PANJIM: Goa Government suffered a major setback as the Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to set up a special bench to urgently hear the petition of the State seeking resumption of construction of the Greenfield International Airport at Mopa, whose environmental clearance (EC) has been stuck down by the Apex Court.
A bench comprising Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justices S A Bobde and S A Nazeer was informed by Attorney General K K Venugopal that the construction of the airport has been stalled for the last ten months and the petition of the State government is pending before it.
“We are not in a position to constitute a special bench now. Mr Attorney, our present situation does not permit us to do this,” the bench said.
The bench asked the lawyers to request the presiding judge “to release the matter”.
One of the lawyers appearing for the firm, GMR Infrastructure, the project proponent, said that a bench headed by Justice D Y Chandrachud has already heard this petition partly and the matter needs to be concluded at the earliest.
The Supreme Court had in January, in an interim order, had asked State Government and GMR to stop all construction activities and maintain status quo.
It has then in March, suspended the EC granted for the project in October, 2015 and directed Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) to revisit the decision in light of its impact on ecology.
It said a glaring deficiency, which emerges from the EIA report, is its failure to notice the existence of Ecologically Sensitive Zones of Western Ghats within a buffer distance of 10 kms of the project site.
The order was passed hearing two separate petitions filed by Hanumant Aroskar and Federation of Rainbow Warriors, alleging illegal felling of thousands of trees to make way for the project, whose first phase was expected to be completed by December 2020.
The EAC had in May recommended to MoEF&CC for grant of fresh EC for the project with additional stringent conditions.
The airport to be constructed at a cost of Rs 3,000 crore, will be developed in four phases and is expected to have the capacity to handle 13.1 million passengers by 2045.
