Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's recent assurance that the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 would be amended is welcome though delayed. There are many compelling reasons why this inept and outdated Act should be changed and the farmers' protest over disruptive acquisition in Uttar Pradesh is only one of them. The 1894 Act, last amended in 1984, has not helped balance the land needs of rapid economic growth and the grievances...
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Posco to suffer as panel purview widened by Debabrata Mohanty
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...
More »Who will save our Na’vis? by Manoj Mitta
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...
More »Govt mulls demarcating mining areas to avoid another Niyamgiri
The government is planning to put in place a more transparent mining policy by designating parts of mineral-rich regions as out of bounds for industry because of environmental concerns, a move that can avoid episodes such as the recent ban on mining at Niyamgiri in Orissa but could hurt expansion plans of companies located in such areas. The plan is to divide the country’s mineral-rich regions into so-called ‘go’ and...
More »‘Jaitapur nuclear plant needs thorough regulatory scrutiny'
The Konkan Bachao Samiti (KBS), which is opposing the proposed Jaitapur nuclear power plant (JNPP) in Ratnagiri, has said that several questions on the project remain unanswered. At a recent press conference, Vivek Monteiro and Adwait Pednekar of the KBS said several issues were raised at meetings held among the KBS, Janhit Seva Samiti (JSS) and officials of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) and the National Environmental Engineering...
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