Environment clearance for real estate projects in India


Being a studious one :-), for an assignment from our real estate firm in the family, over the weekend I read guidelines by the Indian ministry of environment and forests for environment clearance of building, construction, township and area development projects in various states of India. The guidelines provide a standardized process and requirements for environment impact analysis of these projects. It is heartening to see such a comprehensive document made available by a government ministry. It will help reduce subjectivity in the environment clearance process across 25 states that have formed State Environment Impact Assessment Authorities (SEIAA) and state export appraisal committees (SEAC).

The guidelines make 2 categories of projects. Building and construction projects, and township and area development projects. Building and construction projects involve construction of one or more standalone buildings sans the infrastructure development while Township and area development projects involve development of infrastructure like roads, water supply and management, electricity supply and management and social infrastructure like school, recreation and community centre, security, waste management, medicare and shopping center with adequate facilities should also be housed in the township itself.

All building and construction projects with built up area over 20,000 sq. meters and less than 150,000 sq. meters and all Township and area development projects covering an area of 50 hectors or built-up area over 150,000 sq. meters require to come up with environment impact assessment for environment clearance from SEIAA. These requirements get tougher for projects within 10KMs of a protected forest or near a critically polluted area listed or a listed ecologically sensitive area like Matheran etc.

For environment clearance one needs to apply using a prescribed Form 1 and supplementary Form 1A along with a conceptual plan of the project. EIA document should include following sections.

  • Introduction
  • Project description
  • Description of the environment
  • Anticipated environmental impact and mitigation measures
  • Analysis of alternatives (Technology and site)
  • Environment monitoring program
  • Additional studies
  • Project benefits
  • Environment management plan
  • Summary and conclusions
  • Disclosures of consultants engaged (wondering why this is required? Proper channel? J)

I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Jai Hind!

Amit

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Preserving our heritage!

Image
Attached are photographs of a magnificent ancient Bawadi (stepwell) situated at Vela (Harishchandra) about 12 KMs from the zero mile, Nagpur. The Bawadi still has good clean water that is being used by the Church nearby. The structure is ill maintained like most other ancient structures in India and needs immediate attention from the Archaeological survey of India. We in India are so blessed by our forefathers to have these stepwells! It will be foolish of our generation to let these disappear without protection and care. All these stepwells should be declared heritage sites and protected with participation from local governments. It may be a good option to involve some corporates to augment resources for the maintenance of the historically and culturally important water bodies in these times of water scarcity. At a broader level, our whole country has thousands of such ancient monuments from Mahakali caves in Mumbai to Markanda in Vidarbh to Laksh
Read more

Irony of customer satisfaction!

We have a strong relationship for over 3 years with a reputed client, with 2 mission critical systems delivered and being maintained by us. We get multiple repeat orders from them every year. I thank them for their business. We were recently restricted from bidding for a relatively large project by the client saying that we are too small to bid for the project. The BRD for the project is written by us. This almost felt like a slap for providing delighting service to the customer over years at a price no one can beat! I don’t know how to react and hence this blog post. The lesson I learned from this is that its not always timely service at reasonable cost with good technical capabilities (overall, proven track record) and personal relationships, that help you grow. There are other factors at play beyond pure value-proposition that determine the choice of a vendor. Immediate reaction to this was that we increased our pricing to make sure we increase our profitability, as that i
Read more

Digital, Global and Available!

Some of this may sound repetitive but is increasingly relevant with each passing day. Considering the way, the Internet is evolving and engulfing various aspects of life, soon we may have one gigantic network, and any screen for all of the following, and more… ·        Information (the Web) ·        Communication (phone, email, chat, instant messaging - Whatsapp) ·        Entertainment and media (Videos, TV, Movies, Media, Social Media) ·        Education (information and knowledge as text, images, video and audio) ·        Commerce (Catalogs, Banking, payments) ·        Maps and Navigation (GIS, GPS, Uber and Ola) ·        Tourism and hospitality (Trip Advisor, Yelp, AirBnB!) ·        Healthcare (Telemedicine) ·        eGovernance ·        Devices (Mobile, Cars, and the Internet of Things – Networld!) ·        … and the list is growing … all this intertwined, hosted & operated from innumerable computers spread across the globe (cloud) that we
Read more