“The reports are apologies even on the paper they are written on. These reports are mostly written at a very junior level. For instance, statistics are extremely debatable. Information on the 10th page will not tally with the 12th page and so on,” admitted another member of one of the expert groups set up by the environment ministry, who also did not wish to be identified. “More often than not, such consultants hardly visit the sites.”
Most major projects in India—refineries, mining, thermal power and hydroelectric power—have to submit a comprehensive EIA after a survey and a comprehensive investigation of the project site, including repercussions on the environment and displacement of local people.
Under the Environmental Protection Act, 1986, the EIA then has to be cleared by an expert appraisal committee before a project can get under way. There are separate committees on hydroelectric projects, thermal projects, infrastructure, coal mining, non-coal mining, nuclear and industrial projects, set up by the Central ministry.
But appraisal committees are also over-burdened as each monthly meeting can take up some 50 or more projects for approval, say people involved in the exercise.
The Ratnagiri saga
Ashapura submitted its EIA to the environment ministry in 2005. It was seeking a 74-year mining lease for the bauxite mine, spread over 100ha in Umbershet, a village in Ratnagiri district. The company, which is listed on the National Stock Exchange, has operations in Belgium, Nigeria, Oman and Malaysia. It generated annual revenues through March of about Rs900 crore, out of Ashapura Group’s total revenues of Rs1,272 crore.
The EIA was a critical element of the process of granting the licence to Ashapura. A copy of the EIA, on the basis of which the project was cleared, was then obtained by Life through an RTI filed on 22 August. Life then sent the EIA to E-law, a US-based global network of environmental lawyers that it works with, for comparison with other EIAs.
E-Law discovered that large portions of the Ratnagiri EIA were actually copied from a Russian EIA for a bauxite mine. “The Indian EIA is a pirated version of another one for a proposal by a Russian aluminium company to mine bauxite in the Komi Republic of Russia. It was submitted to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in April 2004,” says Mark Chernaik, a lawyer who works with E-law.
Indeed, Rob Hounsome, the author of the original EIA for a Russian mining project, said in a telephone interview: “Clearly there has been liberal and uninformed cut-and-paste of our work.”
Apart from the obvious mistakes on vegetation, there are numerous examples in the Ratnagiri EIA of text copied verbatim from the Russian report, including variables in surface water quality, precipitation, bird and mammal densities, number of species and impacts of the project.
According to R.B. Panjwani, vice-president of resource development, Ashapura submitted a fresh EIA in July 2006. The company doesn’t deny it submitted the first EIA and, in two separate communications cited in Life’s RTI request, the environment ministry maintains it based its approval only on the original EIA.
Ashapura’s new EIA, reviewed by Mint, is completely different from the first one though it doesn’t say which consultant had prepared it.