 "Subramanian panel report on environment laws: Mischief is in details hiding under Umbrella law")
I do think the TSR Subramanian report legitimises several ideas that the NDA government was already keen on. In itself that should not be a reason for the high level panel to keep the ideas out. But several of these recommendations are either half-baked or detrimental for environmental conservation.
Fast-tracking coal and power projects by short-circuiting appraisals, overriding forest rights act in some cases, reducing no-go areas to cover not much more than protected areas, emaciating judicial review of government decisions are some of these recommendations that could be dangerous.
Good governance could be helped by a single new all-encompassing environmental law. Will the model bill suggested by the high level panel provide that framework? I have serious doubts. It looks to merely export the functions of the existing clearance expert committees and bureaucracy to bodies with new names and garb. Not much more.
The need of the hour, as organisations such as Centre for Science and Environment have said too often, is to substantially enhance monitoring and surveillance on ground. It requires much larger capacities and more technical support and not outsourcing. Partial self-certification by industry (we already have it in large doses in the appraisal process) would perhaps work if the government was serious on this aspect. There is not a hint that this government, just like the previous one, wants to enhance those capacities. The report itself remains thin on it. We have seen some of the largest scams of natural resource plunder come up in the past decade as PILs and not because they were found out by the executive and their arms.
The report, peppered with quotes from the Upanishad, measures the symptoms well and sets the large principles in place like many other experts have before it. But, its diagnosis is influenced too heavily by what the government wanted pronounced. It ends up often recommending one thing all governments love - hastening clearances. It does not attempt to answer one thing all governments dislike doing away with – bureaucratic political discretion at the top. As a consequence, if the report is accepted in large parts, it would steer projects faster through a simplified clearance mechanism and reduce rent-seeking at lower levels of bureaucracy but leave enough discretion with the upper echelons of power.
The haste and non-transparency with which the committee has done its work is too evident. It has not spent as many pages or as much time looking at what would also protect environment better. This is where the detail is either missing or too often runs contrary to the large principles the report’s authors set out at the beginning.
One would have loved to see the submissions that everyone made to the committee - the industry, the government, the NGOs – form part of the report and permit people to match it up against the recommendations proffered.
The environment minister has said the government shall set up a committee to draft the new law taking the high-level panel report in to consideration. Haste in doing so (the government wants the new law to be tabled in the budget session), and lack of transparency more-so, in this case could be far more dangerous.
Having a single law on environmental regulation would be good only when one knows what’s in the provisions, rules and regulations of the law. Unfortunately, the Subramanian committee report recommends several bad provisions, rules, ideas and escape routes to embed as land-mines on the new road it paves.
A less relevant point: I was asked by some to comment especially on the Business Standard edit on the recommendations of the report. I presume because the paper has done a series of stories accessing the full report before it was released by the government. I agree in principle with the edit by our paper today. I see some of the details in different light perhaps. The report has also been officially released now. A chance for everyone to read what is in it, what it implies and what has got left out.