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15th July 2020, 10:37 | #1 | |
BHPian | MoE's Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020 Dear fellow BHP-ians and readers, I am starting this thread with the intention of drawing your attention to the Environmental Impact Assessment draft 2020 proposed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. The Environment Protection Act was introduced in 1986. As part of this act, a process called Environmental Impact Assessment, EIA, was introduced which is applicable to any industrial/construction/development projects in India. The EIA basically looks into the impact and pros and cons of any project on the environment so as to minimize any potential damage to bio-diversity, socio-economic, cultural and human-health impacts that maybe caused due to such projects. Hence any project would be provided approval/clearance from the government only on the basis of the EIA. The current implementation of the EIA in India is already weak, with many projects operating without obtaining necessary clearance, many projects approved without proper public hearing/consultation with the affected locals and many projects operating on EIA reports created through fudged data and concealment of facts and figures. Such weak implementation has already had devastating effects on the environment and public, such as Styrene gas leak in LG Polymer Plant in Visakhapatnam, on May 7, 2020 that was discussed here (Gas leak from LG chemical plant in Vizag) in Team BHP. A similar incident was reported on May 27, 2020, where due to poor adherence of environment norms, the natural gas of Oil India Limited in eastern Assam’s Tinsukia district had a blowout and caught fire. This caused severe damage to the livelihoods in the region rich with biodiversity. The State Pollution Board, Assam, had reported that the oil plant had been operating for over 15 years without obtaining prior consent from the board. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change has proposed major changes to the EIA through a draft released in March 2020. Unfortunately, the proposed changes weakens the already weak EIA and is very industry friendly. It proposes that projects that are already underway and operating can apply for EIA later and get the required approvals/clearance. It categorizes several projects where public consultation with the affected locals is not required and so on. Understandably, several citizens, environmentalists and other organizations are opposed to these changes and are demanding stronger environmental laws instead of weakening the already existing ones. I have added links to the articles and videos on this subject below. Several other links can also be found in the description section of the attached YouTube videos. Fortunately, any person interested in making any objections or suggestions on the proposal contained in the draft notification may forward the same in writing for consideration of the Central Government to the Secretary, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Indira Paryavaran Bhawan, Jor Bagh Road, Aliganj, New Delhi-110 003, or send it to the e-mail address at eia2020-moefcc@gov.in. The last date to send any objections/suggestions/feedback is 11th August 2020. I have sent an email with my concerns and suggestions which I am reproducing here. Please feel free to use/modify it. Quote:
Original draft EIA 2020 notification - http://environmentclearance.nic.in/w...t_EIA_2020.pdf https://www.change.org/p/ministry-of...tion_dashboard https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/...aluation-72148 https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge...611958824.html https://scroll.in/latest/967280/over...essment-policy https://indianexpress.com/article/ex...ained-6482324/ https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/tr...s-5534021.html https://www.thebetterindia.com/23160...e-india-nor41/ https://linktr.ee/LetIndiaBreathe | |
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15th July 2020, 17:49 | #2 | |
Senior - BHPian Join Date: Oct 2008 Location: kolkata/bangalore,india
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| re: MoE's Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020 Interesting thread to follow. Quote:
Easy to start a Change.org for everything but this is more like "This is bad because I am saying it is bad". Is there a comparitive analysis with the best practices with regulation elsewhere? | |
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15th July 2020, 18:04 | #3 |
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| re: MoE's Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020 On one hand we keep debating on why India is not competing against China but on the other hand we want to keep industries tied down with clearances, adding red tape, bureaucratic hurdles and reducing the ease of doing business. Even things like border roads and public infrastructure development gets stuck in environment clearances (or) endless litigation. There is nothing wrong in making the proposal investor friendly and its actually the need of the hour. Its easy to pick faults on any reforms in a county as big and diverse as India but I would say that the proposals are quite meaningful, reasonably well thought out and are welcome measures. |
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15th July 2020, 20:56 | #4 | ||
BHPian | Re: MoE's Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020 Quote:
https://www.cseindia.org/understanding-eia-383 Quote:
While this draft seeks to make it easier to do business in India, certain aspects of it have huge potential to be misused by big corporations and industries. 1) The fact that a project can start operations without obtaining EIA clearance and will be allowed to apply for one afterwards, violates the very essence of any EIA. 2) The fact that any violations or lapse in operating procedures carried out by any project can only be reported by the project proponent or a government regulatory authority has huge potential for misuse. IMO, it's naive and highly optimistic to hope that a violator would report himself of any violation! 3) Removal of public consultation from many projects will also lead to clearances being approved without taking all the ground realities into consideration These are just some of the points which have huge potential of being misused when the current rules are easily getting circumvented. Broader cases of deforestation, global warming and poor air quality do not hit us in an instant and build up over several years or decades due to which most people fail to notice it until too late. But cases like the recent Styrene gas leak at LG Polymers plant in Vizag can hit us overnight which killed 12 people and sickened hundreds. Investigation after the gas leak revealed that the plant was operating without environment clearance. (Link) Hence IMO, steps should be taken to ease the doing of business but at the same time tighten the implementation of already existing environmental laws instead of diluting them. | ||
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15th July 2020, 22:03 | #5 |
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| Re: MoE's Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020 I appreciate your effort for writing to appropriate authorities. While people may agree/disagree with certain content in the draft, what is important is, incase you have concerns, raise it to appropriate authorities and hope they take an informed decision. Coming to the content, the draft clearly aims at easing approval process to spur manufacturing. That's a welcome move. However, what is worrying to me is the "postfac approval". It allows industries/organizations to do permanent environmental damage or operate potentially hazardous project. Personally, in my experience in chemical industries, the bottleneck is not regulations, it's just the bureaucracy. Easing/tightening regulations, IMO is not going to be effective. Last edited by Thermodynamics : 15th July 2020 at 22:09. |
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15th July 2020, 22:21 | #6 |
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| Re: MoE's Environmental Impact Assessment Draft, 2020 There's layers of complexity and I have no intention to generalize it into back & white, but how is an expectation of transparency a hindrance to doing business? On the contrary, hasn't the largest pet peeve of most businesses trying to find a foothold in India always been the non-transparent, arbitrary and sometimes retrospective application of policies (the Vodafone taxation cases from a few years ago comes to mind)? And how exactly do we intend to fix our policy issues by giving the bureaucracy a free hand without any public visibility? Isn't that scenario potentially risking a descent back into license/permit raj where a bureaucrat's opinion (which can be influenced in multiple ways), and not the merit of the business itself, decides who gets to succeed or even to play? Businesses don't operate in a vacuum, they operate in an ecosystem where the gen-pop is a stakeholder too. Turning policy-making opaque with vague criteria is not the way to do it, and there's no guarantee it will achieve the intended end-result anyway. Quite the opposite, and often the damage can be irreversible. Last edited by Chetan_Rao : 16th July 2020 at 02:54. Reason: Typo |
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