Cleared Files, Destroyed Forests |
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When Congress leader Rahul Gandhi walked through the rainforests of Great Nicobar Island last week, he was not making a political pilgrimage. He was bearing witness to a crime. A million trees marked for felling for a Rs 92,000 crore project whose crown jewel is an Adani transshipment port.
The Modi government has granted environmental clearances to itself. No public hearing, no consent. Just the machinery of state serving the corporate interests.
This is not an aberration. It is the direct and crystalline articulation of a governing philosophy that has been in operation since 2014: one that treats the environment not as a commons to be protected but as an obstacle to be cleared. One that makes development antithetical to the environment, that forecloses any choice between infrastructure and healthy living before citizens can exercise it. It ensures that corporates prosper and people suffer.
The public suffering is undeniable: look at the list of the world’s 100 most polluted cities – it features over 90 Indian cities. Look at the heat map – it shows 92 Indian cities among the 100 hottest across the globe.
Right now, Indian cities are hotter than the Sahara desert, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
These numbers are not aberrations. They are the ledger of a decade of governance choices made consciously – systematically – and in full view of their consequences.
The evidence is not in government reports, judicial orders, or media dispatches. It is in your lungs, on your skin, in the eyes that sting on a winter morning in Delhi, Kanpur or Muzaffarpur.
Why is there no solution in sight?
In 2014, the Modi government started with a stated intention to break the shackles of environmental regulation and end ‘policy paralysis’ of the UPA government. It immediately implemented 60 urgent action points submitted by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Every one of them aimed at dismantling hurdles to environmental clearances.
The then environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, boasted of clearing over 500 files in a single day. By 2019, the BJP manifesto listed ‘speed in issuing forest and environmental clearances’ as a governance achievement.
Speed, not scrutiny. The intent was never ambiguous.
The negation of environmental concerns by the Modi government was a commitment by the BJP to its industrial and corporate constituency. It was a price it was willing to pay in exchange for their support.
What followed is measurable. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of environment, forest, wildlife and coastal zone clearances granted jumped from 577 to over 12,000 in a single year – a 20-fold surge.
In 2023-24, approximately 29,000 hectares of forest land were diverted, the highest in a decade. Since 2014, over 16 million trees have been felled for infrastructure projects.
The phrase “policy paralysis” was not a spontaneous public grievance. It was a corporate lobby’s talking point, amplified by........