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...

HYDERABAD: The Right to Information (RTI) Act finally seems to be serving its purpose: empowering citizens with information which they can use to demand justice. Reeling under an attack on their houses, a group of 13 displaced tribal families from remote Bhadrachalam used the RTI Act to find out the status of the land on which they had constructed their huts a year ago. Armed with this information, they have now...

Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) president Ajit Singh's draft for amendment in the Land Acquisition Act, 1894 proposes a complete ban on acquisition of land for profit-making and commercial purposes. The acquisition rights for industry should be allowed only if necessary for national security. Besides redefining `public purpose' for which land is acquired, the draft wants the government to be advocate of farmers' right and not a real estate agent. The...

The Ministry of Environment and Forest’s decision to stall the Vedanta project in Orissa must be understood. The ‘story’ is about a powerful company breaking the law. But it is equally about a development puzzle in which the richest lands of India are where the poorest people subsist. The N.C. Saxena committee has indicted the mining conglomerate on three counts of breaking the environmental laws. One, it took over and...