Letter from industrialist prompts minister to scrap environment policy

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Editor's note: More than five months after the environment ministry strongly defended its corporate environment responsibility, or CER, guidelines in the Delhi High Court, environment minister Prakash Javadekar asked his officials to scrap them following a letter from Rajju Shroff, the founder of United Phosphorus Ltd, or UPL, according to official documents accessed by The Morning Context.  Published in May 2018, the CER guidelines mandated companies to spend between 0.25% and 2% of their projects’ capital investment towards activities that could mitigate adverse impacts on people and the environment in their immediate surroundings. The exact percentage of investment to be spent as CER obligation differed according to the nature of the project.  In his letter to Javadekar on 15 July 2020, Shroff was seeking the imposition of the CER spending obligations as per these guidelines for three of his projects—two in Gujarat and one in Maharashtra. He had to specify this obvious thing because while granting clearance to the projects, he told the minister in the letter, the environment ministry had imposed a higher percentage of expenditure towards CER activities than what …