and in one sitting cleared all the projects, all of which will come within 10 km of protected areas. Some of the proposals were left undecided by the previous UPA government, often criticised for delaying decisions on projects and adversely hitting investment sentiment.
Parliament was informed about the committee’s decision Friday. HT found that only a few projects that came for approval were rejected and some deferred for want of information.
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Environment minister Prakash Javadekar, who heads the panel, was not available for comments but had said earlier the ministry was following the mantra of “quick decision without any delay” based on prudent appraisals.
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Environment minister Prakash Javadekar, who heads the panel, was not available for comments but had said earlier the ministry was following the mantra of “quick decision without any delay” based on prudent appraisals.
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An intelligence bureau office will border the Dudhwa Tiger Reserve in Uttar Pradesh. In Madhya Pradesh, mining has been allowed within 10 km of Sanjay Tiger Reserve in Sidhi, Son Ghariyal Wildlife Sanctuary and Kanha National Park.
The committee also allowed diversion of forestland from the Kerala’s Periyar Tiger Reserve to increase the height of Kunnar Dam. In neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, a Defence Research and Development Organisation testing facility is to come up along the Bay of Bengal coast, close to a rare olive ridley turtle nesting site. The DRDO will, however, no conduct tests between January and May, when the turtles come to nest.
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.
