The environment ministry has issued environmental violation notice to Anil Agarwal-promoted Vedanta Alumina’s Lanjigarh refinery. Violations include failure to adhere to environment protection norms, unauthorised expansion of capacity to 6 million tonnes and sourcing of bauxite from illegal mines. The company has time till September 14 to submit its reply. An unsatisfactory explanation could result in the refinery’s closure. The ministry had, last week, rejected Vedanta’s $1.7 billion bauxite mining...

11 of its source mines did not have a valid clearance One week after Vedanta Aluminium's application to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa was rejected, its refinery expansion project has been slapped with a show-cause notice by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests. The company was taken to task for allegedly going ahead with a six-fold expansion of its refinery in Lanjigarh even as the Ministry was still...

Long before they gained currency as the real-life counterparts of the Na'vis portrayed by Hollywood blockbuster "Avatar", the author of the Vedanta verdict — Justice S H Kapadia — had made clear about how he saw the Dongaria Kondhs, who are officially classified as "primitive tribal group". Kapadia, now chief justice of India, described this tribe from Orissa as a people "living on grass". His unflattering, almost dismissive description came...

A week after the Ministry of Environment and Forests threw the Vedanta Aluminium project in Orissa into doldrums by denying final stage forest clearance, the fate of the 12 million tonne per annum steel project by Korean steelmaker Posco appears to be bleak after the ministry widened the ambit of the Meena Gupta panel looking into the steel project. In July this year, the MoEF had formed a four-member panel headed by...

N C Saxena, who led the committee which recommended against permitting mining of the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa, says the same approach should be adopted for Andhra Pradesh’s mammoth Polavaram hydro project, too. If there is violation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) there, too, it should not be allowed, as that is the law of the land, Saxena told Business Standard. The Polavaram dam being constructed on the Godavari river by...