<b>BS People:</b> Meena Gupta

Standing apart

Irony stalks Meena Gupta like a shadow. The spotlight fell on the former secretary in the ministry of environment & forests recently for her dissenting note as head of a four-member committee of experts constituted by the ministry on July 28. The panel’s brief: to review compliance with environmental and coastal regulation zone clearances by the Posco steel project in Orissa.

Controversy surrounded Gupta’s differences with the other experts on interpreting violations of the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, by Posco. Clearances were given to the project, despite the fact that the consent-seeking process under FRA was not completed. However, Gupta had said that in this case, those affected were not tribals and weren’t that vulnerable as tribals displaced by the Vedanta alumina project. Ironically, Gupta was secretary in the ministry of tribal affairs when the FRA came into force. Despite her dissent on several aspects, Gupta agreed with other members of the panel that gram sabha hearings should be conducted before allowing the Posco project to go ahead.

The second irony stems from the fact that Gupta, apart from being a Orissa cadre officer herself, presided over the coastal regulation zone clearances given to Posco for the steel plant and is today being accused of going soft on these clearances. She differed from the rest of the panel to say that the clearances granted by her former ministry were final and could not be questioned, and that only further conditions could be placed on the project.

Gupta, in her defence, said that she never wanted to be on the panel in the first place as she hailed from Orissa and had been part of the clearance-granting process.

But that did not stop other members in the panel, as well as forest rights groups who once lauded her for the FRA, from questioning the fact that she had stopped short of cancelling the clearances given to Posco, even when they had been found illegal by the committee. Her defence in this case was that these were conditional clearances and that conditions could always be complied with.