Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Initially, the environmentalists had welcomed Ramesh, saying he was the most active
and well-informed minister that India had ever had, and that he brought a positive focus to
wildlife and other issues that had not been seen since Indira Gandhi was prime minister.
Some felt let down because he had not honoured commitments, and many regarded his ac-
tions as capricious, publicity-seeking and sometimes politically motivated - for example,
doing what he knew would be supported by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi for socially conscious
vote-getting reasons on projects like Posco and Vedanta, while ignoring other, less sen-
sationalist breaches of regulations. Ramesh denied this and said he divided projects into
'yes', 'yes but' and 'no' categories. That led to 95 per cent of applications being approved,
'down from 99.99 per cent earlier'. Perhaps his one-time environmental supporters were
right to become disillusioned with such a small improvement after all the noise.
But Ramesh had put the environment firmly on India's political agenda and had begun
to clean up a highly corrupt ministry, setting up new environmental and conservation reg-
ulations and institutions including coastal development guidelines and a National Green
Tribunal to adjudicate on environmental issues. He also changed India's role in internation-
al climate change negotiations. In a speech to businesspeople three months before he was
transferred, Ramesh appealed to them to 'take the environment far more seriously and not
see it as a problem', adding: 'See the environment not as a cost or obligation or favour to
someone else, but as something intrinsic to the growth process.'
His actions made it easier for his successor, Jayanthi Natarajan, to resist pressures from
elsewhere in the government. She had previously been an able and sometimes tough Con-
gress party spokesperson and was expected to be far less confrontational and more prag-
matic than Ramesh. She scrapped the 'no go' coal mining areas and allowed some contro-
versial power projects but, probably with Sonia Gandhi's backing, she challenged the prime
minister's office and other government departments on various other issues. She success-
fully forced Singh to water down plans for a new National Investment Board that would
reduce the impact of environmental and other regulations on new projects. 18 As a result,
she pleased neither camp and was increasingly bracketed along with Ramesh by business
interests and their supporters in the media. This was illustrated by an India Today article
headlined 'Green Terror', which talked about the 'J factor' - Jairam Ramesh and Jayanthi
Natarajan. It said they had made the ministry 'the single biggest stumbling block to India's
growth story', which was scarcely fair. 19 Yet environmentalists complained that, between
2004 and 2013, the ministry had approved the destruction of 600,000 hectares of forest-
land, of which 250,000 hectares were for mining, and had rejected proposals to do with
only 14,000 hectares. 20
In December 2013, Natarajan was moved out of the ministry to the Congress party office
and her job was taken over by Veerappa Moily, the petroleum minister and a leading critic
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