Navi Mumbai airport gets environment nod

Second international airport for India’s business capital, Mumbai, got green clearance with a procedural glitch — Bombay high court’s permission will have to be taken to cut mangroves.

Updated on: Nov 23, 2010, 02:45:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Second international airport for India’s business capital, Mumbai, got green clearance with a procedural glitch — Bombay high court’s permission will have to be taken to cut mangroves.

The 161 hectares of project area in Navi Mumbai is a mangrove belt and the court in January 2010 had termed them as forests. Its implication is that the City and Industrial Development Corporation of Maharashtra (CIDCO), the project proponent, will have to seek approval of environment ministry’s Forest Advisory Committee to cut these forests, if court does not change its order.

“We will soon approach the court for necessary action,” Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said, along with environment minister Jairam Ramesh and aviation minister Praful Patel.

The proposed airport, which will cater to 20 million passengers when it becomes fully operational by 2016-17, had been caught in a year-long battle between Ramesh and Patel.

The comprise for the new airport at Navi Mumbai, as reported first by HT on November 8, is reduction of distance between two runaways to 1,555 meters from the proposed 1,800.

“The process for construction of the airport can start from today (Monday),” Ramesh said.

The airport in its first phase will be operational by 2014-15. “The ecological impact of the airport has been reduced by 80-90%,” he said.

Initially, 17 sites were examined, which were later zeroed down to three. “For various technical and non-technical reasons, the Navi Mumbai location became a fait accompli,” Ramesh said, in a statement.

Chavan outlined advantages of the new airport for Maharashtra saying it will create over one-lakh direct jobs and over four lakh indirect jobs, apart from easing pressure on present international airport at Santa Cruz.

The new airport will be constructed in Public Private Partnership model with CIDCO and Airport Authority of India each having 13 % stake. Already, 78% of the land, which would mean displacement of 3,000 families, has been acquired. “We will soon initiate the process to award the contract to a private party,” Patel said.

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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