Why Moily's clearance sale should not shock the green lobby or comfort India Inc

Two weeks in the job. More than 65 infrastructure projects and investments worth at least Rs 80,000 crore cleared. The notification of Ecologically Sensitive Areas in 60,000 sq km of the Western Ghats across six states stalled indefinitely. A united sarkari stand cemented against the Supreme Court’s Technical Expert Committee report, clearing the decks for resuming field trials of Genetically Modified (GM) crops.

Since he relaxed clearance norms for certain industries, such as river sand mining, immediately after taking over the green ministry on 24 December last year, Veerappa Moily has not wavered from his brief. All in all, in less than a year, the Cabinet Committee on Investment (CCI) and the Project Monitoring Group in the Cabinet Secretariat of the UPA2 have pushed through at least 300 investments worth nearly Rs 6 lakh crore.

If India Inc is not cheering openly it is because the industry sees this surge - coming after nearly four years of so-called policy paralysis - as too late, if not little. Environmentalists and rights activists, however, hold that the CCI was set up to bypass laws to ensure summary clearances for big investments. They are naturally aghast at Moily’s tearing hurry.

More from Economy

Budget 2024: These are the many hopes and aspirations of India's social development sector Is the United States in recession? Signs to watch out for

Indeed, many of these clearances overrule the recommendations of various statutory bodies - the National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) in case of the Rs 3600-crore Teesta IV in Sikkim or the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in case of the Rs 6100-crore Tawang II in Arunachal Pradesh. Others, such as the Rs 4000-crore Nellore port that has been cleared without the consent of 40,000 project-affected fishermen in Dugarajapatnam, violate livelihood or religious rights.

[caption id=“attachment_1309295” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Veerappa Moily in this file photo. PTI[/caption]

But truth be told, very few, if any, of these 300 mega projects would have passed the increasingly righteous green muster. For both growth and green hawks - and I dare say they rule this debate - it is an absurd game of all or nothing. The green lobby wants to save everything. And nothing suffices for the growth lobby. Since neither has any rational yardstick for success or failure, their shrill debate has long been reduced to a clash of two belief systems.

But India needs new roads, industries, mines, power plants, ports etc. Unless we demolish our houses or clear agricultural fields to make room for these, we have to build them where natural space is available. And wherever we build them - in forests, pastures, mountains, deserts or beaches - we will end up destroying natural ecosystems. Even wasteland, such as ravines, has its own biodiversity.

In the absence of a zero-loss scenario, the solution lies in maximising the gain and minimising the loss. The existing infrastructure must be milked to its capacity. Before asking for more power, the massive transition losses must be plugged. Before opening up new mines, the existing ones must be exhausted. And aspirations must be rationalised, too. Unbearable infrastructure boom eventually ends up in recurrent tragedies, like the deluge in the Uttarakhand hills.

But even a most reasonable demand for infrastructural growth will require conversion of more and more natural areas over time. While it is nobody’s guess how efficient our technology, or how frugal our needs, may become in the future to deal with increasing scarcity of land, water and other natural resources, it certainly makes both ecological and economic sense to save our best natural landscapes for, or till, the last.

To ensure that, we need to know which natural areas are invaluable; which can be compromised if we must; and which can be dispensed with to accommodate legitimate growth. At present, everybody is in the dark about these relative priorities of our natural assets. So, industries can be barred from ten times the area of a tiny, nondescript pocket forest because laws prescribe an ecologically sensitive ring around every sanctuary, while a critical wildlife corridor does not even come under any legal protection.

In fact, former environment minister Jairam Ramesh had prescribed a ‘go, no-go’ forest regime for coal mining but backed out in the face of the growth hawks in the cabinet. Then, last January, an expert MoEF panel proposed a mechanism for demarcating top-priority natural areas on a national grid of 1km x 1km units.

These included protected areas (PA) and a one-km-ring around PAs; compact patches of very dense forests; last remnants of forest types found in less than 50 sq km area in the entire country; areas located in direct draining catchment of important perennial streams that serve as water sources or feed hydropower projects; areas within 250 m of perennial rivers and important wetlands.

Remaining forested areas, the report said, would be scored on a scale of 100 against six measurable parameters - forest type, biological richness, wildlife value, forest cover, landscape integrity and hydrological value - and an area with a score of 70 or above will be considered untouchable. Though this report was in the context of mining, similar exercises are a must to map the hydel carrying capacities of our rivers and so on.

The report was immediately shelved. Surprisingly, busy fighting battles wherever a project is proposed or opposed, the green and growth warriors also forgot about it. It is anybody’s guess why they failed to thrash out a consensus on the proposed parameters that, once accepted and applied on the ground by the government, would have drastically reduced the room for both sidestepping green laws and flagging trivial green objections.

The second flashpoint of this debate is the people’s consent under laws such as the Panchayat or the Forest Rights Act. Since unanimous verdicts - such as the rejection by 12 palli sabhas of Vedanta’s plans for mining bauxite in Odisha’s Niyamgiri hills - from the project-affected are rare, we need a set of clear yardsticks to determine what constitutes consent or lack thereof. But that discussion will require another article.

As it stands, rhetorical green-versus-growth debates undermine both ecology and economy. While it allows both groups to play victim, a coveted position in any ideological faceoff, it does make real victims of both. Unless the growth hawks are happy that they always have their way eventually - often through costly manipulation of the system after many years of delay - they will not seek much comfort in Moily’s clearance sale.

As for the greens, they can feel justifiably outraged that a number of decisions taken by the new minister brazenly overstep the due process of law. But that will have as much effect on him as it has had on his many predecessors. Unless the greens accept that everything is not defensible and demand of the proponents of growth that they sit with them to identify and defend together what indeed has to be defended.

When it is not all-or-nothing, there will be something in it for both.