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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's new wetland rules threaten to destroy 65% of its water bodies rather than protect them -Nityanand Jayaraman

India's new wetland rules threaten to destroy 65% of its water bodies rather than protect them -Nityanand Jayaraman

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published Published on Oct 13, 2017   modified Modified on Oct 13, 2017
-Scroll.in

Notified in September, the rules will facilitate the development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dump

After ignoring repeated directions from the Supreme Court to notify stricter rules to protect the country’s wetlands, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has gone and done just the opposite. On September 26, it published the Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017 – replacing the older rules dating back to 2010. The new rules quite simply provide a framework to legalise the destruction of wetlands.

The new rules define a wetland as:

    “An area of marsh, fen, peatland or water; whether natural or artificial, permanent or temporary, with water that is static or flowing, fresh, brackish or salt, including areas of marine water the depth of which at low tide does not exceed six meters, but does not include river channels, paddy fields, human-made water bodies/tanks specifically constructed for drinking water purposes and structures specifically constructed for aquaculture, salt production, recreation and irrigation purposes.”

Draft rules that had been published for comment in March 2016 had drawn severe criticism from environmentalists and social activists. The new rules have not only ignored the objections that were then raised, some of their provisions are weaker than those contained in the draft. It is not often that one sees a law so at odds with the logic, objectives and spirit laid out in its preamble. By undoing the protection for India’s already threatened wetlands by playing with definitions, introducing caveats and provisos and shifting jurisdictions and decision-making powers, the ministry seems to have achieved its objective of easing the doing of business in these hydrologically sensitive areas.

While the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has been centralising powers through several moves – the introduction of a nationwide Goods and Services Tax subsuming all state and Central levies being one such step – the wetland rules are couched in the language of devolving powers to the states. The new rules have done away with the National Wetlands Authority created under the 2010 rules and conferred all regulatory powers on the state governments. The Centre’s act of abdicating its responsibilities is made to look like a virtuous move to decentralise in the spirit of federalism.

If left unchallenged, the new rules will facilitate the legal exploitation and development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dumps. For a country battling droughts and floods caused by destructive land-use change – say, by changing agricultural lands to industrial use – and climate change, the new wetland rules will have disastrous consequences, especially since only bad environmental laws are diligently enforced.

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Scroll.in, 12 October, 2017, https://scroll.in/article/853515/indias-new-wetland-rules-threaten-to-destroy-rather-than-protect-65-of-its-water-bodies


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