government response to environmental issues during Covid 19 india
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Mumbai and Bengaluru: The risk of meddling with the environment has been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought the world to its knees. India, in the last six years since July 2014, has approved over 270 projects in and around its most protected environments, including biodiversity hotspots and national parks, according to an IndiaSpend analysis. At the same time, the Centre has watered down environmental safeguards, prompting stakeholders to warn that such interference not only imperils habitat and ecosystems but also endangers public health.
Habitat destruction is changing the patterns of infectious diseases, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been warning for years. This includes a growing number of zoonotic diseases--the ones that spread from animals to humans--such as rabies, Nipah, Ebola, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and COVID-19.
Scientists believe that the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), which causes COVID-19, likely jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate animal host, before snowballing into a pandemic in a matter of weeks. The highly infectious disease has claimed over 233,000 lives globally, including 1,152 in India, as of 5 p.m. on May 1, 2020.
The chance of coming into contact with zoonotic diseases increases when humans enter biodiversity hotspots--where a large number of animal species are found.
“India is a potential hotspot for emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases,” said Abi Tamim Vanak, a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), and a DBT/Wellcome Trust India Alliance fellow. “[This is] Because we have [a] very high density of people and livestock amidst areas of high biodiversity, and potentially very high rates of interaction amongst these.” Vanak co-leads the OneHealth and Zoonoses programme of the recently announced National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Wellbeing.
The path, for what Vanak describes as potential interaction, has been put on fast-track mode. India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has approved 2,256 of the 2,592 proposals that it received for environment clearance (EC)* between July 2014 and April 24, 2020, according to publicly available data on the ministry’s clearance monitoring website, Parivesh. This is a clearance rate of 87%. The Parivesh website does not show data for previous years.
Of these 2,256 approvals, IndiaSpend looked at 2,115 approvals that had been granted until March 2020. Of these approvals, we analysed data for 2,053 project proposals; the remaining 62 project proposal details could not be analysed due to missing or vague information. The MoEFCC granted 278 approvals for projects in and immediately around Protected Areas (PAs), according to the IndiaSpend analysis; PAs are places such as wildlife sanctuaries and national parks, where human presence is severely restricted by law.
IndiaSpend unearthed this during a year-long investigation scouring data and combined it with ground reporting and expert opinion. Just before the COVID-19 outbreak led to a nationwide shutdown, we spent four months travelling from Uttar Pradesh (UP) to Karnataka to report from projects that the MoEFCC has either granted clearances to, or has expedited to accelerate development.
In the Environment Undone series, we will dive into how some of India’s infrastructure projects are damaging its environment and how legal safeguards are failing to stem this damage. Reporting from central India’s coal mining areas, the 1,600-km long Western Ghats, the rivers of Bundelkhand, and coastal Karnataka, we show how the projects also have little or no benefits for locals, and are also poorly-conceived. This is the first of a multi-part, data-driven series that explores the environmental, ecological and human cost of India’s chosen path of development.
Buffers no more
The MoEFCC granted the maximum number of ECs to three public-sector enterprises, IndiaSpend found in its analysis of 2,053 approved project proposals between July 2014 and March 2020, the details of which are here.
While Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) received 42 approvals, Uttarakhand’s tourism services provider Garhwal Mandal Vikas Nigam Limited received 21 approvals, and Coal India’s subsidiary, Western Coalfields Limited, received 16 clearances.
Three states--Maharashtra (380), Gujarat (316) and Uttar Pradesh (153)--received a majority (849) of the 2,053 ECs between July 2014 and March 2020, our analysis revealed.
Category-wise, 607 ECs went to projects classified as ‘Industrial Projects - 2’ (neither the Parivesh nor the MoEFCC websites explain what this category includes), we found. Another 435 clearances went to projects classified as ‘Infrastructure and Miscellaneous Projects + CRZ’ while 316 clearances were granted to projects classified as ‘New Construction Projects and Industrial Estates’.