-India.Mongabay.com * In its latest decision, the Indian government’s ministry of environment has come out with an order to help a certain category of mining projects avoid public hearing while seeking environment clearance. * This decision is mainly for projects which were granted environment clearance under environmental impact assessment notification 1994 after a public hearing was conducted. * But experts note that public hearings should be understood as a critical tool for good...

-Article-14.com In 2018, India diluted environmental safeguards when it ‘standardised’ or made simpler permissions for industry by expert panels. Now, as the government pushes the use of dirtier domestic coal by power plants, further dilution is underway, increasing health risks and imperilling the environment New Delhi: Standardised conditions will be “monitorable”. They will bring “uniformity”. They will help in “expediting the process of environmental clearance without compromising environmental norms”. These are claims the ministry of...

-Down to Earth The environment ministry on February 22 wrote to all states, seeking their views on the matter, according to documents Does granting forest clearance to an agency lead to its name entering land title records? The Union environment ministry recently asked this to all states and Union territories. The letter dated February 22, 2021 from Assistant Inspector General of Forests Suneet Bhardwaj came on the back of repeated requests by the...

-The Hindu On several significant items relating to the environment, allocations have remained stagnant or fallen In 1991, when the then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh ushered in economic reforms that catapulted India into the global economy, I had asked him how he intended to balance rapid economic growth with environmental protection. He said that the experience of the West is that once there is enough money in the economy through growth, it...

-Down to Earth The ‘real owner’ of forest land is still the forest department. Such brazen violation of the law betrays a systematic attempt to implement FRA, reducing it to a symbol rather than a tool of empowerment The Dangs, the smallest district in Gujarat, is a thickly forested and tribal-dominated region that has been away from the ‘developmental’ paradigm till today. Some 77.5 per cent of its area is under forest cover,...