Govt changes tack on conserving dense forests, okays mining in Chhattisgarh

Coal mining has been allowed in the 5-mtpa Parsa Open Cast Coal Mine, about 841.5 hectares from Chhattisgarh's Hasdeo Arand forest, one of India's densest sal forests

The Union government has allowed coal mining in Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand, one of India’s densest sal forests, ignoring its own scientific demarcation of this patch of forest as ‘inviolate’ — one so dense and biologically valuable that no industrial or development activity should be permitted there.

The permission is for mining coal from the 5-million-tonne-per-annum Parsa Open Cast Coal Mine, in about 841.5 hectares from the Hasdeo Arand forest. The clearing of forests, acquisition of lands and all mining operations will be carried out by the Adani group for the Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam (RRVUN) Ltd, a company run by the Rajasthan government. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government at the Centre had allotted RRVUN the coal block during the term of the previous state government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Vasundhara Raje. The state-run power company, in turn, gave the Mine Developer and Operator (MDO) contract to the Adani group through a joint-venture company in which RRVUN has only a 26 per cent shareholding.

Business Standard has reviewed government documents that show mapping and forestry experts in the Union environment, forests and climate change ministry initially identified the Parsa coal block as falling in the inviolate zone. This demarcation remained intact even after the fundamental parameters for identifying inviolate forests were diluted repeatedly. But, the Union coal ministry allocated the block to RRVUN without considering this demarcation and the latter signed a contract with the Adani group to develop, control and mine the block. The coal ministry then intervened with the environment ministry, informing that the Parsa coal block should regardless be kept out of the inviolate zone, as it had already been decided that mining in it should be allowed, the documents show.

Business Standard on April 8 sent the Union environment ministry a questionnaire asking about the legality of keeping the coal block out of the inviolate zone demarcation after once identifying it as one. The ministry did not respond to the written queries, but Siddhanta Das, director-general of forests in the ministry, said over phone: “It is not so that the entire (Parsa coal) block was inviolate. Only a certain portion of the block was reported to have a high conservation value. The state government will re-examine that portion and get back to us.”

Government records — particularly the correspondence between the coal and environment ministries dated December 9, 2015 — however, show that the environment ministry had demarcated the entire Parsa coal block as “inviolate”. There were other coal blocks that the government had demarcated as "partially inviolate" because only small portions of those blocks had pristine forest, and it wanted to allow mining in them by modifying their boundaries. Such a modification was not possible in the case of Parsa, the records show. The coal ministry still insisted that the entire Parsa coal block be removed from the inviolate list, merely because it had already approved mining in it.

Email queries were also sent to the Adani group and RRVUN on April 8. A public relations officer with the Adani Group informally spoke to Business Standard over phone on April 10 and promised to send the responses by email. However, Business Standard did not receive responses despite repeated reminders. RRVUN officials also did not respond to the queries, despite repeated requests over phone and text messages. The responses from the Adani group and RRVUN will be carried as soon as Business Standard receives them.

Coal mining and inviolate forests 

The inviolate policy was first introduced in 2009 by the Union environment ministry in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of the day. It was initially termed as the ‘no-go’ forest policy. A ministry report in 2010 demarcated 47 per cent of areas under 602 coal blocks as no-go zones. Of these, 206 blocks were kept entirely out of bounds for miners. But other arms of the government and the Prime Minister’s Office sought a revision in the policy to reduce the coal blocks that would be impacted. In response, to bolster its argument, a scientifically more vigorous exercise was carried out by an expert committee of the environment ministry to identify such blocks based on transparent laid-down parameters. The areas to be demarcated on the basis of these scientific parameters were termed inviolate forests.

By 2015, with the BJP-led NDA in power at the centre, the list of coal blocks falling in the inviolate forests was trimmed to 73, while only 216 (compared to 602 earlier) of the coal blocks were found with some parts falling in inviolate forests. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court cancelled the allocation of 204 coal blocks to private and state-run companies in August 2014, having found them arbitrary and illegal. The NDA government in response legislated the Coal Mining (Special Provisions) Act, 2015, and began auctioning coal blocks to the private sector and allocating them to both state and central public sector units afresh. The Parsa block went to RRVUN in the first tranche of the allotments in March 2015.

During this time, however, the government did not implement the inviolate forest policy in full. Instead, it began an exercise to evaluate whether or not the inviolate policy should be imposed on coal blocks in a piecemeal manner. In December 2015, after several iterations of the inviolate forest demarcation, the coal ministry told the environment ministry that in 12 of the 73 coal blocks identified as inviolate, forest clearance had either already been granted or mining had been permitted. These 12 included Parsa. And another six blocks had already been allocated afresh to mining companies, the coal ministry said. It demanded that these blocks be kept out of the inviolate demarcation regardless of their status under the inviolate policy. For another 34 inviolate blocks, the coal ministry said that they could be removed from the inviolate category by modifying boundaries.

How the approval came

Under the legal process for diverting forests for mining and other industrial activities, as laid down in the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, RRVUN in May 2018 applied for a forest clearance to the environment ministry. At this stage, the environment ministry had not informed the project proponent that the area of the coal mine fell in the inviolate zone. It instead sent the proposal to its expert committee that appraises cases for felling of forests. This committee, comprising top government forest officials (besides some independently appointed members), was also supervising how the inviolate policy was being implemented.

After several rounds of discussions, the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) formed a three-member sub-committee in December last year to visit the mining site at Parsa. One of the tasks assigned to it was examining the “scope of excluding the VDF (very dense forest) from the proposed diversion area and carrying out other appropriate exercises so that the area does not come under inviolate area”.

Two of the three members of the sub-committee visited the site in January. The third member, a representative of the Chhattisgarh government, did not participate in the visit. The sub-committee’s report said that the mining area did not have any ‘very dense forest’. When the report was discussed at the FAC meeting in January this year, the state government did not agree with its findings, show the minutes of the meeting. The state instead asked the FAC to form a larger committee that should take up a site visit for a longer duration. The FAC, however, did not accede to the request and went ahead with recommending an approval to felling the forest. But it asked the state to “reconfirm the presence/absence of very dense forest... and scope of excluding the same from the (mining) proposal,” the minutes of the meeting show.

The Hasdeo Arand forest, spread over 170,000 hectares is one of the last remaining unbroken patches of pristine forest in central India. There are 18 coal blocks in Hasdeo Coal field. Despite most of this forest being identified as inviolate by the environment ministry in 2010, Jairam Ramesh, the environment minister at the time, gave forest clearance to two mines — Parsa East Kete Basan (PEKB) and Tara — in 2011. In doing so, he went against the recommendations of the FAC, which had advised against allowing mining. States and the central government are currently considering applications for opening up four more mines in this forest.

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