Spiritual guru Ravi Shankar's Art of Living (AOL) today moved the National Green Tribunal seeking extension of time for submitting its response to the expert committee's report on Yamuna, which had said its cultural extragavanza "completely destroyed" the riverbed.
A seven-member expert committee headed by Shashi Shekhar, Secretary of Ministry of Water Resources, had opined that the three-day 'World Culture Festival' organised by AOL had not only damaged the floodplain, but the ground also was "now totally levelled, compacted and hardened and is totally devoid of water bodies or depressions and almost completely devoid of any vegetation".
However, AOL had refuted the findings and said the NGT committee's finding is "biased, unscientific, lacked credibility".
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"The report, recently submitted by the committee to the NGT, contains no analysis, no in-depth investigation, no reports of any scientific tests to support the conclusions. The conclusions in the report are merely the opinion of the expert committee without scientific basis. The report does not reflect the true state of the ground," it said.
The NGT had directed the expert committee of senior scientists and experts from National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, IIT, Delhi and other agencies to inspect the site of the AOL festival site which was held in March.
The committee, in its 47-page report, had said that due to the three-day event, the floodplain has lost "almost all its natural vegetation" like trees, shrubs, tall grasses, aquatic vegetation including water hyacinth which provides habitat to large number of animals, insects and mud-dwelling organisms.
The green panel on March 9 had refused to prohibit the 'World Culture Festival', held from March 11 to 13, but had asked AOL to pay a compensation of Rs 5 crore for damaging biodiversity and aquatic life of Yamuna.
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