Pollution control: Much noise but little action

There’s much noise being made over environment conservation, but not enough action has been taken on the ground by the government. Or so it seems. One of the most essential mechanisms devised to control pollution by industries and monitor their operations - the Environment Clearance (EC) procedure and Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) - have been deemed totally ineffective by the industries.

An Ahmedabad-based voluntary organization, Pryaavaran Mitra, which has been attending almost every environment public hearing (EPH) in Gujarat since 1997, claims that its proper implementation does not happen in most cases, and there is a clear violation in some others.

The group has written a letter to the chairman of the committee for EIA and CRZ & additional secretary JM Mushkar bringing these concerns to his notice. “We have been closely observing that the implementation of new EIA Notification 2006 & further, its Amendments in 2009 that replaced the notifications of 1994, have not brought about any ‘changes’. They have failed to bring any changes to the environment clearance process. Rather, in large number of cases it is not even followed properly, which in turn has resulted in gross violations of the very basic objectives of the Environment Protection Act,” says Mahesh Pandya in the letter.

Elaborating on the violations, the presentation includes examples of industries in Gujarat which started production before environment clearance was received. The procedure for conducting the hearing in also not followed. EPH is not completed within 45 days of the date of receipt from applicant. Last but not the least, some conditions given in the Environment Clearance are very vague. In fact, in two annexure attached with the letter to the EIA chairman, a long list of industries and malls that have violated the process and law, and in most cases continue to do so, has been affixed.

The activist says the new amendments have made the EIA report totally ineffective. “The amendments have been made to reduce the time taken for getting the clearance by the industry. In turn, what has happened is that there is no compliance by the industry. Six-month report card is not submitted. Even otherwise, there is no mechanism to monitor whether the polluting unit is following the guidelines given to it at the time of getting the environment clearance. Is this the value we have for Mother Earth?” he adds.