The Madras High Court today directed the Environment and Forests Ministry to nominate the chairman to The Loss of Ecology Authority for Tamil Nadu (Prevention and Payments of compensation) within a month.
The court stated this while disposing of a petition on awarding compensation to agriculturists whose land was seriously affected by ecological pollution caused to Noyyal river due to discharge of effluents from a large number of dyeing and bleaching units in and around Tiruppur.
The first bench, comprising Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice R Mahadevan, passed the orders on a petition by one S Jayalakshmi, since deceased.
"We are informed that actually the claims may number as large as 28,000. It is more than a full-time job even for one body. The least we can expect is to make the Loss of Ecology Authority of the state government functional for the purposes of determining compensation in respect of the claimants who are affected by the pollution as a consequence of the effluent discharge."
"We thus call upon the Union of India to nominate the Chairman of the said body within a maximum period of one month of the receipt of the order and provide necessary facilities to make it fully functional so that it can forthwith proceed with the task of determining the compensation."
Earlier there were several rounds of litigations and the affected agriculturists were waiting to receive their compensation for almost 18 years.
