Central Empowered Committee: SC hands over its green watchdog committee to Environment Ministry

Central Empowered Committee: SC hands over its green watchdog committee to Environment Ministry

Subject: Environment

Section: Environment legislation

Central Empowered Committee (CEC):

• Setup in 2002 by the Supreme Court of India, and reconstituted in 2008.
• Aim: To flag cases of official non-compliance with its orders related to conservation.
• The current CEC is chaired by retired IAS officer PV Jayakrishnan and includes four other members: Retired Forest service officers Amarnatha Shetty, Dr Maharaj K Muthoo, SK Patnaik, and lawyer and naturalist Mahendra Vyas.
• Recent development:
  • The CEC has been made a permanent body that will now report to the Environment Ministry which will nominate its members and have the final say on the merit of its recommendations.
  • In case any suggestion or recommendation of the Central Empowered Committee is not acceptable to the State or Central Government, the Government shall give reasons in writing for not accepting the same and such decision of the Central Government shall be final.
• Impact:
  • It has diluted the CEC’s autonomy on four key counts:
    • The committee will report to the ministry, instead of the SC;
    • The ministry will pick all the members and the SC will have no role in the process;
    • The ministry, and not the court, will fund the committee;
    • The provision of having two NGOs in the committee has been done away with.
  • Now anyone considered an “expert” can be included as a member.
• Significant works of CEC’s:
  • It has filed thousands of reports on issues referred to it by the apex court that have shaped the discourse around environment policy.
  • These include: Compensatory afforestation, Net present value of forests, Kudremukh mining, Aravali forests, Bellary mining, Recommendation to cancel the double-tracking of a railway line from Castle Rock in Karnataka to Kulem in Goa, Imprisonment to former Maharashtra minister for permitting wood mills to operate in violation of the SC’s order.