The National Green Tribunal’s southern zone bench in Chennai has recommended that the State-Level Environment Impact Assessment Authorities (SEIAAs) be brought under the direct administrative control of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) to avoid the “eagerness” shown by them to grant environment clearances to State government projects, without due diligence.
Judicial Member Pushpa Sathyanarayana and expert member Satyagopal Korlapati have made the recommendation after observing that they had come across many cases where SEIAAs had granted environment clearances without undertaking a critical scrutiny. “This can have a serious and long lasting impact on the environment and defeat the very purpose of Environment (Protection) Act, 1986,” they wrote.
The bench said, in most cases, the SEIAAs tend to trust the misleading information provided by the project proponents (State government departments) on their face value and end up considering B1 category projects under the B2 category thereby dispensing with the requirement of undertaking environmental impact assessments and conducting public hearings before granting the environment clearance.
