Damage by Art of Living will take 10 yrs to fix: NGT panel
The damage to the Yamuna floodplains caused by the Art of Living’s three-day cultural festival last year will cost more than ₹42 crore and at least 10 years to fix, according to the expert panel appointed by the National Green Tribunal.
The Foundation has called the committee biased and acting with vested interests.
The expert panel, headed by Shashi Shekhar, secretary of ministry of water resources, submitted its report to the NGT on Wednesday, on damage assessment following the Art of Living’s three-day World Culture Festival in March 2016.
The panel has suggested a time-bound action plan, which comprises two components physical and biological rehabilitation. The physical component is estimated to cost around ₹28.73 crore and the biological part would cost around ₹ 13.29 crore.
“In addition to this, there would be expenditure for the monitoring by a team of experts for 10 years and the cost of transportation of material outside the floodplain,” said an expert.
The 47-page report estimates that approximately 120 hectares (about 300 acres) of floodplains of west (right bank) of the river Yamuna and about 50 hectares (120 acres) floodplains of the eastern side (left bank) of the river have been adversely impacted ecologically at different magnitudes.
The Art of Living spokesperson, however, has alleged “bias beyond doubt.”
“The Expert Committee members of the NGT who were supposed to be non-interested parties to the case and were to act as the eyes and ears of judges have given biased interviews in public while the case is sub-judice... The closeness of the petitioner with the expert committee members was not disclosed to us when it was appointed by NGT and went into the preparation of the report,” said Kedar Desai, the spokesperson.
Desai said the Art of Living Foundation is a “responsible and environmentally sensitive NGO” and its legal team will be looking into the report to decide on the appropriate future action.
The NGT had allowed the festival in March 2016, saying that as the matter was ‘fait accompli’, they could not ban it. The threeday World Cultural Festival soon grabbed headlines for allegedly polluting and damaging the Yamuna floodplain ecosystem.
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and diesel prices in some cities will now vary daily in sync with international rates, according to two officials from oil marketing companies.
This will be effective from May 1 in five cities, including Puducherry, Visakhapatnam, Udaipur, Jamshedpur and Chandigarh, as part of a pilot project.
This will be extended to other parts of the country after an assessment of consumer response.
Fuel prices move in tandem with the price of crude oil in most countries. In January, Mint reported that the fuel retailers plan to introduce dynamic pricing in India this year.
“We have been piloting dynamic pricing at a few of our retail outlets for some months now, and the response has been encouraging. This has allowed us to go ahead and introduce it formally,” an executive director from an oil marketing company said on condition of anonymity as he is not allowed to talk to reporters.
Currently, state-run fuel retailers—Indian Oil Corp. Ltd (IOCL), Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd (HPCL)— revise fuel rates on the 1st and 15th of every month based on average international price of the fuel in the preceding fortnight and the currency exchange rate.
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