The 83-page draft law – called the Environment Impact Assessment – has whipped up an firestorm of online protest. India uses this law to assess the potential impact of a development or industrial project on the environment.
Critics say the new draft limits regulation of and public hearings over large infrastructure projects, exempts some projects from public consultation and promotes investor friendly profit-generating projects with faint understanding of their social consequences, among other things.
And that’s not all. The government has also been blamed for trying to hurry through the crucial law during a lockdown. The draft was announced on 23 March, two days before the lockdown began, and originally the last date of accepting comments from the public was 30 June. After protests and the intervention of the courts, the date was extended to 11 August. “The rule says public consultation on any such draft is limited to only 60 days. We extended this to 150 days in view of the pandemic,” says Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar.
The draft was also made available in only two languages – English and Hindi – ignoring the many languages spoken by people who would be impacted by it. There were allegations of muzzling public dissent: three websites run by environmental groups that were collecting and sending emails of objections to the law to the government were blocked without reason for weeks together. “Our site was down for 26 days when we were in the middle of the campaign. At the end of it we had collected 300,000 emails against the law,” says Yash Marwah, 25, of LetIndiaBreathe, one of the blocked sites.
India began making environmental clearance mandatory for expansion or modernisation of a range of projects – mining, power plants, river valley, roads, highways, ports, airports, factories – in 1994. More than 100 countries use similar regulation to check damage to the environment.
Since 2006 the law has been has been changed 55 times, mostly under previous administrations, Mr Javadekar told me recently. “To do away with the confusion we decided to bring an new draft, incorporating all those changes, and bring more clarity [to the law] after 15 years,” he said. In a previous interaction, the minister said: “We are not changing the law.
