Narendra Modi’s war on the environment

TAMNAR, India — Tarika Lakra’s days have a predictable quality. The 32-year-old is a nurse in the Tamnar village government hospital in Raigarh district in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, where she works eight hours per day in the women’s ward. Afterward, she does an hour of housekeeping and cooking in the staff quarters that she shares with her husband, a shop owner. Then, all evening and during her days off, she meets with lawyers and the police, goes to court and spends long hours reading legal documents and scouring the Internet, trying to keep up with the rapid undoing of everything she holds dear. “That’s the role taking over my life,” says Lakra. “I’m fighting a giant every day.” 

Until eight years ago, Lakra’s evenings looked very different. They were spent at her orchard — 27.5 acres of fertile land packed with about 300 mango trees, 400 cashew, 315 sagwan teak and 400 of the local mahua. Her father had spent his life’s savings on this piece of land, Lakra says, irrigating it and putting in two tube wells. He taught his daughter how to graft stems, choose fertilizer and tend to a tree so that it would produce the best fruit. After he died, Lakra took over. “He dreamt that this land should be a patch of man-made paradise resembling the forest nearby, that it should employ many villagers and be a proud gift to pass on to his grandchildren,” she says. “But a family like mine can’t have dreams in Raigarh.” 

Raigarh is part of Chhattisgarh’s massive industrial belt and has long attracted steel, cement and thermal-power companies to its rich seams of coal. Tamnar village is where it all began, with the government granting Jindal Steel & Power Ltd, or JSPL, a coal-mining permit in 1996, making it the first private company to generate power in India. It started with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts, now expanded to 2,400. Today, Raigarh is often called Jindal Kingdom. JSPL has an enormous campus with thermal power and steel plants. In addition to its coal mines, it runs a private college and numerous schools, which sprawl through half the district. Gradually, other private companies, such as Adani Mining, Monnet Ispat and Hindalco Industries, also flocked here. 

The land appropriation in Raigarh may sound extreme, but it is only one example among many of how private companies and the government are able to violate laws with impunity. And the situation is set to deteriorate. As the trio fight their cases, hoping to get justice in court, the Indian government is diluting the very protections people like them are counting on. 

The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government came to power last May in a massive wave of support for Narendra Modi, now the prime minister, and his agenda of economic development for all. In under a year, it has begun to undo policies of fair land acquisition, undermine environmental protection and reverse the fight for tribal rights. The finance, environment and rural-development ministers, and Modi himself, have called these safeguards to protect people’s property, the environment and tribal rights “roadblocks” to economic growth. Rules that ensure business responsibility to people and the environment, in other words, are now largely being written off.

For decades in India, regressive policies favored industrial growth over people’s rights. Affected villages would routinely erupt in massive and often violent protests against land grabs, pollution and forced evictions. Thousands of cases like Lakra’s still languish in courts across the country. On the other hand, corporate officials complained of wasted investments, bureaucratic logjams and market uncertainty. 

In the last decade, the government, led by the Congress party, tried to address some of these complaints. It strengthened the rights of tribal communities over forestlands and set up the National Green Tribunal, a special court with environmental expertise to hear grievances about green violations within short deadlines. It replaced a 120-year-old draconian law that allowed land to be acquired for inconsistent payment and without permission from owners, with the progressive Land Acquisition Act in 2013. This provided higher rates and made consent from a large majority of landowners necessary before acquiring land for industry. It also ensured that companies assess the impact of their proposed projects on the whole community, including on non-owners such as landless farm workers, fishermen who use local rivers or even children who might lose their school or playground. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change also mapped out forest areas that must never be diverted for industry or infrastructure.

The changes had limitations due to political compromises and corporate pressure, activists say, but were still a long-awaited win for communities that had demanded sustainable growth. Since 2014, however, these progressive steps have begun to be reversed. As parliamentary elections approached, the Congress party started to weaken some of its own policies. The party’s ratings had sunk due to million-dollar scams that exposed its coalition members’ corruption in coal mining and telecom spectrum licensing. Desperate for an image makeover, the party rolled back some environmental protections that Indian businesses said had stalled growth. 

“In damage-control mode, the Congress scaled back the pro-people laws. This was also to woo corporates for campaign funding,” says activist Medha Patkar, pointing to the tens of millions of rupees funneled by corporations into the campaign coffers of both national parties (90 percent of all campaign funding in 2013-14). Some of this, by foreign companies such as Vedanta, violated campaign laws. The Congress party subsequently increased exemptions from the environmental laws for certain companies and allotted many forests to industry. 

The Modi government has loosened these laws even further. Now, in more instances, land can be taken without asking owners. Consent from villagers is mostly unnecessary. Tribal rights hang by a thread. Forests are fair game, and pollution monitoring is more lenient than ever. 

The government claims these moves will boost economic growth. During his 2015 budget speech, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said projects worth millions were “held up for want of permissions” under the previous governments. This may be true for government-owned projects, but nearly 95 percent of projects proposed by private companies have received environmental clearances, and only 13 percent of stalled infrastructure projects have been held up by land-acquisition procedures. “Unfavorable market conditions (and not regulatory clearances) are stalling a large number of projects in the private sector,” according to the Economic Survey of India. “Perhaps contrary to popular belief, the evidence points towards over exuberance and a credit bubble as primary reasons.”

Even without much evidence, the growth rhetoric has remained a powerful justification for the government. BJP ministers equate fast growth with national pride and have called demands for human rights and conservation “anti-national” activity. Patkar says the previous governments were “at least open to conversation with NGOs and people’s groups. That door is fast shut today. They are making policies more aggressive, no matter what the cost.” 

In August 2014, Modi’s cabinet set up a committee to review six key environmental and climate change laws. “Their mandate was enormous and vague. It held only six to seven public consultations, and only one of five members was associated with the environment in any way,” says a critic of the process, environmental lawyer Shibani Ghosh, from the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research. In only three months, the body was to recommend changes to laws on everything from water pollution and forest conservation, to coastal zone regulations and recycling electronic discards. “Once the recommendations were out, it was clear the committee was simply meant to remove human rights and green roadblocks for investment growth,” says Ghosh. 

The committee suggested a single-window clearance for all green permits, something corporations in India have long lobbied for. In project applications, companies should assess the potential environmental damage their own projects could cause, instead of asking affected communities or the regional pollution-control board to do so, as the earlier rules required. The committee also recommended eliminating all government and independent monitoring and letting companies disclose their own violations, with no oversight. These new rules, the committee says, will oblige companies to act in “utmost good faith.”

About three-quarters of India’s electricity needs are met by coal-fired thermal power. Power Minister Piyush Goyal said in a parliamentary debate last December, “The country is hugely short on coal supply and has to spend tens of millions of rupees on coal imports despite having the third largest coal reserves in the world.” India has about 10 percent of the world’s coal reserves, but is also the world’s third biggest coal importer. The industry was mired in a massive corruption scam in 2012, which exposed the Congress government’s corrupt allocation of coal mines. The Supreme Court called the allotment arbitrary and illegal and canceled 214 fields with coal deposits allocated to private parties from 1993 to 2008. While this was a course correction, it also exacerbated the fuel shortage. 

The new government’s main agenda is to increase coal production, raise more revenue for the state and change the licensing procedure from allocation to auctions of coal blocks. To accomplish these goals, the BJP has passed two laws related to mining and coal. 

For four decades, mining in India was dominated by the state-owned Coal India Ltd., which is the world’s largest miner of coal and the only outfit in India allowed to sell or export coal commercially to other companies. Private power, steel and cement companies can mine coal only for their own consumption. The new coal law — Coal Mines (Special Provisions) Act 2015 — effectively ends government monopoly over extraction of coal, allowing private firms to mine and sell coal commercially and making way for foreign companies to do so in the future.

The mining law — Mines and Minerals (Development and Regulation) Amendment Act 2015 — puts in place a system of competitive bidding, instead of government allocations. Since February, the coal-and-power ministry has auctioned 33 coal blocks to private companies, which have given the coal-rich states revenue of more than 2 trillion rupees (about $32 billion) by way of royalties over a 30-year period. With 90 million tons of coal expected to be produced from just the 42 operational mines in the blocks auctioned so far, Coal Secretary Anil Swarup says the chronic coal shortage and reliance on large imports could end in almost four years.

On the bumpy road from Raigarh town to the coal-bearing areas, a painted sign says “Forest for Need, Not for Greed.” The route is chockablock with hundreds of coal-laden trucks. As they rumble by, plumes of black dust rise and settle on suffocated, scrawny trees on either side, planted by the mining companies for reforestation. 

Beyond the sign, the temperature dips perceptibly, and the forest cover is thicker. This is the edge of the Hasdeo-Arand forest, rich in biodiversity and rare medicinal plants. In a satellite image, the area of nearly 600 square miles is a large swath of dark green, but the Geological Survey of India marks it coal black. It is one of the most sought-after blocks in the country. 

Earlier this year, 20 villages within this forest resolved to oppose any coal mining here. Alok Shukla, an activist from the Chhattisgarh Bachao Andolan (Save Chhattisgarh Movement), explains that government committees in the past declared this forest inviolate, but it keeps reappearing in the coalfield list. “Forests have only five of the 300 billion tons of coal reserves in the country. Can they not leave this area alone for some decades till they have exhausted all other coal blocks?” asks Shukla. 

A few miles outside the forest, Sarasmal village stands at the boundary of the JSPL coal mines. Balkumar Rathiya, whose family home skirts the edge of the mine, points to the fist-sized chunks of coal that fly into his house during explosions. He worked as a mine blaster for three years but was fired when he refused to sell his land for an expansion of the mine. “Earlier, we thought that mines will mean more jobs for us, but we can see now that jobs come rarely and at a price,” he says. His wife and mother grow some turnips and cabbage outside their house, and they get free rice under the state food-security scheme. “I went from being a farmer to a mine worker, and now from a mine worker to a charity case,” he says. “I am asked to sacrifice my land for the country’s growth, but I still don’t have power, there is no hospital, my health is shot because of the mines, and I can’t access the forest anymore.” 

Raigarh district, and therefore Sarasmal village, is protected under the Indian constitution as a scheduled tribal area, and according to the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1996, or PESA, all companies must consult with tribal communities here before commencing any industrial or infrastructural project. The 2006 Forest Rights Act also applies; for a project to get clearance to tear down a forest, the local village council must give written consent.