Jayanthi: MoEF no bottleneck
In a bid to stem the growing tide of criticism against the green ministry, environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan went into an overdrive to explain that her ministry was not anti-development.
Marshalling facts and figures, the minister explained that the decision to divert 74 per cent of the forest land (less than 5 hectares) for all projects was taken at the state level.
Her own ministry, she explained, accounted for only nine per cent of clearances for projects above 40 hectares in size while the regional office of the ministry gave clearances for 17 per cent of projects requiring between 5-40 hectares.
“How can we then be accused of being a bottleneck for economic development? There is no delay in processing. There is no bottleneck in this ministry,” Ms Natarajan insisted.
Giving a break up of the 101 pending projects, Ms Natarajan said, “Four were from defence, three for drinking water, seven for hydel, four for irrigation, 14 coal mining, 22 non-coal mining, three for railways, 16 from road transportation, one from thermal, five for transmission lines, one for wind power and 21 others.”
But these proposal were pending before the Forest Advisory Committee or awaiting legal clearances and were not held up at the ministry level.
Nevertheless, she concedes that there has been a significant dilution of the Forest Rights Act with state governments no longer have to seek the consent of the gram sabhas for forest clearance to linear projects, including expansion of roads, setting up of transmission and power lines.
When asked how much land had been diverted for non-forest purposes, the minister replied that during her tenure, she had received 828 proposals from which 754 had been approved. These had required diversion of 1,820 has while 74 proposals had been rejected.
The minister’s clarification comes in the light of the National Highways Authority of India case filed against the ministry in the Supreme Court. This is an obvious effort to get the NHAI to withdraw the case to avoid embarrassment to the UPA regime.
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