Minister Jairam Ramesh said the ministry is contemplating to make environment impact assessment mandatory for geographies with concentration of projects, wherein each project would be made to adhere to recommendations of cumulative assessment.
Chief financial officer of a 1,320mw thermal power project coming up at Nellore in AP, on condition of anonymity, said, “The move towards stringent regulations to satisfy environmentalists will inordinately delay the process of environmental clearances since the ministry is not at all equipped and as a result project implementation schedules will be badly hit." TV Krishna, MD of East Coast Energy, setting up 2,640mw coal-fired power project in Srikakulam district of Andhra Pradesh, said, “It will put to rest all the accusations on the power project developers. What we want is an independent panel to oversee the process and ensure that environmental clearances were granted in time-bound manner."
The minister also said no seaports and projects would be allowed hereafter to come up in the high-erosion zones of India's 5,400 kilometers of coast and a satellite based assessment is currently being carried out to map all the high-erosion zones. Read the full report here.
Source: by C.R. Sukumar, Financial Chronicle, Hyderabad.
