New Delhi | Jun 15, 2015: Having shaken off the “roadblock ministry” tag, the environment ministry is focusing on ways to enforce laws. It is preparing a “green platform” that will require companies to submit regular compliance details on the conditions on the basis of which they were granted green clearances.
Laxity in enforcement of regulations and monitoring of conditions for environment clearances are thought to be some of the biggest weaknesses in the environment ministry.
The ministry was known to sit over granting green clearances under the previous United Progressive Alliance, or UPA, government, which, in turn, was thought to have held up the development of industries and mining. Now, under environment minister Prakash Javadekar, it is alleged to have overcompensated for the previous shortcoming.
Accused of functioning as a “green clearance ministry”, the step to enforce regulation is one among several that it is taking to make amends.
“The focus area of the ministry this year is ‘enforcement’. It is going to be one of our main thrust areas. For pollution, too, we are tightening the enforcement mechanism and substantially increasing the penalties on the violators,” said environment secretary Ashok Lavasa.
The secretary said the ministry is preparing a green platform where in every six months or a year all companies will have to submit compliance details of the conditions on the basis of which they were granted environment, forest or wildlife clearance. Lavasa said this would enable the ministry to improve the monitoring process.
“A third-party agency then can be engaged to check the status of those details being filed. Also, the system could be programmed in a way that it randomly throws names for on-ground verification. The whole process has to be made technologically driven, otherwise doing it physically is impossible,” the environment secretary said.
The ministry decided to launch a green platform after the success of its online system of environment, forest or wildlife clearances introduced last year.
According to a senior ministry official, online clearances have helped the department “track and tackle the bottlenecks where clearances used to get stuck”.
The official said the idea was also borrowed from the successful implementation of the ministry of corporate affairs website, where companies annually submit their returns. “The system of corporate affairs ministry’s online portal has ensured that it is possible for the system to automatically find defaulters and send alerts,” said the official.
“It is an urgently required step as otherwise it is humanly impossible for regional offices of the environment ministry to verify clearances given to industries in areas under them. Leave aside the ground verification, even locating the file of a specific company is a cumbersome task,” the official said.
Environmental activists, however, are unsure about the green platform plan. “Putting everything under an online system does not resolve everything unless you have people who can handle such data. At the state level, a lot of officials are not trained on how to handle online data. Capacity building is a must at the state level. Unless you strengthen capacity to deal with data, an online system may not help,” said environmental lawyer Sanjay Upadhyay.
(Source: http://www.livemint.com/)