Making a mockery of environment impact assessment
A loophole in the law allows companies intending to set up large infrastructure and mining projects to conduct their own assessments, putting a question mark on the integrity of the process.
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Editor's note: On a wintry morning in early 2019, around 160 people gathered at a playground at Siarmal village in Odisha’s Sundargarh district. The village is surrounded by paddy fields and forests teeming with tendu trees, barking deer and the occasional sloth bear. The setting isn’t as idyllic as it sounds. Siarmal is close to one of the most polluted areas in India, the Ib Valley-Jharsuguda coalfields, where the air is thick with dust from the mining and transport of coal that feeds power plants across eastern India. The people had been called to the playground by the Odisha government for a public hearing for another coal mine—this time in the village itself. The proposed Siarmal opencast mine would be bigger than any other mine in the area, and would come up over 23 sq. km, an area nearly 40 times the size of the Central Vista redevelopment project in New Delhi. It would displace 1,500 families in five villages and 300 hectares of forest. The costs and benefits of this project were inscribed into one official document—the environment impact assessment, or …
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