the goan I network
PANAJI
The greenfield Goa international airport at Mopa, which the current Pramod Sawant-led dispensation is hoping will have its first phase executed by mid-2021, got its environmental clearance afresh on Thursday after being dogged by a Supreme Court imposed suspension for over a year since January 2019.
Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar announced that the EC was “granted today” (Thursday) in accordance with the Supreme Court’s direction earlier last month by which the MoEF&CC’s Expert Appraisal Committee (EAC) was free to consider the issue afresh.
The fresh EC was granted in the form of “addendums” to the original one which was suspended by the Apex Court in January last year after serious and substantive questions were raised by Rainbow Warriors, an NGO which questioned large-scale felling of trees in excess of thousands over and above the number permitted by the Forest department.
Exactly a year after the Supreme Court had suspended the original EC, it permitted the MoEF&CC to put the matter before the EAC and issue the EC afresh all over again after taking into account the impact on the area’s ecological balance.The project is being executed by the concessionaire, GMR Airports, which will then operate the airport for 40 years, including the time utilized to construct it. When work will re-start on the project at the Mopa plateau site however is still uncertain as the parent group company of the Concessionaire has undergone management changes due to financial restructuring and majority stake sale. The Goa government however has announced the first phase of the airport will be completed and the first flights will begin taking off by the end of the 2021-22 financial year.
The Supreme Court had stayed the EC in January last year and subsequently in March suspended it while directing the Expert Appraisal Committee to revisit the decision in light of its impact on ecology.
The Bench of Justices DY Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta had said that the EAC, as an expert body, had abdicated its role and function by taking into account circumstances which were extraneous to the exercise of its
power and failed to notice facets of the environment that were crucial to its decision-making.
The Supreme Court bench had also noted a glaring deficiency in the project’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report is as it had failed to notice the existence of ecologically sensitive zones of the Western Ghats within 10 kilometers of the site.”The EAC shall carry out the exercise within a month of the receipt of a certified copy of this order. Until the EAC carries out the fresh exercise as directed above, the environmental clearance granted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests on October 28, 2015 shall remain suspended,” the Supreme Court order said.
Earlier in August 2018, the National Green Tribunal had declined to quash the EC granted for development of the Mopa airport. The Federation of Rainbow Warriors and Hanuman Aroskar had then moved the Supreme Court.
