Natarajan in her first interaction with the media made it clear she that she would maintain a low profile but would continue to talk tough when it came to protecting the nation's natural environment and resources. Her low profile in the media in subsequent months had us convinced that hers would be a stoic but mature response to a Ministry that has courted many a controversy in recent times.
The Minister may have got good press, at two international level negotiations, at Durban and at Rio and has succeeded well in ensuring that the country's “development agenda" is not hampered by pressures from the developed world, but on the domestic front, the functioning of this Ministry in the last one year leaves much to be desired.
To start with Jayanthi Natarajan can lay claims to being a true green minister. She has given the green signal to every single project that has come to it for clearance, even those with ecologically disastrous consequences. Since she took over, she has chaired three meetings of the National Board of Wildlife, a premier decision making body that decides whether a crucial wildlife habitat should be signed away or not for a road or a dam project, not even one project has got a firm no.
And then there are projects which her own ministry's Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) has advised her to reject. For instance the 300 MW Alaknanda hydro-electric project is being constructed on the main tributary of the Ganga-by private company GMR. The Forest Advisory Committee and the Wildlife Institute of India had both recommended rejecting the project, because of the high ecological importance of the area.
But Natarajan over-ruled her own committee and gave a yes, despite the fact that the dam will destroy part of the buffer of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve rich in biodiversity and home to endangered wildlife such as the snow leopard, brown bear and 16 endangered plant species. Read the full report here.
Source: by Bahar Dutt, CNN-IBN, First Post.India.
