Navi Mumbai airport to get clearance by Wednesday

The Navi Mumbai airport is all set to get environment clearance with a ministry panel having expressed satisfaction over revised proposal submitted by City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO).

Updated on: Nov 8, 2010, 23:51:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The Navi Mumbai airport is all set to get environment clearance with a ministry panel having expressed satisfaction over revised proposal submitted by City Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO).

The airport, has been a bone of contention between environment minister Jairam Ramesh and civil aviation minister Praful Patel with the latter accusing the former of getting the project delayed.

The ministry’s Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC), which is meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday, will examine the revised proposal submitted by CIDCO, in which major concerns raised by the panel were addressed.

A major concern of EAC is to reduce distance between two runways to minimise impact on two rivers — Gadhi and Ulwe. The issue was addressed with CIDCO, which agreed to reduce the distance between from 1,835 meters to 1,500 meters. The panel agreed to the change.

This will mean there will be no diversion of Gadhi and impact on Ulwe will be minimised. Ulwe will flow beneath the airport site as proposed by CIDCO.

The panel, during its site visit in October, had agreed to the CIDCO proposal to divert non-aeronautical activities out of the airport area so that a lagoon of around 275 hectares can be developed for a mangrove park.

“This will reduce impact on the mangrove cultivation,” a ministry official said.

But, the panel still has some issues regarding impact on water quality of the rivers due to the discharge from the airport and its mitigation is likely to be a condition for the clearance. The CIDCO has been asked to submit revised data on it.

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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