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http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/4/narendra-modis-war-on-the-indian-environment.html

The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government came to power last May in a massive wave of support for Narendra Modi, now the prime minister, and his agenda of economic development for all. In under a year, it has begun to undo policies of fair land acquisition, undermine environmental protection and reverse the fight for tribal rights. The finance, environment and rural-development ministers, and Modi himself, have called these safeguards to protect people’s property, the environment and tribal rights “roadblocks” to economic growth. Rules that ensure business responsibility to people and the environment, in other words, are now largely being written off.

The Modi government has loosened these laws even further. Now, in more instances, land can be taken without asking owners. Consent from villagers is mostly unnecessary. Tribal rights hang by a thread. Forests are fair game, and pollution monitoring is more lenient than ever.

The government claims these moves will boost economic growth. During his 2015 budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said projects worth millions were “held up for want of permissions” under the previous governments. This may be true for government-owned projects, but nearly 95 percent of projects proposed by private companies have received environmental clearances, and only 13 percent of stalled infrastructure projects have been held up by land-acquisition procedures. “Unfavorable market conditions (and not regulatory clearances) are stalling a large number of projects in the private sector,” according to the Economic Survey of India. “Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the evidence points towards over exuberance and a credit bubble as primary reasons.”

Even without much evidence, the growth rhetoric has remained a powerful justification for the government. BJP ministers equate fast growth with national pride and have called demands for human rights and conservation “anti-national” activity. Patkar says the previous governments were “at least open to conversation with NGOs and people’s groups. That door is fast shut today. They are making policies more aggressive, no matter what the cost.”

In August 2014, Modi’s cabinet set up a committee to review six key environmental and climate change laws. “Their mandate was enormous and vague. It held only six to seven public consultations, and only one of five members was associated with the environment in any way,” says a critic of the process, environmental lawyer Shibani Ghosh, from the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. In only three months, the body was to recommend changes to laws on everything from water pollution and forest conservation, to coastal zone regulations and recycling electronic discards. “Once the recommendations were out, it was clear the committee was simply meant to remove human rights and green roadblocks for investment growth,” says Ghosh.

The committee suggested a single-window clearance for all green permits, something corporations in India have long lobbied for. In project applications, companies should assess the potential environmental damage their own projects could cause, instead of asking affected communities or the regional pollution-control board to do so, as the earlier rules required. The committee also recommended eliminating all government and independent monitoring and letting companies disclose their own violations, with no oversight. These new rules, the committee says, will oblige companies to act in “utmost good faith.”

Ramesh Agrawal, a prominent environmental activist in Raigarh, is also critical of the new recommendations. “Where in the world have companies admitted to polluting rivers?” he asks. “When companies have to police themselves, they don’t.”

A tall, soft-spoken man, Agrawal has reason to mistrust corporations. After he and other activists accused JSPL of not following norms while holding a public hearing in 2010 for a coal mine expansion, and beginning construction before getting the appropriate environmental clearances, he was arrested because the company filed a complaint of defamation, criminal intimidation and incitement. The recording of the hearing shows that Agrawal was listing violations by the company since the ’90s, and at one point, he lost his composure and said in Hindi, “If they [Jindal officials] are sons of their fathers, they should come forward.”

Agrawal is indignant. “I wasn’t polite, yes, but is that a reason for arrest? And what about their violations?” he asks. He was in jail for 60 days, until the Supreme Court released him on bail. The activist took the case to the National Green Tribunal in Delhi. After reviewing video evidence, the tribunal called JSPL’s public hearing “a mockery” and “a classic example of violation of the rules and the principles of natural justice.” It went on to cancel the environmental clearance for JSPL’s coal mine.

A month later, in 2012, gunmen broke into Agrawal’s home in Raigarh and shot him, shattering his thigh bone. In his police complaint, Agrawal said the attackers told him to “stop taking on Jindal,” but the company has denied any involvement. Now Agrawal has difficulty walking. “If existing procedures are not working, the government should fix them, not get rid of them,” he says. “Then there will be no place to appeal to when the faith is violated.”

lmost all of the coal-producing areas in central India are forested. They are alsohome to 10 tiger reserves, a variety of wildlife and nearly 9,000 villages. Across the country, roughly 40 percent of the people displaced by dams, power plants and mines are tribals, even though they make up only about 9 percent of the country’s population. Recognizing tribal communities as stakeholders in forestlands, the Forest Rights Act 2006 allows for the clearing of these lands for development only after an applicant has gained the consent of the local tribal-village council.

Last month, however, the Ministry of Environment suggested changes that will allow the cutting of forests without tribal consent. “If this happens, forestland in tribal areas will be easier to get and cheaper for a company than any other type of land,” says campaigner Nandikesh Sivalingam from Greenpeace India, which the Modi government calls “anti-national” for protesting corporate violations in forest areas. After issuing several threats to the nonprofit to curb its environmental activism, on April 10, the Ministry of Home Affairs suspended the organization’s registration under the law that governs international funding.

Divya Raghunandan, the group’s program director, says, “This is an attempt to remove any kind of dissent despite the Supreme Court having repeatedly said that differing opinions is not grounds for proving anti-nationalism.”

“In one blow, they’ve attacked conservation and human rights,” adds Aruna Sekhar, senior researcher with Amnesty International. In early March, the tribal affairs minister, Jual Oram, whose initial objections were ignored, wrote a seven-page letter to the Environment Ministry strongly objecting to the dilution. Oram belongs to the Kurukh tribe and hails from the heavily forested and mined state of Jharkhand, in eastern India. He writes that “there is no evidence to show that Forest Rights Act is resulting in delays in forest clearance” and that it would be illegal to erase tribal rights to forests.

deep look into an attempt for economic growth by not being concerned about environment.