Govt offers one-time amnesty for projects working without green clearance

Projects to pay for clean up if environmental damage is found

Hundreds of existing projects and industries that have come up without mandatory prior environmental clearances under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 could now stand to benefit from a one-time conditional amnesty. The Union environment, forests and climate change ministry has passed a new notification providing for conditional clearances to all those projects that took off illegally before April 11, 2017.

About a year back the environment ministry had told the courts that about 450 such projects had been identified to be either under construction or operating without mandatory environment clearances. Sources in the ministry say the numbers could be much