A major dam project of the Madhya Pradesh government, which is part of the Centre’s marquee Ken-Betwa river interlinking project, was found to be in violation of environment clearance laws by an expert committee of the Union Environment Ministry, The Hindu has learnt from a perusal of publicly available documents.
In an effort to rectify the situation, the Centre has invoked a set of controversial orders whose legality is being examined by the Supreme Court. The sequence of events demonstrates the confusion among the States in interpreting the Centre’s environment clearance processes and how this results in ad-hoc fixes being applied as amends.
In 2019, the Madhya Pradesh government began constructing the Lower Orr dam – part of the second phase of the Centre’s ambitious Ken-Betwa river interlinking project – only to be told by an expert appraisal committee (EAC), tasked with assessing the environmental impact of projects, in 2022 that the State hadn’t taken a formal clearance from the Environment Ministry for the project.
