TIL Desk/Business/New Delhi-Hundreds of projects and industries that have come up without mandatory prior environmental clearances under the Environment Protection Act, 1986 may benefit from a one-time conditional amnesty. The Union environment, forests and climate change ministry has passed a notification providing for conditional clearances to all those projects that took off illegally before March 11, 2017.
About a year back, the environment ministry had told courts that roughly 450 such projects had been identified to be either under construction or operating without mandatory clearances. Sources in the ministry say the numbers could be much higher and would come to light once the violators apply for retrospective clearances.
The amnesty can be availed of potentially by all those who began constructing their projects, expanded their projects, commenced production or changed the product mix without prior environmental approval.
The regulation requires the violators to apply within six months for the retrospective green nod. The environment ministry’s expert committees at the Centre will at first assess the violating project to ascertain if it has come up in locations that are expressly prohibited for them.
