Environmental Clearance Draft Notification, 2020: A Case of Obscure Visibility?

Abstract

The year 1987, remains to be a significant milestone when the ‘Brundtland Report” was officially released, curving out the gist of the concept “Sustainable Development.”3 The United Nations in its General Assembly urgently appealed to the World Commission to prepare a vision document for "A global agenda for change". 4 This action UNGA was to create a global alternative to the existing conflicting dynamics of environment and development. The concept of sustainable development was designed to create a synthesis amongst the conflicting dimension of human development and natural environment. The conference at Stockholm in 1972 was partially successful in creating the awareness towards the environmental obligations of mankind5 . Thereafter in 1992, at Rio de Janeiro the more detailed blueprint map of sustainability was curved out in the next global conference held on the theme integrating the environment and human development.6 The principles of Rio Conference along with its two binding instruments are considered as the essential part of the international environmental jurisprudence till date. A few important principles of the Rio Convention such as principle 4,7 highlights the need for and importance of integration of the developmental growth with environmental protection. Further, in principle 10 it lays down the stress for people’s participation for environmental decision making and the need for developing the adequate environmental redressal mechanism.8 Lastly, the Principle 17 encourages for the adoption of the domestic instrument for guidance in the decision making in cases with potential adverse decision making.9 Thus, to sum up conceptually, we can say that EIA: “Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) is a planning tool to integrate the environmental concerns into developmental process right at the initial stage of planning and suggest necessary mitigation measures. EIA essentially refers to the assessment of environmental impacts likely to arise from a project.”10 According to the aforesaid principles of the Rio Convention, most of the state nations developed environmental legal framework for environmental decision making within their own jurisdiction. India in the early 1980’s had no specific legal mechanism for scrutinizing the developed projects for environmental safety. The department of Science and technology was the sole authority to grant environmental clearances having a narrow jurisdiction mostly focused on river-valley projects. Further, it was only post Rio Conference, in 1994 the MoEF(Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change) passed the first exclusively devoted legislative instrument for environmental decision making in India based on the precautionary approach of sustainability popularly known as Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, 1994. The said notification prescribed both the substantive and procedural guidelines for the granting environmental clearances in diverse fields of developmental projects in India.