Jairam Ramesh shoots down Vedanta

After alarming politicians and businessmen with his bark, union environment minister Jairam Ramesh showed he can bite, too. Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik and Vedanta chief Anil Agarwal were the first victims.

The two, part of a long list of politicians and business leaders who have found their pet projects held up by Ramesh, were told that the mining project in Niyamgiri was off for flouting ecological and tribal rights policies.

In all, Ramesh has blocked 64 projects and kept another 469 waiting for clearance, stepping on the toes of civil aviation minister Praful Patel, surface transport minister Kamal Nath and mines minister Jaiprakash Jaiswal, among others. The Navi Mumbai airport project will be another test case for Ramesh’s pugnacity.

Tuesday was the day the axe fell on Vedanta.

“The stage-II forest clearance… stands rejected. Since the forest clearance is rejected, environmental clearance for this mine is inoperable,” said Ramesh.

With the rejection of the mining project, the minister has also issued a show-cause notice to Vedanta on why its existing alumina factory — which would have benefited from the new mine — cannot be shut down for flouting environment norms.  Vedanta was to invest Rs37,440 crore in the Niyamgiri project, along with a smelter facility in nearby Jharsuguda.

Ramesh’s decision followed a scathing report by the Naresh Saxena committee earlier this month, which accused Vedanta of grabbing forest land, among other things.

Saxena is an expert on tribal rights. The rejected project had been the subject of adverse comments by Rahul Gandhi, son of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, in 2008.

Ramesh, however, denied that Orissa was being ‘victimised’. “I want to underline the fact that there is no prejudice on projects in Orissa. There is no emotion, no politics, no prejudice... I have taken the decision in a purely legal approach, that these laws are being violated,” the minister said. Personal meetings with the Orissa chief minister obviously failed to move him.

Predictably, the move was welcomed by environmentalists. “For the first time, we have someone who takes his job as environment minister seriously,” says Divya Raghunandan, campaign director for the India unit of Greenpeace, arguably the most vocal eco-activist group in the world.

“He has turned an apathetic and weak ministry into something that has teeth,” she says, despite some of the U-turns Ramesh has been forced to make due to political reasons.

Orissa’s industries, steel and mines minister Raghunath Mohanty, however, was not amused.

“Having given in-principle environment clearance to the project long ago, the ministry of environment and forests has now all of a sudden announced its decision to reject the stage-II clearance in an improper and inappropriate manner,” PTI quoted him as saying.

Ramesh, who took over the ministry a little more than a year ago, has left a sword dangling over many projects, including the Navi Mumbai airport project being pushed by aviation minister Praful Patel and the Tamnar power project by Congress MP Naveen Jindal’s Jindal Power.

While final approval for the airport has been kept on hold, Ramesh withdrew the preliminary approval given to Jindal’s plant in Chhattisgarh, with the comment that the state government take further action.

Also at the receiving end of Ramesh’s tight scrutiny are various projects of Nagarjuna Power, the South Korean steel giant Posco and Aditya Birla group’s UltraTech cement. For long the preserve of coalition partner DMK, the ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) kept itself out of the limelight even as it was seen as a ministry where approvals and permissions could be ‘managed’ without much trouble.

The current Vedanta project too, was granted preliminary approval by the ministry five years ago. However, it too was caught up in the raft of projects subjected to closer scrutiny after Jairam Ramesh took over in June last year.

Partly due to the increased attention given to the plight of Kondh tribals after Rahul Gandhi’s visit, Ramesh appointed a four-member committee of experts under the leadership of Saxena.

The report, in a trenchant indictment of Vedanta’s project, accused the company of land-grabbing. “This is an act of total contempt for the law on the part of the company and shows an appalling degree of collusion on the part of the concerned officials,” the committee noted, adding that Vedanta’s already existing aluminium refinery too had broken the law by expanding its capacity without getting environment clearance.

It also pointed out that allowing the seven sq km mine on Niyamgiri hills would result in 1.2 lakh trees being cut, while the mine itself would have a life of just four years.