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 higher and it would only come to fore once violators now apply for retrospective clearances.

The amnesty can be availed potentially by all those who began constructing their projects, expanded their projects, commenced production or changed the product mix without prior environmental approval.

The regulation requires the violators to apply within six months for the retrospective green nod. Illegal factors that are ready to commence production will have to wait till they get the environmental clearance under the process prescribed by the new notification.

The environment ministry’s expert committees at the Centre will at first assess the violating project to ascertain if it has come up in locations that are expressly prohibited to them. For example heavily polluting industries can under no condition be permitted in demarcated environmentally sensitive zones. If the project is found at a site which is not permissible the expert committee will recommend a closure. If a project has expanded beyond the limits prescribed in the clearances then the committee will assess if the project expansion is sustainable with adequate safeguards. These terms are not predefined in the notification.

Those violators that clear this level will ask the project developer to get an assessment done of the level of damage caused to the environment by accredited consultants and laboratories. Along-side they shall be required to undertake the usual process of seeking environment clearance – get an impact assessment report prepared and cleared after a public hearing.

The expert committee will recommend a cost for the environmental damage and clean-up which will be approved by the environment ministry. The project developer will be required to submit an equivalent amount as a bank guarantee. Once the clean-up has been done and the expert appraisal committee and the ministry both agree to the fact the guarantee can be revoked.

The project developer will also be prosecuted for violations under the environment laws. Though the law and its attendant regulations along with the Supreme Court orders provide vast powers including jail terms and full closure of the project. But ministry officials had earlier told Business Standard that it was not aware of any case where a jail term had been given or the maximum fine imposed. In most violation cases, the ministry said, penalties of Rs 25,000 had been imposed.

The latest notification comes after the original draft raised a stink for being a near verbatim copy of regulations from the US. “This is a much watered down version of the draft version. In a way, I can say that they have largely taken into consideration the objections raised by people like us. Most significantly, Environment Supplement Plan, which was the copy and paste version has been completely done away with. The whole issue of linking it with environment justice and climate change is also not there,” Ritwick Dutta, environmental lawyer said.

The need for a notification in the first place had arisen after multiple courts rejected administrative orders of the environment ministry passed during UPA era condoning violations with very soft conditions. Existing regulations themselves provided no space for giving retrospective clearances to projects that had come up, expanded or changed without environmental clearances.