Team Herald
PANJIM: Quality Council of India, an autonomous body under DPIIT, Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Government of India and the National Accreditation Board Education and Training (NABET) organised 11th Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Assessors meet at Goa.
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The three-day meet was inaugurated by A M Sharan, Principal Secretary, Department of Higher Education, Government of Haryana in the presence of Dr R P Singh, Secretary General, QCI.
The EIA scheme was mandated by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) under Gazette Notification and it scheme provides accreditation to the EIA Consultant Organisations to prepare EIA-EMP reports. These ACOs play vital role in process of Environment Clearance from Centre/regulatory authorities. Around 40 participants attended the meet.
Various issues and their possible way-out faced in the assessment process and to come out with revisions in the scheme with more focus on the quality of EIA reports were discussed. One of the issues widely debated was that ACO was paid by PP and the PP is interested in approval of projects and the ACO feel discharge of responsibility towards PP.
One of the suggestions made was to look for payment through common kitty to ACOs instead of being paid by PP. It was also focused that sensitisation about ecology and environmental issue is to be made at all levels.
Dr Singh suggested considering a rating scheme of the EIA consultants and notify the fee structure accordingly to avoid very low bidding and subsequently compromising the quality of EIA reports.
Sharan spoke on importance of Assessors and data integrity in the EIA reports while, A K Ghose talked about evolution of scheme and importance of experienced assessors in strengthening of the scheme.
Dr K S Anandan laid importance on the role of technology like Geo-tagging of site visits, use of software to check plagiarism and random sampling of EIA reports for review. Santosh Kumar, IFS, Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forest, Goa spoke about people diversity register to be referred while preparing the EIA reports taking local people into consideration.
Secretary (Power & Renewable Energy) Kunal talked about quality of EIA reports which plays pivotal role in the EIA study.
