The Meghalaya High Court has been the vanguard of civil rights. From rapping the State Government on the knuckles for illegal mining and transportation of coal to pulling up the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) for the decrepit road condition from East Jaintia Hills to Silchar in Assam and beyond to Mizoram. The High Court has called out the State Government for ignoring its directives vis a vis the construction of eateries adjoining the Umiam River. Judging by the cases of public interest coming before the High Court it would appear that there is no oversight institution to decide on the validity of the clearances given to individuals that seek environmental clearances for their construction projects.
The State Environment and Forest Department and the Meghalaya Pollution Control Board have both been found wanting in the discharge of their duties. The former does not seem overly concerned about either the Environment or the Forest or even the ecological destruction caused by relentless sand mining from every river worth its name. Indeed, the long term impacts of such actions appear to be of no concern to the Department which is intended to safeguard our environment before more drastic climate changes overwhelm this State and its people. The only task of the Meghalaya State Pollution Control Board (MSPCB) would appear to be to organise public hearings before granting clearances to projects when they should instead be exercising a supervisory role. The faulty paradigm of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is that consultants are engaged and paid for by the company requiring clearances. This therefore takes away the ombudsman role from the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests & Climate Change (MoEFCC). It has very little say in the matter since the EIA is tailored to pass through the State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities (SEIAAs).
The Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 2006, is the governing legal instrument to grant green clearance for establishment or expansion of an industry on the basis of the expected environmental impact of the project. Introduced in 1994, the EIA protocol has gone through several amendments and revised in 2006. Instead of ensuring stricter implementation of the provisions, governments, over the years, have made concerted efforts to dilute the processes and norms to ease establishment and expansion of industries and to even accommodate industries that generate pollution. Records of the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) show that in the last five years, some 110 changes have been introduced in the 2006 EIA notification vide office memorandums. This faulty compliance module has resulted in forests being cleared with alacrity much to the detriment of the environment. The question is whether the ambit of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) has also been diluted and hence it is unable to stop rampant environmental destruction in Meghalaya. Who then is the custodian of the environment?