Jairam Ramesh's removal from the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests on July 12 brought jubilation to Industry lobbyists. Let us wait and watch the moves of his successor, Jayanthi Natarajan.
On 20 September it was announced that mining in forest areas will be subject to tough conditions like strict adherence to forest rights laws, consent of gram sabhas (village assemblies) and a case-by-case basis approach to proposals.
While a "go/no-go" policy will not be followed, a group of ministers agreed that some forest areas will be considered inviolate where no mining can be permitted. These areas will be considered vulnerable from the environmental aspect as well as with regard to tribal populations. Although the GoM's decision is yet to be formalized, there was a consensus that the environment and forests ministry will demarcate these inviolate areas.
Jayanthi Natarajan stood her ground on the right of the gram sabha to reject diversion of traditional forest lands for projects under the Forest Rights Act.
The environment minister opposed any blanket forest clearances to expansion of up to 25% for thermal power projects pointing out that the law required her ministry to clear these projects on a case-to-case basis.
Earlier, Jayanthi Natarajan had undertaken a review and permitted the parallel processing of environmental and forests clearances, but she had stuck to the Supreme Court-ordered linkage of the two. One cannot be made operational without the other clearance.
The biggest failure of Ramesh regime was that he could not bring systemic changes.
Let us first look at his positive contributions. Ramesh has been reported to have listed these as some of the achievements of his tenure at MEF: Literal (glass doors at his office) and virtual (up-to-date website) transparency, public hearings on GM Brinjal (and others), speaking orders (e.g. on Posco, Vedanta, among others).
The MEF website is indeed a remarkable achievement of Ramesh. However, some of the crucial information that was statutory requirement (e.g. six monthly compliance reports of ongoing projects, which are still not available as per statutory requirements or agenda notes and minutes of meetings of Forest Advisory Committee) were missing on the website; some of it appeared only after RTI applications, some not even till date.
His orders did speak at times, but they did not always throw full light on the issues on hand (e.g. final order on Posco clearance). Public hearings (for not project specific issues like GM crops or North East Dams) were good initiatives, but he did nothing to institutionalise them.
Ramesh was also very happy to institutionalise National Green Tribunal, but his failure to ensure that the NGT starts functioning before the National Environment Appellate Authority was wound up meant that there was a vacuum for over an year when neither of them were available. Jury is still out on how effective NGT will be, but its formulation has many serious problems.
He was constrained by the fact that he was not a cabinet minister and the Prime Minister was not with him on most issues. There are a number of occasions, when it seemed he had to tow the PM line (take Posco, Lavasa, Jaitapur, Navi Mumbai airport, dereservation of coal block from No-Go areas)
Many times he was not consistent. While he cancelled clearances to Vedanta and Posco for lack of adherence to the Forest Rights Act, he refused to do the same in case of Polavaram dam in Andhra Pradesh.
Even on Posco, while three different committees from his own ministry gave evidence about violations, he ultimately succumbed to the pressure from the lobbyists and gave it ok when on ground there was no change in the situation from the point when he had cancelled the clearance.
A lot of groups wrote to him that IIT Roorkee is not the right agency to do cumulative impact assessment of Ganga basin hydro projects due to the agency's pro hydro bias and that consortium is not the right agency for preparing the Ganga Basin Management Plan due to their lack of knowledge of ground realities or understanding of governance issues, but he remain stubborn on both occasions.
The failure of Ganga Cumulative Impact assessment is now acknowledged by all.
All the same, the number of battles he fought during his 25-month tenure makes an impressive list. He faced opposition from PMO (blind push for big hydro projects in North East), Power Minister Shinde, Coal Minister Jaiswal, Planning Commission vice chair Montek, Agriculture Minister Pawar (GM crops, Lavasa), Civil Aviation minister Patel (New airport for Mumbai), Orissa Chief Minister (Posco, Vedanta), Delhi Chief Minister (Renuka dam in Himachal for Delhi's water supply), Kerala Chief Minister (Athirapally), Maharashtra chief minister (Adarsh, Lavasa, Jaitapur, Mumbai airport among others), Uttarakhand Chief Minister (hydro projects on Bhagirathi among others), IPCC chief Pachauri (wrong predictions about glacier melting), lobbyist media groups like Indian Express (GM crops, hydro projects in North East), Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister (Maheshwar hydro, Ken Betwa link), among many others.
Ramesh was also fighting battles within the MEF. So while he remained accessible and responsive, he could not ensure that his ministry officials were also accessible and responsive. On the issue of implementation of Forests Rights Act in particular and reforms in forestry sector in general, he was known to be battling with the forest bureaucracy.
One of the important contributions of Ramesh on the climate change front was in formulation of India Climate Assessment Report and in pushing the case that India also needs to take responsibility for the climate change impact of its activities.
However, this need not have been done at the expense of weakening of the pillars of Kyoto protocol, which he ended up doing.