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In what could be a shocking move, the Karnataka government has scrapped the State Environmental Clearance Committee (SECC), which was in place for the last 29 years. This will enable the government to approve many small and medium industrial, infrastructure, mining and biotech projects among others without any review of their significant environmental and social impacts.
In a Government Order issued in February this year, the Department of Forest, Ecology and Environment (DFEE) decided to discontinue the SECC, much against the recommendations of a panel for retaining and reforming it, said Bangalore-based Environmental Support Group (ESG) in a release.
"Our efforts to convince the Karnataka government to revoke its decision to scrap SECC and make our report public, as required, have been unsuccessful. We consider the decision to discontinue SECC to be legally infirm and illogical," ESG said.
"We consider the decision not to make our report public is a contravention of Government Orders and TOR commissioning the study. An excellent opportunity to review and reform SECC and make it accountable, transparent, its administration decentralised and democratic has thus been lost. With it has also been lost an incredible opportunity to safeguard environment and public health in Karnataka," ESG added in the statement.
Genesis
In 1985, the Government of Karnataka took an unprecedented step by instituting the State Environmental Clearance Committee as a measure of strengthening its environmental decision making processes. The horrors of toxic gas leak from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal that killed and maimed thousands had exposed fundamental weaknesses in prevailing environmental regulatory controls essentially administered under pollution control laws by the State Pollution Control Boards. Karnataka was aware that environmental and social impacts of industrial, infrastructure development and extractive sectors had to be anticipated and safeguards built in priorly, to prevent recurrence of such a calamity.
Consequently, the SECC was set up in Karnataka to ensure industrial development and economic progress did not result in the irreversibly damaging human health and environment, and destroying irreplaceable biodiversity.
At the national level, Environment Protection Act enacted in 1986 sought to institute comprehensive environmental regulatory and management controls. But these were slow to come by. Karnataka therefore utilised the SECC mechanism that it had developed to anticipate and mitigate environmental impacts of various industrial and infrastructure development projects.
The SECC had the mandate to provide environmental clearance to industrial projects with an investment of below Rs 100 crore and above Rs 5 crore.
Review mechanism
Since there had not been a review of the efficacy of the SECC mechanism since it was established, in 2013 Sridharan, the then Principal Secretary of the Karnataka Department of Ecology, Environment and Forests directed the state's Environmental Management Policy Research Institute (EMPRI) to undertake a comprehensive review. EMPRI contracted the services of ESG to conduct the review based on a thoughtfully evolved Terms of Reference (TOR) and Agreement that involved specific commitments that the final report would be made public.
On this basis the study was undertaken over a period of one year with support and cooperation from the EMPRI leadership and staff. A framework was developed to rigorously and comprehensively assess and analyse the working of the SECC.
This involved reviewing 447 clearances that had been accorded during 2002-2012 to dams, industries, mining projects, infrastructure projects, biotech firms, radiation processing units, etc. and field verification of 10 per cent of these projects across various sectors and district was undertaken to assess extent of compliance with clearance conditions. The quality of the clearance accorded was also thoroughly reviewed for sectoral specificity.
On the basis of this work, we prepared the report in collaboration with EMPRI and proposed various ways to reform the agency in securing the ecological security of the State. The Final Draft Report reviewing SECC was submitted in January 2014 to N Sivasailam, then Principal Secretary of the Karnataka Environment Department. However, instead of making the report public, the Karnataka Environment Department, on February 7, 2014, decided to scrap the SECC.
The brief order issued claimed that the SECC had become irrelevant. This order does not acknowledge that a State funded study on the working of the SECC with the intent of reforming the institution had been commissioned and that the report was pending public review.
In a meeting of the Board of EMPRI held on April 2, 2014 and chaired by Madan Gopal, Principal Secretary of the Environment Department, it was decided on the advise of Ramachandra, Secretary of the Karnataka Environment Department that "only a limited number of copies of report may be printed and used for academic purposes" and that "there is no need of conducting workshops or publishing the report on the EMPRI website".
Subsequently, ESG decided to make the report public on its own, the statement added.
