Two days before India went into lockdown in March, the Ministry of Environment had published a draft titled Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2020, for public comments. The Delhi High Court had extended the deadline for sending comments by the public to the Central Government’s controversial Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notification, 2020 till August 11 which ended yesterday. Earlier, this date was 30 June 2020. Let’s take a look as to why this proposal is at the centre of many controversies and why critics want the government to withdraw it.
What is Environment Impact Assessment?
Environment impact assessment is a process under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which prevents industrial and infrastructural projects from being approved without proper oversight. This process ensures that every project should go through the EIA process for obtaining prior environmental clearance. EIA covers projects such as mining of coal or other minerals, infrastructure development, thermal, nuclear and hydropower projects, real estate and other industrial projects. The projects are assessed based on their potential impact on the environment. Based on the assessments, they are granted or denied environmental clearance by a panel of experts.
Highlights of the Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020
The EIA new draft 2020 allows post-facto clearance. This means that even if a project has come up without environment safeguards or without getting environment clearances, it could carry out operation under the provision of the new draft EIA 2020. There are also two crucial ways in which the new draft endeavours to take power away from communities. First, it reduces the space available for public participation, thereby abandoning public trust. The second way in which this proposal tries to curtail rights of the communities is by legalising projects that have already caused a great deal of harm and have been operating without approvals from the EIA.
Reason for debate
The 2020 draft offers no remedy for the political and bureaucratic stronghold on the EIA process, and thereby on industries. Instead, it proposes to bolster the government’s discretionary power while limiting public engagement in safeguarding the environment.
While projects concerning national defence and security are naturally considered strategic, the government gets to decide on the “strategic” tag for other projects. The 2020 draft says no information on “such projects shall be placed in the public domain”. Additionally, the new draft exempts a long list of projects from public consultation. For example, linear projects such as roads and pipelines in border areas will not require any public hearing.
The ‘border area’ is defined as “area falling within 100 kilometres aerial distance from the Line of Actual Control with bordering countries of India.” That would cover much of the Northeast, the repository of the country’s richest biodiversity. All these provisions of the government create a situation of serious contradiction with the basic law for environmental protection. Due to this policy, the biodiversity of the country can be severely damaged and the tribal poor may face a serious existential crisis.
Logic behind the opposition of environmentalists and experts
Environmental activist Medha Patkar said that India expressed its seriousness towards it by signing the draft to save the environment in the Stockholm Agreement in 1972. In light of this agreement, laws relating to water were made in 1974 and air in 1981. After the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, the need for a proper environmental policy was realized, which was met through the Environmental Protection Act, 1986. In the light of the references mentioned in this Act, in 1994 certain criteria were made and later amendments were also made.
The biggest feature of these rules was that before starting any project, it was mandatory to assess the impact on the local people. For this, a committee of experts and environmental scientists was consulted. Only on the recommendation of this committee, a project used to get a ‘No Objection Certificate’ (NOC) from the Ministry of Environment.
In the new policy, such losses will be ‘assessed’ after the commencement of the scheme. The intention of the government behind this is that no development plan can be stopped only in the name of clearance from the environment. As the plan goes on, its effects should also be assessed and potential problems diagnosed. Patkar further added that before undertaking a project, the environmental damage caused by it should be assessed.
