How Haryana allowed 15 companies to break the law and get away with it

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Editor's note: Throwing environment protection norms to the wind seems to have become quite the fad. The latest to jump on to the bandwagon is the Haryana government, which in an order issued late last year, created a special six-month amnesty to grant post facto environment clearances to a group of 15 companies that manufacture carcinogenic formaldehyde, in complete violation of India’s main law for environment clearance, the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006. A review of official documents shows that the 11 November 2020 order, though temporary in nature and slightly different from the legal provisions in the central government’s draft EIA 2020 law, had the same effect: firms that had violated the EIA law could receive environment clearance even though they had begun operations without it. Over the past two years, the central government has been persistent in its efforts to draft a new law for environment clearance by replacing the 2006 EIA law. Two draft notifications, one issued in 2019 and the other in 2020, which proposed controversial provisions that sought to dilute environmental safeguards in the existing law have …