Illegalities were the core reason: Posco panel

A member of the Union environment ministry’s panel which has, with a dissenting note, recommended rejection of clearance for Posco India’s Orissa steel project, said the decision was based solely on the illegalities involved.

Rejecting the argument for favouring Posco by a dissenting member, that scheduled tribes (STs) were not involved and the forests involved were scrub, panel member V Suresh told Business Standard that with or without STs or forests, the earlier clearances were based on illegalities.

The 155-page report names the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), among others, for the violations that were overlooked while granting clearances to the project at various stages.

Of the four panel members, Meena Gupta, former secretary in zMoEF, has dissented. Her dissent note says the environmental and forest law violations in the Posco project should be seen in a different light than the case of Vedanta, which recently had its earlier clearance revoked for like irregularities. Gupta was in favour of clearing Posco, with some additional conditions. The other members want revocation. Gupta says Vedanta was a different matter, as the displaced persons were tribals and would have been destroyed by the project, while in this case the displaced persons were not STs and the forests involved are “just sandy waste with some scrub forest”.

Suresh said it was not a matter of allowing Posco because the forests were a lesser variety and the tribals were not strictly STs. “Posco clearances have to be revoked because they were illegal. There were serious environmental concerns about the project, which have been documented in detail in the 155 pages. There were irregularities in the whole procedure of clearances and these have been documented, too,” he said.