BANGALORE: The Campaign for Environmental Justice India (CEJI), a coalition of people's movements, has said that the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) is covertly engaged in "re-engineering" two key notifications relating to Environment Impact Assessment and Coastal Regulation Zone.

The Environment Minister, MPs, and even the Parliamentary Standing Committees on Environment, Science and Technology have been kept in the dark about these amendments, the CEJI alleged.

The members of the coalition told presspersons here on Tuesday that the CEJI had been campaigning against the continued dilution of environmental standards for the past two years. The main charge against the MoEF was that the EIA Notification Amendment was being pushed through without consultations, Leo Saldanha, Coordinator of the Bangalore-based Environment Support Group, said.

Even a meeting they had with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, where she said it was unfortunate that people's groups were kept out of the dialogue, seemed to have had no effect on the MoEF, Mr. Saldanha said.

The CEJI, which had not received any response from the MoEF on their requests, for information in the last two years, found on meeting the A. Raja, the Union Minister for Environment, that he was not aware of the people's groups and voluntary organisations being kept out of the dialogue on the EIA notification.

After meeting with the CEJI, Mr. Raja directed Environment Secretary Pradipto Ghosh on August 9 to open up the process of comprehensively amending the EIA and CRZ notifications.

However, the CEJI had not received any communication from the MoEF even after this meeting, and in the meanwhile MoEF was pushing ahead with the amendment to the notification in clear violation of the Minister's assurance, Mr. Saldanha said.

Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment and Forests P.G. Narayanan told a delegation of CEJI recently that he had not been consulted on the process of reformulation of these critical notifications.

Soon after he wrote to MoEF calling for an explanation, it responded saying that the Environment Secretary, the Principal Secretary in the Prime Minister's Office and the Member, Planning Commission had "decided that there should be another round of discussions among the industry representatives and Central ministries".

The CEJI has demanded that until the MoEF plans reflected the interests of millions of farmers, workers and communities which depended directly on natural resources, the proposed amendments should be put on hold.

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