Scorching the earth

The Environment Ministry's clearance of projects such as Posco, Jaitapur and Lavasa will cause havoc in our gravely endangered environment.

EVEN the worst pessimist could not have imagined that the January 31 order of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) approving the South Korean-origin company Posco's steel project in Orissa would be as bad as it actually is. Construction of the Rs.54,000-crore steel plant, its captive power unit and private port can brazenly proceed to devour forests and farmland, displace vulnerable people, steal their water, poison their environment, wreck farmers' livelihoods, and throw out from forests thousands who have lived there for centuries, thus blatantly violating the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, (FRA).

Posco will pay a laughably trivial price for this huge cornucopia extracted by the State on the backs of poor people. The price is a paltry 2 per cent of its net profits for corporate social responsibility-related programmes, and seeming compliance with 60 largely meaningless conditions. I say seeming advisedly because the MoEF does not monitor, and does not know how to monitor, compliance with the conditions imposed while clearing projects.

Several things about Posco's three clearances (environmental, forest and coastal regulatory zone-related) are deeply deplorable and wholly indefensible. One, the forest clearance makes nonsense of the process adopted by the MoEF itself, including the establishment of two committees under former Union Secretaries N.C. Saxena and Meena Gupta and the referring of their reports to its own statutory Forest Advisory Committee (The Posco question, Frontline, December 3, 2010). These committees clearly stated that the project had been wrongly granted environmental clearance in December 2009; it should be withdrawn. The MoEF has no business to overrule all their reports.

Second, the latest forest clearance is in flagrant breach of the FRA, one of the most important progressive laws passed in India, in force since 2008. This guarantees tenure on forest lands to tribal people and Other Traditional Forest-Dwellers (OTFD) who have lived there for 75 years, are dependent on forests/forest land for livelihoods, and have been in occupation of the land before December 13, 2005.

It also says that gram sabhas (village assemblies) must grant their prior informed consent to any diversion of forest land to other uses. Or else, diversion is forbidden. It is obligatory upon State governments to complete the FRA's implementation through bodies at village, taluk and district levels.

Both the Saxena and Gupta Committees concluded, after inquiries in Posco's project area, that the FRA had not been implemented, and that the Orissa government had failed to furnish certificates from the gram sabhas concerned stating that the FRA's implementation was complete and that the sabhas had granted their consent to forest land diversion.

Third, some 4,000 non-tribal families reportedly live in the project area, besides a small number of Adivasi families. The area's gram sabhas have all opposed the project and put their views on record. The MoEF on January 8, 2010, asked the Orissa government to stop work on the project in the absence of the gram sabhas' certificates. The Orissa government offered an assurance in March that no family in the area was eligible under the FRA. The MoEF did not accept this and established the Saxena and Gupta Committees.

The State government has no authority to determine such eligibility. The FRA specifies a three-step local-body process, starting with the gram sabha. This is confirmed by Saxena (page 2) and Gupta (page 171). Both committees found documentary evidence from State records of the presence of eligible tribal people and non-tribal people in the area. It also found that the government had totally failed to implement the Act or to furnish records to the local people.

The Orissa government started forcibly acquiring land on July 27 last. The MoEF on August 5 explicitly barred it from doing so. The Gupta Committee termed the government's actions criminal and recommended that forest clearance be revoked on this ground too.

Yet, Jairam Ramesh, Union Minister for Environment and Forests, has cleared the project on condition that the Orissa government give categorical assurance that there has been no violation of the FRA in the project area. But this government is a blatant partisan of Posco and has acted as its zealous advocate and lobbyist. It can be confidently expected to declare, as it did in the past, that there are no eligible OTFDs in the area; hence, the FRA does not apply there.

This amounts to wishing away 20,000 people. Worse, Jairam Ramesh has acted in contravention of the law and as if his own orders requiring the gram sabhas' certificates confirming the FRA's implementation did not exist. This is also evident on the environmental clearance issue. The Gupta Committee observed: Potentially very serious impacts have not even been assessed, leave alone planned for. Such impacts could harm the entire district and could even lead to loss of lives. The cavalier and reckless attitude of the concerned authorities to such potentially disastrous impacts shocks the collective conscience of the Committee.

The impacts include devastation by cyclones, effects on water availability, and high-level pollution. The project had wrongly received environmental clearance in July 2007 in disregard of objections from the public and four different State and Central bodies, on the basis of a rapid, as distinct from comprehensive, environmental impact assessment, which was only done for a third of the steel plant's final capacity.

The Gupta Committee explicitly warned against vague conditional clearances, which obviate hard decisions on crucial issues and undermine public responsibility. On coastal regulatory zones (CRZ) issues too, the committee found that large chunks of the project fall under the CRZ-III area, where industrial activities are prohibited, and that Posco had suppressed material facts. In November last, another official committee recommended that the plant's location be re-examined.

Whitewash' conditions

Jairam Ramesh has overruled all this and granted clearance on the vaguest of whitewash conditions, which do not address basic problems pertaining to the project's forest-, environmental- and coastal-related impacts. For instance, greening a quarter of the project area will not remedy displacement of forest-dwellers or impacts on land, water and coastal ecology. It is redundant to ask Posco to follow national ambient air-quality standards. These are mandatory.

Besides, as Jairam 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 is notorious for not conducting periodic project inspections, as is mandated. The Polavaram dam was conditionally cleared in October 2005. But a Right to Information (RTI) query in 2010 reveals that the MoEF neither sought nor got any compliance reports. This is true of most projects.

Jairam Ramesh rationalises the Posco clearance on the grounds that it has economic, technological and strategic significance for the country, adding lamely, at the same time, laws on environment and forests must be implemented seriously. But he has done the opposite.

He has often said that his role is that of a balancer who finds the middle ground between faster economic growth and ecological security. But his legitimate role or mandate has nothing to do with faster growth. It is to protect India's rapidly deteriorating environment and implement environmental laws in their true spirit.

To neutralise thoughtful environmentalists, grass-roots activists and even politicians, Jairam Ramesh has combined the dual role of both the protagonist and the opposition. He has made an art out of raising objections to dubious projects and then making a U-turn by clearing them on bogus conditions that ultimately pamper promoters. Recent examples are: Jaitapur (A nuclear Enron? Frontline, February 11), Lavasa township and Navi Mumbai airport in Maharashtra, Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh, Vedanta's refinery in Orissa, and the latest CRZ notification.

Jairam Ramesh opposed Vedanta's mining project but seems inclined to allow its refinery, already working at six times its sanctioned capacity, to expand further although no water is available for it. Polavaram will submerge 3,700 hectares of forests. It was cleared not on the basis of gram sabha certificates but on the State government's say-so.

The Lavasa case is particularly shocking. Its promoters have illegally re-contoured mountains, diverted streams, allegedly grabbed non-transferable Adivasi land, and visited havoc upon a precious ecology with virgin rainforests. But they are being let off with a fine and paltry remediation measures.

The new CRZ notification will dismantle many existing prohibitions, encourage intrusive activities in eroded areas, and turn fishing villages into clusters of skyscrapers, with roads on stilts connecting them. There could have been no better way of destroying mangroves, vulnerable coastlines and creating concrete jungles at the high-tide line.

In all this, the predominant consideration is faster growth and investor confidence, central to neoliberalism, history's environmentally most destructive enterprise. Posco was cleared because it is India's largest foreign direct investment (FDI) project. Lavasa must be approved because industrialists close to certain parties must be pleased the environment be damned just when it faces unprecedented plunder and is on its last legs in many areas.