Wildlife panel gets back its power on project approvals

FEARING SC REPRIMAND, GOVT WITHDRAWS TWO CIRCULARS DILUTING GREEN APPROVAL RULES FOR PROJECTS OUTSIDE PROTECTED AREAS

The environment ministry has withdrawn an order that drastically pruned the powers of its committee tasked with giving project approvals around 650 wildlife protected areas — apparently fearing a reprimand from the Supreme Court.

The move restores the original jurisdiction of the standing committee of the National Board for Wildlife, as mandated by the top court in 2006, to appraise all projects coming up within 10 km of protected areas, such as national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, across India. So, a project cannot get environment clearance unless it gets the committee’s nod — a position held up till August 2014.

The Prakash Javadekar-led ministry had in August issued a circular trimming the wildlife committee’s jurisdiction from 10 km to a much smaller ecologically sensitive area (ESA) — which could fall anywhere between 100 meters and five km of a protected area. The ministry is in the process of notifying such ESAs around protected areas and has completed 200 of them already.

A month later, it issued another circular delinking projects outside national parks and sanctuaries from the Wildlife Protection Act of 1972. This was done to prevent the invoking of the Act’s provisions during the committee’s stringent appraisal process, which the government felt delayed approvals and was a stumbling block in ‘ease of doing business’.

While issuing the circulars, the ministry had stated that these would facilitate early decisionmaking by the standing committee on development projects.

The committee approved over 150 projects, including some in fragile coastal and border areas, in the seven months after the new rules kicked in.

The orders were challenged in Supreme Court in September with a petition also accusing the ministry of filling up the standing committee with government officials while nominating only three representatives from NGOs or ecological institutions against the stipulated 10. In response, the court sought the rationale behind the circulars.

Both were withdrawn silently on May 1.