Environmental Impact Assessment Laws: ‘Landing’ In More Trouble
Why the Environmental Impact Assessment legislation needs to consider mountains and hills as a different category of land.
During the heat of summer, most of vacationing Delhi pours itself into the Himalayan foothills, each family looking for refreshing solitude. The ensuing scene is ironic. There are traffic jams on narrow hill roads, ‘DL’ bumpers stuck to ‘HR’ bumpers, and cooling solitude leaks away each time a car horn cleaves the air.
Dharamsala and Mcleodganj in Himachal Pradesh have recently emerged as holiday hotspots, heating up on traffic as well as property price charts. If the mountains are a clear, single-minded head, the sweaty northern plains feel like an armpit. And so there is an inevitable annual or bi-annual pilgrimage made northwards.
A single bus stand in Dharamsala, still some distance from fabulous Himalayan peaks, is an important artery, pumping in the blood of commerce. This is the place where tourists from the plains disembark. Bus stops on mountainous roads have unique distinctions – they embody being ‘few and far-between,’ and are crucial links of disproportionate importance in areas where nightfall means total darkness and single buses carry the dreams of entire villages.
In 2016, the National Green Tribunal asked for the demolition of parts of this Dharamsala bus stand. While the bus stand was meant for buses, the building was illegally extended for commercial projects including a hotel.
The construction of this hotel was done illegally on reserve forest land.
The case highlighted how commercialisation of spaces is carried out while projects claim to be something else. A commercial complex, meant to be used by many people on narrow hill roads, should consider environmental impact: this is a planner’s basic job.
Southwards of this area, the ‘redevelopment’ of government colonies in South Delhi is a similar case.
While some projects are designated ‘housing projects’, several of the structures will be commercial, including malls and offices. This begs the question of the feasibility of such projects in already crowded areas—riding on the felled trunks of trees—when citizens suffering respiratory diseases have protested that the city needs trees more than built-up congestion.
Can’t Have ‘One Size Fits All’
The second issue is that of environmental and local impact. How do we accommodate bottlenecks, dead-ends, jams and strained carrying capacities due to large projects? A new, proposed draft of the Environmental Impact Assessment, 2019 has no answers. Instead, the draft has lifted the need for large constructions to have Environmental Impact Assessments. The earlier law specified that construction of, and over, 20,000 square metres needed environmental appraisals. The new draft throws the ball out of the park. It says only buildings and construction over 50,000 square metres and above should be appraised. As an example, a soccer field is approximately 6,000 square metres.
49,000 square metres of construction, not requiring environmental impact assessments, could comprise an entire hilltop.
While laws tend to look at land as an analogous unit, the impact of construction on metres of land entirely depends on where the metres lie. Building huge structures on mountains have different ramifications than on the plains. How consolidated is the mountain? How much load should the hillside take? These are all questions that must be answered.
Large projects increase traffic volumes, which should lead us to understand and appraise impacts of tunnelling or blasting for wider roads. The mountainous landscape, impacted by tunnelling, also transforms in monsoon, when the threat of landslides and mudslides is real and lived.
We should consider mountains and hills as a different category of land under the Environmental Impact Assessment legislation.
Similar questions hold true for the flood plain of rivers. If we make constructions on flood plains, we curtail the capacity of the river flood plain to absorb water. With a falling water table, there is an urgent need to map aquifers and allow ground water recharge. The Central Ground Water Board says we are using up groundwater faster than we are replenishing it. Construction just shy of 50,000 square metres built without assessments on a flood plain could cause massive environmental damage.
Roads, At What Cost?
Meanwhile, other Environmental Impact Assessment relaxations are already underway. The NDA government had in 2013 relaxed rules for highway expansion. Highways above 100 kilometres require environmental clearance (from an earlier requirement of stretches above 30 kilometres requiring clearances). Nation-wide, trees are being felled in hundreds of thousands for single projects.
More than one lakh trees will be felled between Mumbai and Nagpur for an Expressway. At a time when much of India is under drought—including places near Nagpur—cutting mature trees at this scale is a bad idea.
In essence, damage to environment is poorly understood. We think environmental damage is pollution or disease; something we measure through hospital, insurance or clean-up bills. In effect though, environmental damage can also be tears to the fabric of ecosystems, which compromise system resilience. These could be things like reduced water absorbency in a floodplain; cutting down trees next to highways leading to losses of evapotranspiration and the water cycle; a mountain with top-soil erosion. It could also be bundled problems, such as flooding cities where taps run dry due to constructions over wetlands and reservoirs.
When we privilege construction of huge projects over everything, we are in essence saying:
- no damage will be caused by these actions
- that this is in greater good, even if it involves active tree felling or other damages.
This is the time to rethink projects through the optics of region, ecosystem and scale. With drought, heat waves and increasing weather uncertainty, this is the very time to balance development with environment, and not the other way around.
Neha Sinha is with the Bombay Natural History Society.
Views expressed are personal. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.