Rail project gets K’taka board nod

NEWDELHI:A railway line proposed to be built in the Western Ghats, rejected by several statutory bodies in the past amid concerns that it could cause irreparable damage to forests and biodiversity in the region, received approval on March 20 from the State Board for Wildlife (SBWL), which rejected the project 11 days earlier.

The SBWL approval was granted after the National Board for Wildlife (NBWL), under the Union ministry of environment, forest and climate change (MoEFCC), started reviewing the project in Karnataka and asked about the reasons behind the delay in implementing it, documents reviewed by HT suggest.

SBWL’s approval has resurrected the serious environmental concerns that held up the project for the past two decades.

At least 101 scientists have endorsed a letter written by 11 ecologists and wildlife biologists to the NBWL member-secretary and MoEFCC minister Prakash Javadekar on July 2, raising several concerns about the Hubballi Ankola Railway Line Project (HARP) in Karnataka, including irreversible damage it could do to forests, fragmenting wildlife habitats in the Western Ghats.

“No amount of mitigation will compensate for the damage to the ecosystem that will be lost for good. Ultimately, the well-being of local communities will be jeopardised,” the letter said.

The project has in the past been rejected by the Supreme Court (SC)-constituted Central Empowered Committee (CEC) in 2015 and by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) in 2018, according to documents seen by HT. The MoEFCC’s Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) had also raised several issues regarding the project.