Good times now, but Rahul Gandhi may have made Adani target of environment ministry

Stocks in the Adani group have soared over the last 10 months, helped in no small measure by the fact that environmental clearances for its Mundra port and SEZ project were cleared by the new Modi government that came to power in May this year.

The Adani Port stock has risen 124 percent since September 2013, when Narendra Modi was declared as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate:

However, things were not always this rosy.

Gautam Adani, the head of the Adani group, was a familiar target of Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on the campaign trail during the recent general elections. Listing him as the beneficiary of what he called Narendra Modi’s ’toffee model’ of land allocation, Gandhi accused the businessman of being a little too close to the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate.

While it may have amounted to naught, it turns out Rahul Gandhi and the Congress had put Adani in its crosshairs well before the election campaign began, with his key aide Kanishka Singh reportedly pushing the cause of a Gujarat Congress secretary with the then Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan.

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According to emails the _Economic Times_says it has exclusive access to, the secretary of the Congress unit in Gujarat had written to Gandhi in July 2012 seeking that a committee be set up under a renowned environmentalist like Centre for Science and Environment chief Sunita Narain, a request that was subsequently sent to the Congress vice president’s chief aide Kanishka Singh.

Singh reportedly forwarded the request to Natarajan saying that the Congress vice president had asked for the matter to be forwarded to her and action to be taken on it. He reportedly followed it up a month later with an email seeking to set up a meeting between the Congress functionary and the minister.

The Congress leader from Gujarat subsequently wrote to the Environment Minister suggesting terms of reference for the committee to investigate the claims that the Mudra port set up by Adani had violated environmental norms and fake papers had been used by the industrial house. Singh didn’t respond to the article while Natarajan said the Congress Vice President hadn’t dictated her ministry’s actions.

The environment ministry subsequently did form a five member committee in September 2012 to investigate the Mudra port and SEZ in Gujarat and it was headed by CSE’s Sunita Narain.

The Narain-headed committee in its findings to the ministry said that there was evidence that the company circumvented statutory procedures by using central and state agencies and pointed out that the public hearings that were supposed to be done were bypassed completely.

Among the recommendations made by the committee was the suggestion that the ministry of environment should create an environment restoration fund with 1 per cent of the project cost or Rs 200 crore. The committee said the funds should be used for the remedying of the ecological damage caused and to strengthen the monitoring systems.

It also recommended the cancellation of the environmental clearance granted to the North Port at Mudra which it said threatens the mangroves and the ecological balance in the area.

The government had then slapped a Rs 200 crore penalty in September 2013on the port on the basis of the committee report. A PIL had also been filed against the project, following which an exasperated Supreme Court had asked the ministry of environment and forests to decide on whether it wanted to grant clearance for the project or not.

The project, stalled since 2013, received environmental clearance in July this year soon after the Modi government came to power. There was no mention of the Narain report.