Home / ANALYSIS / Projects / Can infra go green?

The Ganga Bridge was built using ecofriendly cement supplied by ACC.

Green’ is in vogue today and the construction industry too is seen fulfilling its environmental responsibility. In terms of statistics, the number of ecofriendly buildings is swelling with each day. Surprisingly, while there is so much to write and talk about green buildings, not much attention has been given to the construction of ‘ecofriendly infrastructure’.

For many, that may actually sound like an oxymoron because any infrastructural development entails – whether you accept it or not – a negative impact on the environment. However, given the world’s social, economic and industrial requirements, the human race will find it difficult to live without creating the infrastructures that fulfil these requirements.

Infrastructure development today holds the key to India’s quick recovery from the slowdown as well as to a steady rise as a global economic power. It is therefore essential to synergise infrastructure development with environmental consciousness and this can be done only by ensuring that all developmental activities are necessarily sustainable.

Story continues below

Advertisement

COMMENT Comment on this article

Assessing the impact
The word ‘synergise’ implies the acceptance that infrastructure projects will have an impact on the environment and that the project proponents having assessed the impact should incorporate appropriate measures to address this impact in all aspects of the projects – particularly, planning, design and execution. So far, so good. Now the question that we should be asking is whether our projects are getting properly assessed for their environmental impact at the right stage and if necessary measures are being taken at the subsequent stages.

Infrastructure projects are granted/rejected an environmental clearance only after the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report is issued. The EIA Notification was enacted in 1994, with the Environmental Protection Act (1986) as its legislative foundation [Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF), 2008].

Accordingly, all developmental projects must obtain clearance from the MoEF, and prior to this, they must also obtain clearance from the State Pollution Control Board (SPCB).

Ideally, the EIA should link infrastructural activities with ecological concerns at the start and integrate mitigation measures at appropriate project stages. Is this evolution?

Obviously, no law or act can be frozen in time and it must evolve over time to ensure effective execution in the larger interest. Likewise, the EIA regulations too have been modified over the years.

Sadly this seems to have happened only with the sole objective of expediting the approval process. These ‘modifications’ comprise reduction in the number of interfacing agencies and approvals, and allowing parallel activities for clearances.

For example, authority has now been delegated to the state governments for granting environmental clearance for certain categories of thermal power projects. Following are a couple of examples that will illustrate how and why the environmental cause has been compromised vis-à-vis infrastructure requirements.

One of the many reasons why the work at the Commonwealth Games Village was unable to achieve the desirable speed was the various clearances it required. Key amongst these was the environmental clearance. Environmentalists had opposed a major part of the construction due to its impact on the ecology; it’s too close to the River Yamuna.