Broadly, we think that a sound process of environmental clearance (including forest clearance) must incorporate at least the following principles:
1. It must be based on the understanding that ecological processes and peoples’ rights to a healthy and productive environment have to be fully respected, an understanding that needs to underpin all assessments and decisions taken in the process;
2. It should cover all kinds of projects and processes that have an impact on the environment, and also encompass combined impacts of several projects within the same impact zone;
3. It should also include entire sectors of economic activity, such that policies/programmes relating to power, irrigation, macro-economic strategies, agriculture, industry, commerce, and so on, should be taken through a sectoral EIA and clearance (this would be the most important pro-active step to make development sustainable);
4. It needs to be based on sound and adequate information and knowledge, which would include traditional and modern sciences and knowledge, and include both environmental and cultural/social impacts;
5. It must involve in a meaningful way, affected and interested citizens at all levels of decision-making, from the stage of conceptualisation and planning to the stage of implementation and monitoring of compliance;
6. Such participation would necessitate full public access to all relevant information (including at conception, proposal, implementation, and monitoring stages), availability of information in locally relevant forms (including languages), institutional structures of decision-making to which the public has full access, and in particular, the participation of local bodies (rural and urban) at various tiers;
7. The process must also incorporate the need for project proponents to obtain mandatory prior informed consent from affected communities, through a transparent process that involves full provision of information to such people and a written consent from the full assembly of the community/ies concerned;
8. Assessments, evaluations, and monitoring within such a process need to be carried out by neutral, credible, and publicly accountable agencies, which are independent of project proponents;
9. After clearance is granted and work on the project starts, there should be a process of review and renewal with automatic revocation and suspension of the project, if the conditions of clearance are repeatedly or seriously violated, with project proponents having to come back for fresh clearance in such an eventuality; in addition, penal sanctions are needed to ensure accountability of project proponents, EIA consultants, and regulators.
We feel that the above principles were only partially met by the initial notifications under the Environment Protection Act and the Forest Conservation Act. However, even these were further diluted in subsequent years, as has been repeatedly pointed out by civil society organisations. Rather than roll back these dilutions and strengthen the environmental clearance process to include the above principles, MoEF’s proposed “Reforms” will only lead to moving further away from these principles.