Keeping 2006 EIA will not solve environmental issues. India needs a law based on science

We are going through a difficult time. The COVID-19 pandemic, along with rising impacts of climate change such as extreme rainfall in Mumbai and landslide and floods in Kerala, starkly reminds us about the consequences of destroying the environment.

In such a time, the move of the Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change (MoEF&CC) to dilute the existing Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) law can be termed as nothing but insensitive.

It is in response to this insensitive action that people across the country are campaigning against the Draft EIA Notification 2020. Reportedly, lakhs of people have written to MoEF&CC to scrap the draft.

While I respect the sensitivity, I also want people to examine the substance of the draft notification and understand how good or bad is the 2020 draft compared to the existing law.

The Draft EIA Notification 2020 seeks to replace the existing law - the EIA notification of 2006 – which grants Environment Clearance (EC) to projects. The major criticisms against the new draft are that it dilutes scope of public participation, legalizes post-facto EC, removes the requirements of EIA study for several categories of projects, and weakens the provisions of reporting by companies. To understand the significance of these changes, let’s look at the 2006 law.

2006 EIA is worse

The EIA notification of 2006 is possibly the most amended piece of environmental law. In 14 years, it has been amended 43 times, and at least 50 office memorandums (worth at least 350 pages) have been issued to tweak this law. Many of these changes have diluted the original version for some or other industry.

The 2020 draft, in large part, brings together these revisions. Therefore, effectively the 2020 version is no worse than the existing one. So, while I appreciate the criticism of the proposed draft, keeping the 2006 version or even improving it is not going to solve the deep-rooted problems with the EIA process.

Let me explain why.

First, relying solely on the EIA of individual projects is bad science. The environment is affected by the cumulative impacts of all activities, which project-specific EIAs fail to capture. Even if individual projects meet all benchmarks, their cumulative effects may still destroy the environment. This is evident in most mining and industrial areas of the country – from Singrauli to Korba and from Vapi to Patancheru.

Second, the EIA report is prepared by a consultant paid by the project proponent. This creates an apparent conflict of interest, and therefore most EIA reports are not worth the paper they are written on. I am yet to come across an EIA report that says a project will cause significant ecological impacts.

Third, the process of the public hearing, which is mandated to take into account the concerns of the project-affected people, is a sham. It is neither an informed consultation nor informed consent. Most times, it is organized in the presence of police force and physical violence is not uncommon. Worst still, concerns of the community are dealt with in a cursory way by the Expert Appraisal Committees (EACs). EACs typically ask companies to make some investments, such as building schools or providing drinking water, to appease the community. MoEF&CC has even formalized this by calling these expenditures ‘Corporate Environment Responsibility (CER)’ and directing companies to earmark 0.125%–2% of the capital investment on CER.

Finally, the environmental conditions imposed on the companies are rarely monitored by authorities. Monitoring is based on self-certified half-yearly reports submitted by companies; this has been reduced to yearly report in the 2020 draft.

Lot of paperwork, no legitimacy

The fact is that the current EIA and EC process in India is defunct. While it involves a lot of paperwork, there is little improvement on the ground. 99.9% of the projects are cleared, and non-compliance of the safeguards is rampant. The paperwork and transaction costs, on the other hand, gives legitimacy to industries to argue for watering down the process further.

It is, therefore, time that we demand a new EIA law based on sound science, and robust and transparent decision-making processes to safeguard environment and community rights as well as to reduce investment risks of industries. This can be achieved by integrating three environmental concepts.

The first is the strategic environmental assessment (SEA). SEA will help to evaluate the ecological ramification of policies and plans and address concerns at the earliest stage of the decision-making process. Many countries have adopted SEA to integrate environmental concerns in policy-making.

The second is the regional planning approach. This involves conducting carrying capacity studies and developing regional plans based on them. This will allow us to take into account cumulative impacts and also provide information to project proponents to decide the location of the projects beforehand.

The third is project-specific EIAs. In this, EIAs should be done for big projects; doing EIA for small projects is a perversity of the EIA process. The focus here should be to improve environmental management plans and post-clearance monitoring. To enhance the quality of EIA reports, Environment Information Centres should be established to provide independent data to consultants and the EACs.

In all the three processes, public participation should be ensured to improve assessment and scrutiny.

The EIA process is the most important piece of environmental law as it has the scope to decide the development trajectory of the country. But this powerful piece of legislation has never been discussed or legislated by the parliament.

MoEF&CC should, therefore, scrap the draft EIA notification 2020 and bring a new EIA law suitable for the 21^st century, which the parliament can enact.

(The author is the President & CEO of the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology, iFOREST. Follow him on twitter @Bh_Chandra).