The fate of the Rs 54,000-crore Posco steel plant in Orissa will be discussed tomorrow when the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) will meet Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh to come up with a course of action on the proposed steel plant. The FAC met today to discuss the issue.
“No decision was taken today and it has been deferred till tomorrow. The matter will be discussed with the minister tomorrow and though the FAC has come up with two-three courses of action, they will come up with a final decision before meeting the minister,” said an environment ministry official.
An FAC member said: “The meeting was a confidential matter.” The committee met today, a week after the government-appointed Meena Gupta panel could not unanimously decide on the project’s future, as three of the four members of the committee suggested scrapping the environmental clearances given to it, while the fourth, Gupta, recommended a go-ahead.
The report by the three other members of the Gupta panel — Urmila Pingle, Devendra Pandey and V Suresh — strongly felt there had been serious lapses and illegalities in the environment impact assessment (EIA) process.
They held the EIA prepared for the Posco project was done rapidly, based on single-season data, without taking into account all the components like the township project, water project, railway and transport facilities.
In the meeting today, a team of officials of the Orissa government informed the FAC that the three members of the Meena Gupta panel went beyond the committee’s mandate in questioning the environmental and CRZ (Coastal Regulatory Zone) clearance granted to the project by the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF).
Appearing before the FAC at New Delhi today, the officials reiterated the state government’s stand that there had been no violation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) at the project site.
“We stated at the FAC meeting that the three members of the Meena Gupta panel in their report have gone beyond the mandate of the committee in questioning the environmental and CRZ clearance given to the Posco project. In doing so, these three members have challenged the authority of MoEF,” said Siddhant Das, member-secretary of the Orissa State Pollution Control Board.
