Environment regulation regime is set for radical change.
While the climate change negotiations go into their final lap, the domestic environment regulation regime will undergo radical change if the proposals mooted by Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister, are implemented. Significant among the legislative changes proposed are the setting up of quasi-judicial regulatory entities, such as a national environmental protection authority (Nepa) and a national green tribunal (NGT). The apex authority is to be modelled on the telecom regulator and the stock market regulator, as also on the US EPA—and recognises the fact that the existing environment regulators have not been effective. The green tribunals, meanwhile, are to be empowered to take up all litigation on environment- and forest-related issues. This is not new as an idea, having been put forth first by the Law Commission in 2003. Tribunals can work well, but an important issue will be whether the green ones should be headed by (usually) super-annuated bureaucrats from the all-encompassing IAS union, or from the judiciary. Readers will recall that a tussle on the issue had held up the formation of the Competition Commission for years.
In an important development, meanwhile, the Supreme Court has unlocked about Rs 11,000 crore lying idle in the compulsory afforestation fund. Collected over the years as compulsory afforestation charges from companies setting up units on forest land, the money has remained locked up because of differences between the government and the Supreme Court-appointed committee on how it should be used. Now that the apex court itself has settled this issue by ordering that Rs 1,000 crore be released every year to states for spending on afforestation and catchment area treatment plans, the financial hurdle is out of the way. The money being made available is significant, considering that the total budgetary allocations for forests and environment of all states put together is barely Rs 800 crore. This should facilitate taking up the area under forests from the 20 per cent level where it has remained virtually unchanged for half a century, to the target level of 33 per cent. In fact, if the area under scanty tree cover is excluded, the real forest cover in the country is barely 12 per cent. It helps that the new environment minister has managed to achieve some convergence between afforestation and the rural employment guarantee programme (which has large funds at its disposal and by definition has a large manpower available as well).
It is also encouraging that the whole business of environmental clearance for projects is being made open and transparent. These clearances have been the source of a great deal of corruption, even as the process itself has been largely meaningless because 98 per cent of applications have got cleared anyway—often with conditions that no one subsequently has monitored. The decision to put all applications on a website, and disclose on it the stage of clearance in each case, should achieve several changes in this unsatisfactory situation.
