Environment ministry sets up four new regional offices

Live Mint , Thursday, January 30, 2014
Correspondent : Neha Sethi
New Delhi: The environment ministry is stepping up its monitoring at the state level with four new regional offices at Chennai, Dehradun, Nagpur and Ranchi to add to its existing five.

Officials at these offices, apart from monitoring and evaluating schemes, will inspect sites where forest land is being diverted for industrial use, before forest clearance is granted.

The new offices are being set up to comply with the Supreme Court’s 2011 order in the so-called Lafarge case, and to “facilitate more frequent inspections and in-depth scrutiny and appraisal of the proposals”, the ministry said in an 8 January resolution, which Mint has reviewed.

The expenditure finance committee decided to set up the new offices in a meeting on 4 March 2013, it adds.

In the 2011 Lafarge judgement, the apex court had allowed French cement maker Lafarge SA to mine limestone in the forests of Meghalaya. It had also asked the government to make a temporary arrangement for a forest clearance till a national environment regulator was set up. Setting up more regional offices was also a part of this judgement.

The five existing regional offices of the environment ministry are at Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Lucknow and Shillong. The headquarters of all the regional offices is at New Delhi, which monitors and evaluates forestry development projects, with an emphasis on their conservation.

The headquarters of the new offices will remain the same.

Regional offices are empowered to approve diversion of forest land for projects of less than five hectares (except mining and regularization of encroachment) and to process clearance for project between five hectares and 40 hectares in consultation with state advisory groups.

In projects involving diversion of more than 100 hectares of forest land, regional officials conduct site inspections and monitor the implementation of conditions and safeguards imposed by the environment ministry while granting forest clearance.

The forest advisory committee (FAC), which recommends if forest clearance should be granted for a project, generally asks the regional offices to conduct the site inspections.

The FAC has officials from the environment ministry as members, as well as non-official members from outside the ministry. The environment minister generally goes by the recommendation of the FAC while granting or refusing forest clearance for a project.

Rita Roy Choudhury, head of renewable energy, climate change and environment at lobby group Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (Ficci), said the ministry’s decision to set up more regional offices is a step in the right direction.

“The FAC needs to have more capacity in terms of more regional offices to ensure that forest clearances are cleared within the stipulated time,” she said, adding that Ficci had recommended the environment ministry to increase the number of regional offices. The regional offices are required to “do surprise and random checks/verification of EC (environment clearance), conditions of various projects by site visits” as well as “follow up pollution control measures taken by industries, local bodies, government”, according to the resolution.

The Chennai office will have jurisdiction over Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Puducherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra will be under the regional office in Nagpur, and Bihar and Jharkhand under the Ranchi office. The Dehradun office will have jurisdiction over the hill states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand.

Praveen Bhargav, a former member of the national board for wildlife and a managing trustee of Wildlife First, a Bangalore-based non-profit, said the ministry should also implement the process the Supreme Court directed in the Lafarge judgement.

“Regional empowered committees with three non-official experts and the standing site inspection committees are equally important. The current verification process, particularly with respect to monitoring, has huge gaps which are exploited by project proponents,” he said.

 
SOURCE : http://www.livemint.com/Politics/D4mh3kKBDYk8IGzJMNhARO/Environment-ministry-sets-up-four-new-regional-offices.html
 


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