EPW JANUARY 2014
On 9 January, the Supreme Court directed the government to establish an environment regulator at the national and state levels by 31 March. The regulator will evaluate projects on environmental aspects, regulate their clearance, monitor compliance of the conditions it sets for projects and penalise violators. Initial reports suggest that environmentalists have, by and large, welcomed the apex court’s orders.
Their reaction is not surprising. The order has come at a time when the government has warmed up to the industry like never before. It does not see any conflict of interest in giving Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Veerappa Moily additional charge of the Ministry of Environment and Forests. The media is rife with speculation that the previous incumbent Jayanthi Natarajan was dumped because she was tardy in clearing projects. Moily has promised to make up for his predecessor’s laxity.
Those who are concerned about the environment believe the Court order will throw a spanner in the petroleum-cum-environment minister’s works. They believe that a regulator will make the environment ministry transparent and accountable. The mechanism for appraising the environmental impacts of projects certainly requires serious questioning. In fact, the environment ministry, with the support of some non-governmental organisations (NGOs), had mooted a National Environment Protection Agency in 2010. Discussion papers of the ministry had proposed two models for the agency: the structure of the Prasar Bharati and that of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. But the proposal was shelved before the modalities for the agency could be worked out; the then environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, had been shunted out.
It is anybody’s guess if the agency proposed in 2010 would have improved matters. But as things stand, the environment ministry has neither the skill nor the political will to evaluate projects properly. Projects either get caught in the bureaucratic maze or are cleared in haste. State pollution control boards are beset by a similar malaise. They have rarely shown the will to punish polluting outfits. The so-called autonomous and independent state environmental impact assessment (EIA) authorities have become sinecures for retired bureaucrats who do nothing more than hold monthly meetings where projects are cleared almost as a ritual. Most EIA reports are doctored in the project proponent’s favour. Environmentalists believe that this state of affairs will improve once a regulator is in place.
But the necessity to reform environmental governance should not make us lose sight of what ails the system in the first place. That is why we must be cautious about the new Supreme Court directive. The sorry plight of the environment in the country is not due to a lack of government agencies or laws. In fact as we have seen, there are one too many. What hobbles environmental governance in the country is dearth of political will and a slipshod attitude to accountability. How will the new regulator summon these qualifications, when transparency and accountability are at a premium in other regulatory bodies? Much has been made of the autonomy of regulatory institutions. What good is an autonomous but non-transparent and unaccountable regulator? What is to prevent regulatory capture by industry?
An even more serious problem is lack of skills. Many of our administrators do come with distinguished academic records. But there is only the occasional administrator who is sensitive to local environmental nuances. In a country where ecology shows new facets every few hundred kilometres and springs a surprise almost every other month, how will a regulator sitting in Delhi or in state capitals do justice to the environment? Some reports suggest that the state EIA authorities will be absorbed in the new regulator’s office. It is difficult to see how the clearing-houses under the old dispensation will become intelligent evaluators under the new regulatory body.
It is somewhat surprising that in rolling out the red carpet to the regulator, environmentalists are missing out on an institution that many of them champion elsewhere: the gram sabha. A lot of the rot in environmental governance stems from the insincerity with which we have gone about in meeting an essential requirement of EIA: gram sabha consent for projects. Gram sabhas were meant to make people participate in the decision-making process and approve projects at the village level. But the requirement of gram sabha consent has become somewhat of a formality for project proponents, in some cases just a minor irritant. Gram sabha meetings are held only in name; often minimum attendance is somehow cobbled up or people bullied into giving consent to a project. But there have been times when gram sabhas have given us lessons in democracy. In Niyamgiri recently, gram sabha rejection has meant the Odisha government cannot push the boundaries of the law to favour the mining giant, Vedanta. People in Niyamgiri showed that robust democratic institutions negotiate environmental issues far better than administrative – or regulatory – ones. One option to improve environmental governance then may be to strengthen the capacities of the gram sabha and make the administrative institutions responsive and accountable to these local bodies, rather than add one more institution, law or regulator to an already crowded and inefficient system.
No comments:
Post a Comment