The campaign feeds into the efforts of the Prime Minister’s Office and the finance ministry to create an all-powerful National Investment Board (NIB), which will act as a one-stop fast-track clearance window for all infrastructure projects worth Rs 1,000 crores or more—regardless of their impact on land, air and water, forests, and plant and animal life, besides vulnerable tribal communities.

Such mindless breakneck-speed approvals will gravely threaten India’s environmental resources, which are finite and irreplaceable, but also invaluable for people’s well being. India has already lost more than half of its prime thick-canopy forests and suffered severe erosion of its biodiversity, besides extensive air and water pollution. Pollution has made urban life unbearable, turned most rivers into sewers, and poisoned our already-overexploited groundwater aquifers.

The NIB will dangerously accelerate the process. Its extraordinary authority emanating from the PMO will be used to supersede individual ministries and bypass procedures to assess the environmental impact of projects and ensure that they conform to the Environment Protection Act, Forest Conservation Act, Wildlife Protection Act and Forest Rights Act. The NIB will thus undermine basic tenets of democratic governance such as transparency, rule of law, public participation, equity and justice.

The NIB, then, is a retrograde idea, which violates the spirit of the Constitution and places private profit above human rights and environmental protection. It’s meant to further boost “investor confidence”, buoyed up by the recent decision to further open up retail, pension funds and insurance to foreign investment.

The NIB’s origins lie in pressure from the corporate sector, which recently raised the pitch of its complaints about regulatory delays. As we see below, the complaints lack substance; if anything, the MoEF has been clearing too many projects without proper scrutiny. So exclusive is the NIB’s focus on pampering project promoters with “fast-track” approval that it doesn’t even contemplate giving a hearing to citizens or people’s organisations who may be aggrieved by the projects’ impact.

As MoEF minister Jayanthi Natarajan writes in her unusually forthright five-page letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the NIB will “be used for the benefit only of large investors, but not ordinary people, local citizens and stakeholders dedicated to preserving environmental integrity…This concept is unacceptable. The NIB has no constitutional authority to decide on the failure of any minister... when a minister takes a decision, there is absolutely no justification for an NIB to assume his/her authority. Nor will the NIB have the competence to do so.”

Tribal Affairs Minister Kishore Chandra Deo also opposes the NIB: “No environment clearance should be given to any project until there is total compliance with the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and also unless the provisions of Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA) are fully met.”

Under the FRA, passed in 2006, but greatly delayed in implementation under industry pressure, gram sabhas (village councils) must approve a project before forest clearance (for diverting forest land to other uses), is granted. PESA provides for tribal self-rule and control over land and natural resources in Adivasi areas covered by the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution.

The NIB is only the latest in a series of recent measures to dilute and bypass environmental regulations to favour industry. Take three other examples. First, the government is loath to create an independent regulatory/judicial forum outside the MoEF. In 2010, it half-reluctantly set up the National Green Tribunal exclusively to hear environmental cases and speed up decisions on thousands of complaints filed in lower courts across the country.

The NGT has passed strong judgments upholding the law, as in the POSCO case, which was wrongly approved by the MoEF. It has also criticised official decision-making and affirmed the Polluter Pays principle. The government is deviously trying to disable the NGT by the simple expedient of not appointing judges to it and by denying them necessary physical infrastructure such as offices and accommodation. In disgust, as many as six judges—all of them former justices of the Supreme Court of chief justices of High Courts—have resigned from the NGT. The truncated Tribunal cannot function effectively.

Second, the government has weakened three important statutory bodies by altering their composition: the Forest Advisory Committee, the Environmental Advisory Committee and the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL). For instance, three non-official members of the FAC—Mahesh Rangarajan, Amita Baviskar and Ullas Karanth, all distinguished scholars and experts, appointed through a Supreme Court intervention—were replaced last May by blatantly pro-industry persons, including a representative of mining interests in the Confederation of Indian Industry.

Similarly, several well-known expert members of the NBWL, including Asad Rahmani, M K Ranjitsinh, Divyabhanusinh Chavda, Brijendra Singh, Valmik Thapar and Bittu Sehgal recently protested at the lack of integrity in the forest clearance process, and complained about how they were forced to approve 59 industry and mining projects in or near protected areas like national parks and sanctuaries within two hours. They received 39 of these proposals just two days before the meeting, leaving them no time to study them.

Of a piece with this is the manoeuvre to dilute the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel headed by the eminent environmental scientist Madhav Gadgil. This contains many farsighted and wise suggestions on protecting one of the most precious and fragile ecosystems in the world, including a ban on mining and expansion of power and industrial projects in vulnerable areas.

The government suppressed the Panel’s report for months and then set up a committee headed by an arch-conservative, K Kasturirangan, formerly of ISRO, to look into objections raised by industry interests—presumably to make the report more palatable to them.

However, the third development is even more damaging. It involves corrupting the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process and granting environmental and forest clearances, mandatory for major projects, in an excessive, thoughtless and indiscriminate manner. The MoEF has cleared about 200,000 MW of coal-based power plants, way beyond our projected needs, the Plan target or investment intentions. This will double India’s power capacity—and emissions—in five years.

Between January 2008 and August 2011, the MoEF cleared all but 19 of the 1,689 projects submitted to it—an approval rate of 98.9 percent! The projects include 186 thermal power plants and 45 hydroelectric dams, all with heavy consequences for deforestation and pollution.

Forest clearances should only be granted very rarely and under tough conditions, to be closely monitored. Most applications should be rejected. The MoEF website proudly displays a total of 1,800 rejections since 1981. But year-wise analysis shows that most of these took place before Jairam Ramesh became environment minister. Only 8 percent happened post-2009.

Over the past three years, the government has loosened Coastal Regulatory Zone rules to a point where all kinds of high-impact projects, including factories, power stations, highways, roads on stilts and housing estates will be permitted, guaranteeing destruction of mangroves and vulnerable marine ecosystems which protect people against cyclones and storms.

Norms for the EIA process have been relaxed; public hearings, earlier mandatory, have been made discretionary in certain categories. It’s not independent experts, but consultants hired by project promoters, who write all EIA reports. These are typically incomplete and full of contradictory or obviously false claims. A whole industry of consultants has mushroomed, who prepare shoddy pro-forma reports, often recycling the same document by just changing the project name.

Although a number of projects, say dams, are planned on the same river, they are approved individually; the cumulative impact is never considered. Most projects are approved without field visits, in the blind, with pious faith in the promoter’s honesty and neutrality, rather than the realistic assumption that he is an interested party who will downplay the damage he causes.

As Mr Ramesh himself confesses, in the past decade, “we must have approved about 7,000 projects…, each with conditions and safeguards…. But unfortunately, we do not have a system of monitoring compliance….” The MoEF, notoriously, doesn’t conduct periodic project inspections.

Last year, FAC non-official members pointed out 10 different flaws in its working, including official abdication of responsibility under the Forest Act to undertake diligent first-stage scrutiny, absence of on-site impact studies and expert visits, opacity in disclosure of meeting agendas, and lack of penalties for poor or false reporting. No action was taken on these, or on the suggestion that the MoEF create a large panel/pool of experts—more than 160 names were suggested—who can be called upon to give their opinions.

We need to breathe fresh life into the MoEF through reforms that promote public accountability and environmental protection. The NIB will kill the MoEF to promote corporate interests. (IPA Service)