Former finance secretary EAS Sarma asks government to reopen all environment assessment reports and to blacklist offending companies and consultants

Moneylife Digital Team

Former power and finance secretary EAS Sarma has accused some private companies in Andhra Pradesh-many of them pharmaceutical manufacturers-of getting false environment impact assessment reports for their projects, and he charged the environment ministry with overlooking this and sanctioning the projects.

In a letter to the secretary in the Ministry of Environment and Forests, JM Mauskar, Mr Sarma has also complained that the state level Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board has neglected its responsibility to conduct public hearings on the basis of these environment assessment reports, apparently because officials have vested interest.

He has demanded that all such assessment reports be re-examined and that the companies and consultants found guilty of such wrongful practice be blacklisted.

Mr Sarma gave the example of a report prepared by Rightsource Industrial Solutions for a bulk drug manufacturing project of Lohitha Lifesciences in Visakhapatnam  district of Andhra Pradesh, parts of which have been copied blatantly from another report, that was prepared for a sponge iron plant.

"Prediction and identification of the environment impact is an important part of the environment study," Mr Sarma wrote. "The consulting company has evidently lifted paragraphs by cut-and-paste from another report on a sponge iron project elsewhere."

He has highlighted the copied portions and it would be relevant to mention the lines here to understand how blatantly this practice is going on. One line in the Lohitha's assessment report reads: "It is absolutely essential to study the impact of air pollution on its environs due to the proposed sponge iron plant."

This matter was raised at a recent public hearing of the state level expert appraisal committee of the ministry, but without any success. Mr Sarma says that the consultant has similarly copied parts of the same sponge iron factory environment report to prepare reports for two other clients, KS Pharma and JPR Labs. Some of Rightsource's other clients are Celon Organics, Vivin Laboratories, Integrin Life Sciences, KMTK Laboratories and Pharmaestro Laboratories.

Another example he has given is of the Ramky Group, whose company Ramky Infrastructure is listed on the stock exchanges. Ramky has set up its own environment assessment agency by the name of Ramky Enviro Engineers, and it has used this agency's services to get clearances for its gas-based power plants and waste recycling complex.

"Andhra Pradesh State Level Expert Appraisal Committee (APSEAC) has also an EIA report prepared by BS Envitech in January 2011, for the group's own project in East Godavari district," Mr Sarma said. "Clearly, there is conflict-of-interest in this. The Ministry of Environment and Forests cannot permit such reports to form the basis of public hearings." BS Envitech apparently has the accredition from the Quality Council of India.

In most cases, the reports have not been given a public hearing. "The environment impact assessment study is supposed to be the basis of a meaningful public hearing process. But neither the developers nor the consultants have bothered to consider this," Mr Sarma said.

He says that even the state pollution control board, which is responsible for arranging the public hearing, has failed to discharge its responsibility. "This is because many of the government officials have vested interests. I know a state-level appraisal committee member who joined one such company as a director as soon as the project was cleared."

What's worse is that regardless of these fraudulent reports, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has been benevolent in granting clearances to such projects. "I am surprised that neither the MoEF nor the Quality Council of India has laid down the basic norms to be observed by accredited consultants. I come back to my original proposal that the MoEF should institute a system of selecting the consultants at random and ensuring that their remuneration is delinked from the project developers," Mr Sarma said.