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By Meena Menon Environmentalists claim that a powerful industrial lobby is pressing the termination of the Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority, which has been doing its job of protecting this tribal-dominated, eco-sensitive area of Maharashtra, only too well
Even as the environment ministry notifies more eco-sensitive areas, it is trying to scrap the Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority (DTEPA), constituted by the Supreme Court in 1996 to regulate the implementation of the law in that area. Dahanu taluka in Maharashtra was only the second region in the country to be declared eco-fragile by a government notification of June 21, 1991. In 1994, Bittu Sehgal, environmentalist and editor of Sanctuary Magazine, filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court, demanding the implementation of the notification in Dahanu taluka. The Supreme Court subsequently constituted the DTEPA by its order of October 31, 1996. (Notification under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, restricts the development of industries, mining operations and other development in the region.) The DTEPA is a good example of how the Environment Protection Act can be used to give decentralised powers to an expert committee. The very idea of an Authority of this type was to evolve a more decentralised approach to implementation of the law. The Authority was working quite efficiently and was even worthy of emulation. In January 2002, the ministry of environment, an agency which should be protecting Dahanu and other eco-fragile areas, filed an application in the Supreme Court, demanding an end to DTEPA on the grounds that it had already completed its work. For a year now the case has dragged on with ten adjournments. From its initial standpoint of scrapping the DTEPA, the ministry has decided it needs a single authority to monitor all eco-fragile areas. In addition to Dahanu, more recently, the hill stations of Matheran and Mahabaleshwar-Panchgani have been notified eco-sensitive zones in Maharashtra after a lot of pressure from environmentalists. There are other regions in the country that are similarly notified, such as the Doon Valley (the first), the Aravalli range, Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh and Numaligarh in Assam. The ministry's move to scrap the DTEPA lacks any credible reason. It said that the continuance of the Authority was not necessary as it has already considered and dealt with various matters and the only major activity was the finalisation of the development plan for Dahanu. Suddenly the MOEF feels that Dahanu is too small an area to have a separate Authority of its own, and it was better to have a committee at the central level. Perhaps the only fault of the Authority was that it took action. It would appear that the government does not appreciate efficiency at the cost of ruffling powerful feathers. The DTEPA may just have been too effective for a government-appointed committee, the difference being that it has experts and not figureheads on its board. Things turned rocky for the DTEPA the minute it took tough decisions like the refusal of permission to a 29-berth port at Vadhwan in Dahanu taluka. The notification of Dahanu as an eco-fragile area has been repeatedly attacked by local industrialists and Mumbai MP Ram Naik, who is the petroleum minister. Press reports said that in September 2001, the Union cabinet wanted to ask the Supreme Court to discontinue the DTEPA. This information was released by the public relations office of Petroleum Minister Ram Naik. In 1988, BSES Ltd planned to locate a coal-fired thermal power plant in Dahanu for its consumers in Bombay, despite various recommendations to the contrary. The possible effects of the plant, mainly the sulphur dioxide emissions, alarmed local farmers, not the least of them Nergis Irani who was in a small way trying to improve environmental consciousness in the area. Already, the neighbouring Vapi and Ankleshwar areas had become centres for highly polluting industries and unplanned and haphazard development. Alarmed by the possibility of Dahanu going the same way, she and Kitayun Rustom founded the Dahanu Taluka Environmental Protection Group which has been renamed the Dahanu Taluka Environmental Welfare Association (DTEWA) to fight the plant and prevent it being set up in the area. Irani filed a writ petition challenging the location of the plant in the Bombay High Court in 1989. Both the High Court and the Supreme Court threw out her contention. BSES is the largest power distribution company in India, distributing approximately 4,000 MW, and holding the exclusive license for distribution of power in substantial areas of Mumbai, Delhi and the state of Orissa. BSES and its subsidiaries/associates provide electricity to nearly 5 million consumers in areas covering approximately 1.24 lakh square km, and with an estimated population of 8.5 million. The existing power generation capacity of BSES and its subsidiaries/associates is 885 MW, in the states of Maharashtra, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. For the year ended March 31, 2002, BSES registered a total income of Rs 2,783 crore (US$ 577 million), cash profit of approximately Rs 495 crore ($102.7 million) and profit after tax of Rs 281 crore (US$ 58 million). In January 2003, BSES became part of the Reliance group.
Environmentalists accuse industry and vested interests of subverting various laws that were formulated to preserve the ecological fragility of the tribal-dominated Dahanu block in Thane district of Maharashtra. Industry, on the other hand, feels cheated by the notification and has even challenged it in the Mumbai High Court. However, Dr S K Maudgal, adviser to the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF), surveyed the area in May 1991 and found that the BSES plant violated the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) as it was located within the 500-metre high tide line where construction activity was restricted. His report revealed that BSES was landfilling the creek area and this would affect fishing in the future. No attention was paid to this or the earlier S K Roy report which had said that Dahanu was not the appropriate site for a thermal power plant on nine different counts. Ingress of the sea into land was another cause for concern which made the CRZ all the more important to the region. Under the June 20, 1991 notification, the state government was directed to prepare a master plan or regional plan for the taluka based on the existing land use, demarcating the green areas, orchards, tribal areas and other environmentally sensitive areas without changing the existing land use. This plan is not yet prepared. After a hard-fought battle, the DTEPA was set up, and functioning well, only to have the ministry put a spoke in the wheel. Challenging the contention that DTEPA must be discontinued, Nergis Irani in her affidavit said that "the conduct of the Ministry of Environment and Forests has been evidently dictated by pressure from vested interest groups such as BSES Ltd, which have in fact made an application to expand their existing 500 MW unit to 2000 MW". Local industry associations and quarry owners have been distinctly unhappy with the effective enforcement by the Authority of environmental regulations in Dahanu including the terms of the Dahanu notification. It is allegedly industry interests that have resulted in Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Ram Naik making several pronouncements in the local press that the Authority should be disbanded in view of its alleged impact on 'development'. Irani's affidavit also added that BSES Ltd finds the vigil and monitoring of the Dahanu Authority inconvenient, and the order of the Authority to install pollution control measures expensive. Kerban Anklesaria, the lawyer representing Irani, said that these contentions were never denied at any stage and the ministry had changed the reason to wind up DTEPA thrice. One suggestion is that there must be a single authority for all such eco-fragile or eco-sensitive areas in India or a monitoring committee to advise the ministry of environment. Before the DTEPA was set up, there was a monitoring committee appointed for Dahanu, which had no representative of local communities and one of the two industrialists on the committee had challenged the Dahanu notification in the Mumbai High Court. The Rs 1400 crore BSES thermal power plant was commissioned in July 1995. Located on 821.58 hectares of land near the sea, it uses 8040 mt of unwashed coal every day and 84,000 cum/hr of sea water. About 76.38 tonnes of sulphur dioxide gas are spewed out every day. It has a 275.3 metre high stack, the highest in India, to disperse ash to longer distances. Ash is dumped in slurry form and 370 hectares have been set aside for this. BSES claims all its pollution parameters are well within control. It has won many awards for excellence in environment management and conducts tests to show that sulphur dioxide has no harmful effects on fruits like chikoos which grow abundantly in Dahanu. It has planted 66 lakh plants all around the facility, most of them mangroves. Activists however say the company is openly flouting rules. They contend that the jetty for the unloading of coal has polluted the creeks and obstructed the free flow of water. The Authority asked BSES on May 12, 1999, to install a flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) plant within a period of six months (the FGD plant is an expensive pollution control device to reduce sulphur oxide emissions), after it found that BSES was exceeding emissions. A writ petition by BSES challenging this was rejected by the High Court and later the Supreme Court rejected the company's special leave petition in appeal. However, no FGD has been installed by the BSES to date. The other major problem was the disposal of flyash. The BSES plant creates 3,000 tonnes of ash per day which is being dumped on ash ponds which are wetland areas. Alternative uses of fly ash are being examined by the Authority. It is also making efforts to prepare a Regional Plan which can act as a model Regional Plan for other environmentally sensitive or ecologically fragile areas. BSES has applied for expansion of the plant, which is before the DTEPA. The Authority's status report of December 2002 has listed 13 pending matters before it. Clearly, the DTEPA's work is far from over. InfoChange News & Features, June 2003
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