TEAM HERALD
NEW DELHI: As part of Prime Minister Modi’s agenda of “ease of doing business,” the Environment and Forest Ministry plans to draw up a list of 200 eco-sensitive zones as that will enable industrialisation and constructions outside their jurisdiction.
The Environment and Forests Ministry has written to all State governments to suggest the limits of such zones around the national parks and sanctuaries to enable it to issue the notification this month-end or latest by April-end to overcome the 10-km boundary limit of the eco zones fixed by the Supreme Court to protect these areas.
A 2-day conference of the State environment and forests ministers has been also convened on April 6-7 to frame up a national environmental agenda. The States’ response will be sought in the conference on the timeline to be fixed for online submissions for environmental clearances. The ministry is also hiring a technical consultant to implement most of the recommendations of the TSR Subramanian Committee for bringing in a new environmental regime.
States like Goa are also complaining that the limit of 10 km set by the Supreme Court around the national parks and sanctuaries are impractical as it would leave no space for any industrial or construction activities if the area around these reserved forests is expanded in the name of the environment protection.
The ministry wants to ease this problem of the states by seeking their views on how much area should be declared as the eco-sensitive zones.
TREE FELLING: In a separate order, the ministry has asked the Delhi and Maharashtra governments “to crate a suitable mechanism for expediting tree felling permission in a time-bound manner to reduce avoidable delays in granting permissions” while taking care that Delhi and Mumbai are already battling several degrees of air pollution.
The ministry sources said similar mechanism will be recommended for other metropolitan cities in the country to put an end to harassment in removal of trees for constructions but without compromising on pollution.
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Mines bill gets Parliament nod
NEW DELHI: The Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Bill that seeks to replace an Ordinance issued in December sailed through the Rajya Sabha on Friday with a vertical split in the Opposition that otherwise had a clear majority to defeat it.
Only the Congress and the Left Parties were left to oppose the Bill and repeatedly seek division during voting to muster 68, 63, 66 and 69 votes that fell too short of over 110 votes in favour, the highest 117 in the final voting. The Congress itself has 68 MPs in the House and the CPI and CPI(M) together have another 11 MPs. Janata Dal(U) president Sharad Yadav walked out with his 11 MPs just before voting while other Opposition parties voted for the Bill.
It was the Opposition unity that forced reference of the Bill, along with another coal mines bill, to the select committees last week, but a clear picture of fracture in this unity became clear when a motion by CPI(M) member P Rajeev to send back the Bill to the same select committee for a thorough scrutiny was defeated by 68 to 112 votes with three others abstaining.
The Congress and the Left Parties had Thursday night stalled discussion on the Bill by raising technical objections and storming in the well to force at least three adjournments before the government and the Opposition agreed to better defer the discussion to Friday.
During the debate on Friday, members like Manishankar Aiyar and Shantaram Naik of Congress, Sitaram Yechuri and P Rajeev of CPI(M) and D Raja of CPI assailed faulty functioning of the standing committee since its chairman Bhupinder Yadav of the BJP did not invite the stakeholders, not even the State governments getting powers under the Bill, complaining that it dilutes most of the good aspects in the 2011 Bill by the UPA government that was even cleared by the standing committee.
Yadav, an MP from Rajasthan, however, insisted that the committee heard secretaries of various concerned ministries in its six sittings and even called the stakeholders. He said the Bill strengthens the 1957 MMDR Act and brings transparency. He noted that the Bill will pave way for clearing a backlog of 63,000 pending applications and helping the mining workers in the states like Goa and Odisha hit by the Supreme Court banning mining because of gross irregularities.
The Opposition had lost the spirit to make any further effort of obstructions when the Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Bill was taken up later in the day, though many raised objections to provisions in the Bill.
Division was sought half a dozen times during voting on the coal bill while all amendments were lost with even a lesser number of votes for them compared to the division on the mining bill. The amendments were defeated with 106 votes four times and 105 votes once while those supporting varied from 61 to 64. Even the final vote on passage of the bill saw 107 supporting and 62 opposing.
