Tata wants green zone in Jamshedpur to be reduced

The environment ministry has received an unusual request from India’s major steel producer Tata Steel: to reduce the eco-sensitive zone around Dalma wildlife sanctuary near Jamshedpur to just 500 meters from the 10km norm, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Mar 28, 2013, 19:01:15 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The environment ministry has received an unusual request from India’s major steel producer Tata Steel: to reduce the eco-sensitive zone around Dalma wildlife sanctuary near Jamshedpur to just 500 meters from the 10km norm.

The company’s concern is that enforcing the 10km wide green ring around the sanctuary would result in restrictions on its industrial activity in the Jamshedpur steel plant.

The company wants the ministry to implement the recommendations of the Supreme Court appointed Central Empowered Committee (CEC) on declaring eco-sensitive zones around 650 protected areas across the country.

Dalma as per the CEC definition falls under the category of a small park and should have a protective green ring of just 500 meters. Furthermore, the company believes that having a uniform eco-sensitive zone norm of 10km is unreasonable.

“We have already rejected the CEC recommendation and have asked the states to implement the ministry’s norm on eco-sensitive zones,” a senior ministry official said. The ministry recently gave three months to the states to notify eco-sensitive zones.

While not rejecting the deman outright, the ministry has reduced the area to a 5km radius. “Further reduction in the eco-sensitive zone around Dalma may not be possible,” a senior official said, while responding to the company’s demand for reducing the zone to 500 meters.

The ministry believes that if Tata Steel's demand is accepted, similar pleas may be made by other industries thereby defeating the purpose of having eco-sensitive zones around national parks and sanctuaries. The Goa government wants eco-sensitive zones to be scrapped saying it would impact its industry in an adverse manner.

The ministry has backing of the Jharkhand forest department which believes that further reduction in the eco-sensitive zone would jeopardise water sources for the Jamshedpur town inside the Dalma sanctuary. The department also says that having a 5km eco-sensitive zone would help in preserving the ecology of the reserve.

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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