The proposed Environment Appraisal and Monitoring Authority (NEAMA), once it comes into existence, may subsume the existing environment appraisal committees (EAC) and forest advisory committee (FAC) of the environment ministry.
The ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) is working on the modalities of the independent regulator, which is expected to have separate sections for environmental clearance and forest clearance instead of the committees that exist at present.
?There will be no committee business once the NEAMA is in place. Separate sections would be made to look at environment and forest clearance. These sections would comprise young, dedicated professionals instead of the EAC and FAC members who meet only a couple of times in a month,? a senior MoEF official told FE.
In fact, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had advocated the setting up of such an authority, as there is a need to change the way environmental clearances are granted in the country.
This professional, science-based autonomous entity will be tasked with environmental appraisals and monitoring of compliance conditions besides having the required field outreach. Once appraised by NEAMA, projects would be sent with a recommendation to the minister of environment and forests for approval. The official added that NEAMA is the brainchild of MoEF and will most probably remain under its aegis.
Further, NEAMA is a part of the larger environmental regulatory reform agenda of the ministry and will have complementarities with Central Pollution Control Board.
NEAMA is expected to mark a major improvement over the current system wherein the ministry does appraisal and approval of new projects. Besides converting the current ?batch? process into a continuous and rigorous one, NEAMA will maintain its own real-time and time-series databases on pollution loads across the country, which it will use to appraise proposed projects, instead of relying on data provided by project proponents as is the current practice.
Moreover, the authority will remove the conflict of interest between appraisal and approval by separating the two processes. While NEAMA will be tasked with appraisal of new projects, the ministry will be responsible for the final approval.
Previous environment minister Jairam Ramesh had said that this will provide much greater objectivity in the appraisal process and NEAMA will have a well-equipped system to ensure compliance with the conditions imposed on new projects that are granted environmental clearance.