Editorial: Avoid hasty green clearances

At a time when global concerns are growing over climate change and man-made environmental degradation, the NDA government’s move to incentivise the States, through a star rating system, for speedy green clearance to projects appears flawed and ill-conceived. Any attempt to unduly hasten up clearances is bound to lead to dilution of the environment protection […]

At a time when global concerns are growing over climate change and man-made environmental degradation, the NDA government’s move to incentivise the States, through a star rating system, for speedy green clearance to projects appears flawed and ill-conceived. Any attempt to unduly hasten up clearances is bound to lead to dilution of the environment protection regime in the country. The Centre has proposed to rank the States according to the speed at which they issue environmental clearances. However, questions are being raised whether this amounted to undermining the role of regulatory oversight in environmental protection — recognised in several Supreme Court verdicts as one of the key instruments to ensure the right to life. While it is a fact that the procedures relating to the environmental clearances are often steeped in red-tapism, the solution lies in simplifying these procedures and not in eliminating them. Opening floodgates to the projects in the ecologically fragile regions, in the name of development, would adversely impact the livelihoods of the local communities. There must be a delicate balancing between the imperatives of development and environmental protection. These complex tasks involve strengthening of the institutions and making regulatory procedures fool-proof. There are fears — justifiably so — that the ranking exercise will compromise the task of assessing the impact of industrial, real estate and mining schemes on the environment and lead to unhealthy competition to quickly clear projects without due diligence. This pressure of speed and incentivisation is going to skew environmental governance and make it pro-business.

While major projects such as highways are cleared by the Centre, the State authorities assess the environmental impact of the works pertaining to mining, industry, power plants and infrastructure development. The States will be rated by the percentage of cases in which they seek information about a project multiple times. If the State authorities seek additional details more than once, it could stand to lose more points. According to the rating system, the States that ask for additional details multiple times in more than 30% of cases will get zero points, while those who ask for additional details in fewer than 10% of cases will receive one point. Though the rating system is ostensibly aimed at facilitating ease of doing business, the speed at which projects are okayed should not be the primary criterion to grade the efficiency of an agency tasked with curbing environmental degradation. The ranking exercise might prompt the authorities to bypass norms and stop short of ticking all the boxes. The focus should be on granting eco clearance within a broad time frame, even as officials must be held accountable for inordinate and unreasonable delays. Already, unregulated construction and mining activity have been resulting in avoidable tragedies in the ecologically fragile regions across the country. The environmental clearance system should not be weakened.