Oh Environment Ministry, Will You Ever Put Nature First?

For some reason, the major risks involved with letting companies build pretty much anywhere they want have escaped the union Environment Ministry.

Never mind the countless disasters that are proof that we need to be careful where we build, from the Uttarakhand floods that happen almost annually to the deadly 2015 floods in Chennai. The Environment Ministry still wants to change existing regulations so that real estate companies don’t need to assess the impact of their construction or the risks associated with the area in which they are building.

But this week, the National Green Tribunal slowed down the Environment Ministry’s plan, expressing displeasure at the proposal.

You can’t do legal blunders and get away with it. You tell your Ministry and all others not to act under the new notification, otherwise we will stay the notification.

Swatanter Kumar, Chairperson of the National Green Tribunal

The Environment Ministry wants to do away with environmental clearances for buildings between 20,000 square metres and 1.5 lakh square metres.

In the same breath, the Ministry also wants to do away with an environment impact assessment, which would basically check to see if an area is safe to build in, or if the area is an ecologically safe zone.

So let’s take a look at what happens when we don’t think before we build.

Building by an eroding beach? Your house could get swept away. Covering a wetland? Expect floods during the monsoon. Want a pretty river view but getting too close to the riverbed? Also swept away. Or flooded.

Not to mention the fact that India's iconic animals, from tigers to elephants, need space. If we keep eating into their territory, human-animal conflict is just going to get worse. 400 people are killed annually when elephants wander into villages and towns.

The next hearing over the Environment Ministry’s changes comes before the National Green Tribunal on 11 January.

There’s a reason we come up with environmental clearance laws – let’s hope the Environment Ministry remembers that.