Approaches That Bind Modi And Trump Together

By K Raveendran

It is no coincidence that President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have great admiration for each other. It goes much beyond the personal charisma, though Modi will beat Trump hands down in this regard. What binds the two more is probably the uniformity in thinking when it comes to major issues of development and governance.

Both invoke fundamentalist values to back their respective stands, and it is but natural that there is a clear constituency for such an approach. But the trouble is that it can be least inclusive, which is what is happening currently in both United States and India.

Trump was never known to be a friend of environment. So, his actions on climate change protocols hardly surprise. But Modi takes great care to project himself as the champion of environment. And yet his government is strictly toeing the Trump line.

The draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2020, of the Modi government is a recipe for national disaster and sets a bleak future for the country’s environment and people’s lives. The deadline for submitting objections and suggestions on the controversial law passed on Tuesday and from the speed at which the government has planned to implement the draconian law, it is very unlikely that these inputs would receive any meaningful consideration.

There are many things that are wrong with the law. But the most far-reaching is the provision that takes environment beyond the scope of public debate. In the name of easing the environment for doing business, the new law is destroying the environmental future of the country. It is thus business versus the nation.

The new law will institutionalise whatever was wrong with the polices that we have been following so far. Environmental impact studies, public hearing and review by environmental panels have all become a sham.

The country’s environmental laws have been changed 65 times since 1994, and many of these were meant to exempt potentially damaging businesses and activities from the purview of the rules and facilitate regularisation of patently illegal operations.

Environmental impact studies have remained largely a cut and paste job, with content drawn from all kinds of sources, irrespective of its relevance to the issue or project under consideration. It is on the authority of former environment minister Jairam that “between the manipulated EIA report and the fixed public hearing, the environment clearance has become a fait accompli.”

Several instances have been cited of inappropriate data being used to justify projects in the environmental impact studies and exaggerate the benefits in comparison to the adverse impacts. Well-established consultancies like Ernst & Young have been caught plagiarising content from other reports. In 2012, it presented an environment impact assessment on a hydel project in Karnataka, where over 90 percent of the content related to another dam, about 100 km away.

There have even be faux pas, such as data from another country being used to justify a project in India, although there was nothing common between the two projects.

The government claims that the new notification is being brought to make the process of decision making more transparent and expedient by the implementation of an online system, further delegation, rationalisation and standardisation of the process.

But the net result of all this is that it dilutes the environmental safeguards. Almost 40 different projects such as sand extraction or digging wells or foundations of buildings, solar thermal power plants and common effluent treatment plants have been exempted from prior approvals. The worst part is that projects with deep environmental impact, such as major irrigation projects, plants for the production of halogens, chemical fertilisers, acids manufacturing, biomedical waste treatment facilities, building construction and area development, elevated roads and flyovers, highways or expressways have all been taken out of public consultation.

This means that offshore and onshore oil, gas and shale exploration, hydroelectric projects up to 25 MW, irrigation projects between 2,000 and 10,000 hectares of command area, small and medium mineral beneficiation units, small foundries involving furnace units, re-rolling mills, cement plants, acid manufacturing units, dye and dye intermediates, bulk drugs, synthetic rubbers, medium-sized paint units, all inland waterway projects, expansion or widening of highways between 25 km and 100 km, aerial ropeways in ecologically sensitive areas will all be exempt from environmental scrutiny.

The country has seen epic struggles by popular movements against giant projects that destroyed people’s lives and brought untold miseries to people displaced by massive evictions to make way for these.

Rahul Gandhi was not quite off the mark when he described the EIA 2020 draft as a disaster. “It seeks to silence the voice of communities who will be directly impacted by the environmental degradation it unleashes. Not only does it have the potential to reverse many of the hard-fought gains that have been won over the years in the battle to protect our environment, it could potentially unleash widespread environmental destruction and mayhem across India,” Rahul Gandhi said. (IPA Service)