MoEF&CC’s compliance module for environmental clearance
- June 23, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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MoEF&CC’s compliance module for environmental clearance
Subject : Environment
Section: Acts
Context:
- The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) released a notification, detailing a compliance module for projects granted environmental clearance under the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification 2006.
What is Environmental Impact Assessment?
- EIA is the management tool for identifying environmental, social and economic impacts of a project before decision-making. Thus, it seeks to ensure optimal use of natural resources within the context of sustainable development.
EIA Notification 2006
- The EIA Notification 2006 requires that projects that cause pollution, displacement, destruction of natural resources, etc, must go through a series of clearance steps according to standards and with the prior consent of a variety of statutory agencies, both at the state and central levels.
- A compliance report, under the notification, provides the status of compliance with conditions stipulated in the environmental clearance letter and is to be submitted every six months from the grant of environmental clearance to a project.
- However, according to the MoEF&CC notification, project owners often do not adhere to the timeline for the submission of compliance reports under the EIA Notification, 2006.
- Earlier, the project proponent would submit the compliance report as a hard copy to regulatory agencies and upload the same on MoEF&CC’s environmental clearance portal called ‘Parivesh’.
PARIVESH web portal:
- Parivesh is a web based, role-based workflow application which has been developed for online submission and monitoring of the proposals submitted by the proponents for seeking Environment, Forest, Wildlife and CRZ Clearances from Central, State and district level authorities.
- It automates the entire tracking of proposals which includes online submission of a new proposal, editing/updating the details of proposals and displays status of the proposals at each stage of the workflow.
New Compliance module for environmental clearance:
- The module streamlines the compliance and monitoring process and avoids any delays in submission of the compliance reports to regulatory authorities.
- The ministry’s notification makes it mandatory to submit the compliance report online to bring more efficiency and transparency in the compliance and monitoring regime.
- The ministry has made a provision of uploading environmental conditions in an online form against which, compliance status can be submitted by the project proponent.
- Compliance data from the portal can then be directly used by the regulators for project monitoring.
- The ministry, in its new notification, has made it mandatory to submit a ‘self-declaration’ justifying the status for various parameters. Earlier, it was manually impossible to check such a large number of incoming files, the proponent was able to escape scrutiny.
- The provision ensures that the compliance report is not successfully submitted without the required proof of compliance.