Green Laws: Is India in line with rest of the world?

Dec 28, 2013, 04.12 PM IST Green Laws: Is India in line with rest of the world? There is a problem of quality of personnel, both at the industry level -- the consultants they employ -- and at the ministry level -- the quality of the experts who man the expert committees. If these issues are sorted out and there’s an intent to work together, then the delay in environment clearance can be avoided, feels Pradipto Ghosh of TERI Pradipto Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow ,TERI More about the Expert... Tags Environment Ministry, Pradipto Ghosh, TERI, Seshagiri Rao, JSW Steel Indianomics Share . Email . Print . A+ Two successive environment ministers in the UPA cabinet have been seen as obstructive of investments. Is India Inc unable to come to terms with environmental costs or is the ministry being unreasonable? According to environment ministry’s website, 72 coal mining projects are awaiting environmental clearance, out of which only nine came in 2013. The rest of them are pending for over a year. Ninety one mining projects awaiting environment clearance, only 25 came in this year. 118 industrial projects awaiting environment clearance, only 13 came in this year. If one does the math, 83 percent of the projects have waited well over one year. That’s the number of projects awaiting environment clearance, more than double that number of projects at any point in time await terms of reference from the ministry. Why this inordinate delay in clearance? Aren't there well laid out standards in most industries? Is the delay on account of haggling by the industry which doesn’t want to meet its obligations or is unable to understand the obligations or is it that the administration is either incompetent or the wrong people are in the assessment space? Former Environment Secretary and currently with TERI Pradipto Ghosh and Seshagiri Rao, Group CFO at JSW Steel, discuss the issue on CNBC-TV18. Also Read: No files will be kept pending in Environment Min: Moily Below is the edited interview transcript Q: Quickly if you can tell us what is a typical process that a project travels from the moment it enters the environment ministry to its final disposal? Ghosh: We are talking about the category A projects that is projects which are required to be appraised at the level of these central government. And there are other projects which are cleared at the level of the states. We are talking about the ones which require clearance at the central level. The process starts with the proponent submitting an application with a check list of the impacts of the proposed project to the ministry, which in turn submits it to the notified expert group. The expert group in consultation with the proponent and their consultants, develop the terms of reference for the environmental impact assessment (EIA) study. We need to understand that the EIA study is not a checklist which is tick-marked. It is a detailed technical examination which requires a year to produce and which typically is about 400-500 pages long.If this seems onerous, let me clarify that this is the worldwide practice, whether it is in the US, whether it is in Europe, whether it is in Australia, it is exactly the same kind of document. Then once the proponent has prepared the EIA document, and I must emphasize it is up to the proponent to prepare it, it is then submitted to the environment ministry and the expert committee has a 145 days to deliberate upon it in consultation with the project proponent and their consultants. Then at the closer of the period of 145 days they are supposed to send their recommendation within 15 days to the regulator, which happens to be the ministry. Then the ministry, which includes the minister concerned, can take another 45 days to take a final decision and of course if the ministry does not take a final decision at the level of minister within 45 days then the project proponent is deemed to have got environment clearance in clear legal terms on the basis of the minutes of the expert committee’s deliberation. So this is the process in short. Now in the course of this conversation I can point out to some of the reasons why it takes longer than that by way of comparison. The notified period in the World Bank for their own projects after submission of the EIA is one year, the notified period in the case of Canada is two years and this is -- in two years ago -- after they had comprehensively overhauled that environment clearance system. So the Indian system -- the way it is designed to work is not out of line by any means with the worldwide practice. Q: If it is a 145 days or maybe 200 days at best that the ministry should take after a proposal is submitted for environment clearance, my numbers show that out of some 300-odd projects only 85 have come in this year, clearly many projects are waiting for well-over 365 days to get environmental clearance. I am sure you must have gone through environmental clearances for many of your projects, where is the bottleneck? Rao: As Dr Ghosh has explained there are category A and category B. So in the case of category A, the steps, which are involved, either for getting approval of expert appraisal committee (EAC) for terms of reference (TOR) and then preparing an environmental impact assessment report and then doing a public hearing. After public hearing again approaching environmental clearance and if at all it is located in the forest again forest 1 clearance, forest 2 clearance is a prerequisite for environmental clearance. There is no time limit for the forest clearances. After the forest clearance, it is referred for environmental clearance, if it is located near the wildlife sanctuary or any such area, wildlife departmental approval is required. That takes time. So if you see the whole process which is involved, it is not parallel, it is sequential. There is no single window clearance. If there is a problem at one stage then the project gets delayed. Q: Is that the only issue that it is not parallely done, these several clearances, or is it that even otherwise there is an unconscionably long time? Rao: It is unconscionably long time why I am saying again in a public hearing for instance if you have to have a public hearing, in my view, it should be restricted only to the items which are there in the environmental impact assessment study and will impact the environment. Today public consultation when it is happening, first the people who are not affected, outsiders will come to the public hearing, they also raise irrelevant issues which are nowhere connected with the project nor EIA. So all those grievances sought to be addressed before again we approach back, based on the minutes of the public hearing.

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