No work on mangrove land without court nod- HC

Mayura Janwalkar /
DNAThursday, January 28, 2010 0:21 IST

Mumbai: Development on mangrove land will be subject to the Bombay high court’s scrutiny, according to a directive given by justice JN Patel and justice BR Gavai on Wednesday.

In a PIL filed by the Bombay Environmental Action Group (BEAG) seeking conservation of mangroves, the petitioners were seeking compliance of a high court order of October 6, 2005, in which the state government was ordered to notify mangroves as protected forests.

The court also indicated that no non-forest activity should be conducted in mangrove areas in Maharashtra, even if they are not notified as protected forests. “No destruction will be permitted in mangrove areas,” Patel said.

Arguing for BEAG, senior counsel Navroz Seervai told the court that 230 sq km of mangrove cover along the state’s coastline was still not notified as protected forest by the state. “The Maharashtra Remote Sensing Application Centre (MRSAC) had identified the area but the government failed to notify it despite the time extensions granted to it,” Seervai said.

Advocate general Ravi Kadam, however, said that the phase-wise notification of protected forests had already begun and the entire exercise may take six months.

Tata Power, which is seeking permission to erect transmission towers to generate electricity for Mumbai and Navi-Mumbai, has been constrained owing to the 2005 order banning hacking of mangroves. Counsel Janak Dwarkadas said the thermal power station was a sustainable development project in public interest. He said if mangroves were hacked to make way for the power-station they would be replanted elsewhere. “Forests are natural, you cannot plant them. Just like you cannot grow hair on a bald head,” Patel said.

The court allowed Tata Power and other intervenors to move government bodies for necessary permissions.

CEC recommends 'stop work' for UP Park

(http://www.hindustantimes.com/News/newdelhi/Stop-work-on-park-says-court-appointed-panel/Article1-450472.aspx)

On Monday, the Supreme Court will decide whether work on the Rs 685-crore (Rs 6,850 million) Bhim Rao Ambedkar Memorial Park in Noida should be allowed to go on, pending clearances from the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF).

For now, the dice seem loaded against the park — temporarily, at least — after a fact-finding expert panel appointed by the court concluded that the project lacked mandatory central environmental clearances and recommended the Supreme Court stop its construction.

The report of the Central Empowered Committee (CEC),  a copy of which is with HT, states that the “project requires environmental clearance” under the MoEF’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notification of September 14, 2006.

The panel has recommended that the “Uttar Pradesh (UP) state government should be directed to seek the environmental clearance for the present project from the MoEF in terms of the (EIA) notification… If the project is found by the MoEF to be environmentally viable, it may allow the project subject to the appropriate safeguards/conditions.”

The report pointedly states, “pending the environmental clearances, no further works should be carried out.”

Lawyer Jayant Bhushan, who represented Anand Arya and Kanan Jaswal, petitioners against the project, said, “It is a big victory, for now… we expect the Supreme Court would formally stay the construction work at the project site on Monday.”

An MoEF probe, initiated after HT first reported on the suspected irregularities on July 5, had on July 10 established the project’s violation of the EIA notification on two counts.

The project lacked an EIA certificate although it lay barely 100 metres from the centrally-protected Okhla Bird Park and Wildlife Sanctuary (OBPWS).

Under rules, a new construction project within 10 km of such a preserve requires environmental clearance.

The project also lacked the mandatory certificate for construction spread over an area exceeding 20,000 square metres, even though the park’s construction activities were spread over approximately 3.25 lakh square metres.

The CEC rejected the arguments of the UP government and the Noida authority that the project did not need clearances under the EIA notification.

The CEC also found: “had the state government decided eco-sensitive areas around national parks and sanctuaries”, as required of it by a ministry directive pending for four years, “the project area in all probability would have fallen within the eco-sensitive zone.”

The CEC report, however, established that the project area does not fall in the category of forest and does not require approval under the Forest Conservation Act of 1980. The project had uprooted around 6,003 trees.