Narendra Modi’s war on the environment

The Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, government came to power last May in a massive wave of support for Narendra Modi, now the prime minister, and his agenda of economic development for all. In under a year, it has begun to undo policies of fair land acquisition, undermine environmental protection and reverse the fight for tribal rights. The finance, environment and rural-development ministers, and Modi himself, have called these safeguards to protect people’s property, the environment and tribal rights “roadblocks” to economic growth. Rules that ensure business responsibility to people and the environment, in other words, are now largely being written off.

“In damage-control mode, the Congress scaled back the pro-people laws. This was also to woo corporates for campaign funding,” says activist Medha Patkar, pointing to the tens of millions of rupees funneled by corporations into the campaign coffers of both national parties (90 percent of all campaign funding in 2013-14). Some of this, by foreign companies such as Vedanta, violated campaign laws. The Congress party subsequently increased exemptions from the environmental laws for certain companies and allotted many forests to industry.

A tall, soft-spoken man, Agrawal has reason to mistrust corporations. After he and other activists accused JSPL of not following norms while holding a public hearing in 2010 for a coal mine expansion, and beginning construction before getting the appropriate environmental clearances, he was arrested because the company filed a complaint of defamation, criminal intimidation and incitement. The recording of the hearing shows that Agrawal was listing violations by the company since the ’90s, and at one point, he lost his composure and said in Hindi, “If they (Jindal officials) are sons of their fathers, they should come forward.”

A month later, in 2012, gunmen broke into Agrawal’s home in Raigarh and shot him, shattering his thigh bone. In his police complaint, Agrawal said the attackers told him to “stop taking on Jindal,” but the company has denied any involvement. Now Agrawal has difficulty walking. “If existing procedures are not working, the government should fix them, not get rid of them,” he says. “Then there will be no place to appeal to when the faith is violated.”

And measures are being taken to further reduce environmental regulation. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar often refers to environmental clearances as impediments to India’s electricity needs. In its first month in power, his ministry issued a series of memos allowing coal mines to expand up to several times their current size without any public hearings or environmental clearances.