One Day Virtual Workshop On Environmental Impact Assessment & it’s effectiveness in India: An analysis of EIA draft notification of 2020 was organized on the occasion of World Environment Day to discuss the EIA Draft notification 2020.
The Draft EIA Notification which was issued in March 2020, continued the tradition of creating an industry-friendly EIA process in India. Rather, it almost made the situation worse. The draft notification proposed to take away the voice of people by exempting the stage of public consultation from a range of projects and by reducing the time period for filing written objection from 30 days to 21 days.The draft notification provided an opportunity to all the industrial units and projects, which were operating illegally without environmental clearances to turn into legal units just by submitting a remedial plan and by paying the prescribed penalty. However, this provision will not be able to undone the harm caused to the environment by these industrial units and projects. Entry 42 of the schedule proposed to increase the threshold area for the projects which do not require EIA from 20,000 sq. kilometers to 1, 50,000 sq. kilometers. This means that a larger number of projects now will not require EIA. It is however, a fact that mostly small-scale enterprises and medium enterprises are the ones which cause more damage to the environment than the large-scale industries.The draft notification also proposed to change the current requirement of filing a compliance report from every six months by the industrial units and projects to just one yearly report. Recently, in April, 2022, the Government has introduced some major amendments in the 2006 EIA notification which again raise the same issues of equity and justice. The notification issued on 12th April, 2022, has extended the validity period of a prior environmental clearance granted to start various projects. It would mean that the next review for environmental review will take place after a long period of time. Similarly, the notification issued on 20th April, 2022, grants power to the Central government to assess and grant environmental clearance to the projects under national defense or security importance, instead of the state.
