Environment Day: Residents clean Godavari river banks

Hundreds of city residents today cleaned the Godavari river banks here to mark the World Environment Day.
The residents along with officials of the Nashik Municipal Corporation (NMC) picked up garbage from several places on the Godavari river banks, civic officials said.
City mayor Ashok Murtadak and civic commissioner Praveen Gedam too participated in the activity, they said.
Murtadak said the civic body has asked people and builders to plant a tree each and send the selfies to NMC.
"The Government of India enacted the Environment
(Protection) Act in 1986 with the objective of providing protection and improvement of the environment. But, no states, including Kerala, have implemented it effectively so far, despite instructions by Supreme Court in the MC Mehta case," Thomas said.

Even though corruption manifests in several forms, at several levels and at several degrees and impact, it turns into an organized crime when it comes to obtaining pecuniary gains from exploiting natural resources, the official said.

"Often environment degrading actions are perpetrated through abuse of power by some public servants in the departments concerned in collusion with the private interests disregarding the natural resources," Thomas said.
He said corruption-linked-environmental value eroding activities thriving in the state include licensing of pollution testing centres that do not check effectively air pollution from vehicles, registering of lower standard vehicles, insufficient water sample testing, use of forest/leased land for non-agricultural or non-forestry purpose and encroachment of land for constructing buildings.

Unscientific felling of trees, quarrying and mining, sand mining in ports, and rivers, unpermitted filling of lands, paddy or wetlands and cutting of mangroves also fall in this category, he added.
Under ERV initiative, he said "Notices will be sent to all the department heads at district level or nodal officer or the competent authority of each of the categories of natural resources or environmental risks producing activities, based on vigilance intelligence observations."
The agency recently launched a major initiative in the environment sector-the verification of the illegal quarrying at Mukkunnimala near here. VACB is proposing to develop partnership with various stakeholders in their mission.

The VACB director visited the quarry site at Mukkunnimala earlier this week, conducted an inspection and decided to carry out a survey before September 18 to take stock of the illegal encroachments by the quarry lobby.