Hello Friends, If you are a true environmentalist, you need to read this article.
India issued the country’s first Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification in 1994, under the Environment (Protection) Act (EPA) of 1986. This becomes later replaced by means of a changed draft in 2006. In both forms, the EIA plays the critical characteristic of assessing and regulating the impact of new tasks on the environment.
A new draft of the EIA has been proposed by the Union authorities this year, which incorporates positive difficult and contentious modifications in rules. One of those is the supply that projects can receive clearance post-facto, i.E. A task operating in violation of the EPA can now apply for clearance. This is no matter 1st April Supreme Court order that held such clearances as contrary to regulation. The new draft additionally exempts a long list of projects as outside the purview of the EIA, inclusive of any challenge the authorities deems to label as “strategic”. The draft says that no statistics on “such projects will be located within the public domain”. The exempt list also consists of all inland waterways and national highways projects. The other point of difficulty is that creation tasks of up to 150,000 sq. M shall be exempt from EIAs.
The public consultation procedure for the draft EIA itself has been dogged by way of controversy. The obligatory public feedback window turned into firstly set to run out on 10 June, but the environment ministry had set the brand new deadline to ten August due to a delay in publishing the draft inside the Gazette due to the pandemic. However, environment minister Prakash Javadekar overruled the ministry to set the brand new cut-off date for 30 June. On 30 July, the Delhi high court set the brand new deadline to 11 August, while hearing a petition which sought an extension to the 30 June deadline.
In light of this development, Mint spoke to conservation biologist and author Neha Sinha on the want for EIAs, the problems with the new draft and why the environment has to be counted of the ssue to each citizen. Sinha works on environmental regulation and policy with unique admire to the Environment Impact Assessment, the Wildlife (Protection) Act and the Wetland Rules. Edited excerpts.
Issues in Brief:
1) Post Facto Clearance
2) Reduces Public Hearing Time
3) Public has no right to point our violations
4) Strategic Exemptions
5) Additional Exemptions from Public Consultation
This is just a draft of EIA 2020, We can give our suggestions to the government by sending mail at eia2020-moefcc@gov.in until 11 august.
“Your Little Step Can Make Huge Difference In This World” -KP
Helping Hands.
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