Business Above All

In the garb of streamlining green clearances, the Union government has sidelined communities and diluted environmental regulations over the past four years

- Srestha Banerjee

WHEN THE National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power in May 2014, riding on a public sentiment for change, we, as researchers on environmental governance, nurtured a fear: the overtly business friendly government would dilute environmental norms.

The previous government, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in its first term, had brought in legislations, such as the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification (2006), to tighten environmental impact assessment process, and introduced rights-based legislations, such as the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act (FRA), 2006, and the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013, empowering gram sabhas (village councils) to give consent for development projects that involved forest diversion and land acquisitions. But in its second term (2009-14), UPA started diluting these legislations. The fear was that NDA would continue with the same approach. It has come true.

Just four months after it came to power, NDA set up a High Level Committee on Forest and Environment Related Laws, headed by former cabinet secretary TSR Subramanian, to propose reforms to India’s complex and much-maligned environmental clearance (ec) and forest diversion processes, and other environmental laws. However, no such overhaul happened. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology rejected the Subramanian committee’s patchy recommeNDAtions in July 2015.

In the past four years the Union government has given EC to 1,098 projects in the major development sectors and about 124,788 hectares (ha) of forestland diversion has been agreed upon to give way to 6,060 projects in various development sectors. The forestland diverted is over 80 percent of the area of Delhi.