National green tribunal scraps nod for Aranmula airport project

Thiruvananthapuram: The Chennai bench of the National Green Tribunal on Wednesday revoked the environmental clearance given to the Rs 2000-crore Aranmula airport project, touted as the country’s first private greenfield airport venture.

The NGT observed that Madurai-based Enviro Care, the agency that conducted the environment impact assessment for the project, was not accredited to the Ministry of Environment and Forests. The tribunal also passed a restraining order directing the KGS Group to stop all construction activities in the project area. The KGS Group will now approach the Supreme Court against the order.

It was on November 18, 2013 that the project received the environment clearance from the MoEF. The tribunal’s order came on a raft of petitions filed by the Aranmula Heritage Village Protection Action Council, political parties like the CPM and the CPI and even a local Congress leader against the environment clearance.

The order is seen as an indictment of the former UPA government and the state government. The UPA government has been put in the dock because it failed to detect the lack of credentials of the agency conducting the environment impact assessment. The tribunal said that Enviro Care did not have qualified professionals to do the job.

The tribunal said that Enviro Care did not have qualified professionals to do the job. When the agency registered with Quality Control of India in 2010, it had not sought permission to conduct studies on the environment impact of airports, but only of thermal plants. The agency had controversially noted that the project area did not have wetlands or paddy fields, but only “unclassified” lands.

The state government stands indicted for the manner in which the State Pollution Control Board conducted the public hearing. The tribunal said that the public hearing was conducted in violation of the provisions laid down in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) notifications, 2006.

The notifications have laid down two major conditions: the public should be given a notice period of 30 days before the hearing and the venue of the hearing should either be the project site or a place in close proximity to the site. The PCB did not give 30 days’ notice period and the hearing was conducted at the Collector’s office, some 15 km from the project site. The detailed order will be published on the website on May 30.

The project, which had a government stake of 10 percent, was to come up in 700 acres of land in Aranmula, some 80 km from Sabarimala. The state was also planning to provide 55 acres at market rate for the project. It was modelled on an aeropolis with SEZ, multi-speciality hospital, shopping mall, star hotels and an international school.

The state government went ahead with the project in spite of the concerns raised by environmental groups and even the legislative committee on environmental affairs. The biodiversity board also issued a warning in 2011 saying, “Of the 500 acres earmarked for the project, 400 acres are paddyfields. The runway for the airport is being constructed over the Kozhithode canal, a tributary of the Pampa. Many hills in the neighbourhood will have to be razed for soil to reclaim the fields, a process that could lead to biodiversity loss and water shortage,” its report said.