Law of the jungle - The Hindu

Law of the jungle - The Hindu

Law of the jungle
Ritwick Dutta
BREAKWATER: At a time when non-compliance with environmental rules and regulations is the order of the day, the National Green
Tribunal serves to restore faith in the rule of law. Photo: S.R. Raghunathan
The Environment Ministry has systematically undermined the National Green Tribunal, giving expert committees a free hand to grant
forest clearances to private projects
The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has adopted a confrontationist approach with the National Green
Tribunal (NGT). In its recent affidavit before the Supreme Court of India, the ministry stated that the tribunal has
“exceeded its brief” and caused it “embarrassment” in Parliament. The affidavit was withdrawn and time sought to
file a proper affidavit. The Supreme Court even threatened to stay the operation of the tribunal in view of the hostile
approach of the MoEF towards the green body.
It is therefore necessary to trace the reasons for this “conflict” and “embarrassment” and the implications of staying
the operation of the tribunal.
Specialised body
The NGT is a Statutory Tribunal and was created by Parliament as a specialised judicial and technical body to
adjudicate on environmental disputes and issues. The enactment of the NGT Act, 2010 was itself an outcome of a long
process and struggle. The Supreme Court in a number of cases highlighted the difficulty faced by judges in
adjudicating on complex environmental cases and laid emphasis on the need to set up a specialised environmental
court. Though the credit for enacting the NGT Act, 2010 goes to the then Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh, it
became functional only because of repeated directions of the Supreme Court while hearing the Special Leave Petition
titled Union of India versus Vimal Bhai (SLP No 12065 of 2009). The recent developments and the hostile approach
of the MoEF towards the NGT seems to suggest that the aim of Mr. Ramesh’s successor (Jayanthi Natrajan) is to
dismantle the tribunal.
Track record
Despite all the hurdles including financial and administrative bottlenecks, the NGT has emerged as a new hope for the10/18/13 Law of thejungle - TheHindu
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environmental movement in the country. The NGT Act is no less important than the Right to Information Act, 2005,
the Right to Food Bill and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005. Environmental degradation affects
livelihoods, health and access to food. Environmental struggles most often aim at ensuring that information about
proposed projects (Environment Impact Assessment reports), air and water quality data is shared with the people.
Over the last two years, the NGT has delivered 185 judgments on various environmental issues. The MoEF together
with the Central Ground Water Authority, the Central Pollution Control Board and the various State governments
have been forced to wake up from years of slumber and total inactivity. One of the most significant powers of the NGT
is the capacity to do “merit review” as opposed to only “judicial review.” Under the writ jurisdiction of the High Court
or Supreme Court, the courts are essentially concerned with the “decision making process” and not the “merits” of the
decision. As a merit court, the NGT becomes the primary decision maker and therefore can undertake an in-depth
scrutiny into not just the law but also the technical basis of a particular decision.
A new jurisprudence on the environment is steadily emerging in the country and is an example for the rest of the
world. Today, nearly 50-60 Appeals and Applications are heard each working day before the various benches of the
NGT. At a time when Environment Impact Assessments reports are a blind “copy and paste,” job where public
hearings are a “mockery” and non-compliance with environmental rules and regulations are the order of the day, the
NGT serves to restore faith in the “Rule of law.”
CAG report
Why is the MoEF not keen to see the NGT functioning? The answer is quite simple. The conduct of the ministry as
well as the various statutory bodies on the environment has never been called into question in a systematic manner
and its decisions have rarely been subject to any “merit review.” This has given a free hand to the various expert
committees, boards and the officials as well as the Minister to arbitrarily grant approval to projects disregarding the
environmental and social impact of projects and most often in violation of laws and rules. The recent report of the
Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) clearly proves the casual manner in which forest clearance issues
have been dealt with by the MoEF as well as the State governments mostly to favour private companies. History tells
us that the MoEF’s designs have largely succeeded. Post the Bhopal disaster, the National Environment Tribunal Act
was passed by Parliament in 1995 to fix liability on a polluter. It never became operational. The National
Environmental Appellate Authority set up through an Act of Parliament in 1997 was made defunct by the MoEF and
led the Delhi High Court to conclude that the intention of Parliament to set up an effective grievances redressal forum
has been defeated.
The recent affidavit is a wake-up call to those trying to protect the environment, the rights of communities as well as
ensuring greater accountability in the government’s functioning. If the MoEF succeeds in its design, it would mean its
third success in stalling a parliamentary legislation meant to keep a watch on its activities and decisions and
protecting the rights of communities.
(Ritwick Dutta is an environmental lawyer and managing trustee of Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment.)

No covering up this mess - The Hindu

No covering up this mess - The Hindu

No covering up this mess

  AMITA BAVISKAR
The Hindu

Contrary to global efforts at restoring covered streams, the Delhi government’s initiative to concretise and pave nallas is a misstep that will increase drainage problems and destroy vegetation

Like millions of people living in Indian cities, my home is next to a ganda nallah. Only an embankment separates my neighbourhood from the sluggish stream of sewage. On summer evenings, the nallah announces itself with a stench that infiltrates our flats, a bouquet of rotten-egg hydrogen sulphide and methane. Brass lamps and bronze idols are tarnished within a day of being polished. Fridges and air-conditioners need to have their refrigerant gases replaced every year because of leaking pipes. If noxious fumes from the nallah can corrode metal, we wonder what they are doing to the soft tissue of our lungs.

Problems like these are now being addressed by government initiatives to cover up the nallahs. This has already happened in Delhi’s affluent Defence Colony, while work is under way on Kushak Nallah in central-south Delhi and the Shahdara drain in east Delhi. The earthen bed and sides of the nallahs are being concretised and the top paved over. The covered area is to be used for road-widening, parking lots and shops. Many neighbourhood associations support these projects as a solution to a long-standing problem that mars their quality of life and lowers property values. However, instead of improving their environs, covering up nallahs is likely to make their life much worse.

ECOLOGICAL CRISIS

Concretising the channel of a nallah means that it can no longer replenish groundwater. Covering it makes it harder to remove debris and sludge. During the monsoons, constricted flow results in backed up drains and flooding. Reduced oxygenation causes more gaseous emissions, increasing the stink. Manynallahs are lined with trees and shrubs that shelter wildlife. Walking along mynallah once, I was surprised by a raucous party of Grey Hornbills stripping the figs off a peepal tree. But when the vegetation is cleared to enable construction, precious green spaces get decimated. As the environmental NGO, Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan, has argued in a case being heard by the National Green Tribunal, covering nallahs is a decided misstep, one that will take the city further down the path of ecological crisis.

UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE

How do we then deal with the polluting presence of the nallah next door? This problem requires not kneejerk solutions but an understanding of the natural landscape which the city inhabits. Most nallahswere once seasonal streams that followed the lay of the land, flowing into lakes and rivers. The nallahnear my home was a channel of the Sahibi river, connecting the Najafgarh jheel (lake) in west Delhi to the river Yamuna. It absorbed monsoon overflow, irrigated crops and provided drinking water. So did the Kushak Nallah, a tributary of the Yamuna which was dammed at Satpula in the 14th century by the Tughlaqs. After Independence, as the city grew bigger and denser, public sanitation projects installed underground sewers that debouched into these water bodies. Today, the Najafgarh jheel has vanished and the nallah that flowed from it has become one of Delhi’s three major sewage canals, carrying the combined liquid filth of west and north Delhi to the river Yamuna.

Even in municipal plans, these streams were not originally designated for carrying sewage. They were meant to be storm water drains, bearing runoff from the rains, just as they had done over the centuries. But the signal failure of the authorities to treat the sewage generated by this city of 14 million has led to the nallahs being hijacked for this purpose. A performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General earlier this year reported that the Delhi Jal Board collected and treated only 54 per cent of the 680 MGD (million gallons per day) sewage produced by the city. Almost half of the sewage in the city flows untreated through 350 km of nallahs into the Yamuna, turning this once-beautiful river into a black, stinking sheet of sludge. In theory, Delhi has been building sewage treatment plants (STPs) and now has installed capacity to treat 543 MGD of waste. However, all these plants work below capacity because the Jal Board did not simultaneously build the sewers to carry the waste to the plants. Without these connecting pipes, the STPs are slowly rusting away — a plant in Ghitorni built in 1997 has not worked for a single day, another in Rohini works to 5 per cent capacity — while untreated sewage continues to flow through the nallahs. To this day, Delhi has no comprehensive sewage management plan. In 2008, the Delhi Jal Board launched an ambitious plan to build ‘interceptor sewers’ along the Najafgarh, Shahdara and supplementary nallahs to catch the flow from subsidiary drains and deliver it to STPs but five years and Rs 1,978 crore later, there is little to show for it. Instead, the authorities are steaming ahead with Operation Cover-up.

Tragically, this is being done at a time when cities around the world are waking up to the wisdom of restoring covered streams to life. The Fleet, London’s ‘lost river’, was a sewer with floating carcasses of dead dogs in the 18th century before it was covered in the 19th. After clean-up, it is now being uncovered as an urban green channel. Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon restoration project turned a neglected stream covered by a highway into a popular recreation area, a place where residents and visitors stroll along its cascading channel, ankle-wading in its cool flow during the hot months. Philadelphia has made ‘stream daylighting’ its official policy, bringing waterways that were buried in pipes to the surface, restoring streams to their floodplains and improving their capacity to recharge groundwater. A stream running through a cityscape can be a delight, a cool green tunnel with footpaths and bicycle trails, where birdcalls and flowing water provide a calming respite from urban congestion and cacophony.

PUBLIC SCANDAL

This ecological vision is not difficult to realise in Indian cities if we resolve to tackle the challenge of sewage treatment head on. The neglect of sewage in India is a public scandal, one in which all citizens, especially those who live in ‘developed colonies,’ are complicit. Unlike encroachments on lakes and tanks for which we can blame greedy real estate developers, the pollution of water bodies is the direct result of our indifference to the fate of our filth. We flush it away and forget about it. Yet public campaigns to save water bodies in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jaisalmer and Jaipur have found that it is not enough to protect the lake or tank alone. The streams in its catchment that feed it must also be revived. Only when we stop pouring sewage into them can we start the process of restoring the ecological well-being of urban waterscapes.

As towns grow into cities and cities morph into metropolises, urban ecology seems to be losing ground to urgent demands for improved infrastructure. Covering and concretising nallahs to build roads and parking lots may seem like an improvement. But it goes against the grain of a guiding principle that the New Orleans and Mumbai disasters should have etched indelibly into our memory: cities are embedded in a natural landscape. Artefacts of human ingenuity and organisation they may be, but they can endure and afford a good life to all citizens only when they respect the ecological systems of which they are part.

(Amita Baviskar is an environmental sociologist)