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    New Environmental Guidelines
  In a bid to decentralize environmental impact assessment, the Federal Government announced new Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) guidelines that grant concessions for builders, automobile, and biomedical sectors.
 

 

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In a bid to decentralize environmental impact assessment, the Federal Government announced new Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) guidelines that grant concessions for builders, automobile, and biomedical sectors. Union Environment and Forests Ministry officials say that these policy changes included 3 years of professional study and investigation to speed up project clearance but do not say what entities were consulted.

Significant changes introduced by the new regulations include:

  1. Several Sectoral EIA including construction, automobile, and biomedical will be done at the State level

  2. Clearance from Federal or State will depend on built up areas and not by value of a project. The Federal Government will be involved only for projects with built up area of greater than 100,000 square meters

It looks like these changes were prompted mostly by demands from Tamil Nadu (TN) from where a local party known for its divisive and short-sighted policies is an important member of the United Progressive Alliance. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has previously brought in environmentally disastrous changes to facilitate politically sponsored abuse of environmentally-sensitive resources.

Environmental groups have criticized the changed policy because of lack of adequate oversight mechanisms, especially over the construction sector where so-called inspectors turn a blind eye over violations for petty bribes. Moreover, a good number of construction businesses, especially those working on public projects (who will be the primary beneficiaries), are run by politicians or by political henchmen. Many environmental groups, panchayats, and stakeholders (except the industry) complain that they have not been consulted while drafting these changes. Several non-governmental organizations have written to the Prime Minister about these changes accusing the Ministry of leaving them out of policy formulation.