New Delhi: The Environment Ministry has cleaned up its act, and the new minister is all set to project his new team as lean and efficient, as they try and make the tracking of environment and forest clearances a lot more transparent.
However, despite this attempt, several unanswered questions about the clearance process itself remain.
"The acceptance rate for environment projects has been very high - almost 98 per cent. We are putting a system in place whereby projects go through the whole drill. We have to bring down this unhealthy rate of acceptance," said Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.
The Environment Minister is setting the bar for clearing all industrial and mining projects since they need his ministry's go ahead.
The minister has put the rejection rate of projects awaiting environmental clearance at two per cent and 20 per cent for those awaiting forest clearance, but environmentalists and lawyers say proposals almost never get rejected.
The Vedanta bauxite mining project in Orissa's Kalahandi district is one such case. It faced severe opposition when it was sent for clearance in 2004, but it was cleared by the Environment Ministry in April 2009 based on this 2003 project report, which is completely outdated today.
Interestingly, the national environment appellate authority, which is supposed to look into grievances against cleared projects is almost defunct. So if you are keen on contesting a project clearance, be rest assured it's going to be no easy task.
One of the biggest criticisms of the environmental clearance process is that there is no accountability and those who are likely to be impacted the most by the project are least heard despite mandatory public hearings.
Therefore, while the Environment Ministry struggles to give project clearances a degree of respectability, in the larger scheme of things, a lower acceptability rate is far from the only problem.