Orissa High Court gives clean chit to gas pipeline site

CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court has refused to interfere with a Dhenkanal Collector’s order endorsing leasing out of land at Khuntabati under Kamakhyanagar tehsil for construction of GAIL (India) Ltd’s Valve Station (SV-7) as part of a gas pipeline project. 

Jagdishpur-Haldia and Bokaro-Dhamra Natural Gas Pipeline (JHBDPL) phase two is a 1,836-km pipeline system being developed in Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal. It will be extended to West Bengal and Odisha and connect via en-route spur lines with Barauni, Bokaro, Ranchi, Sindri, Rourkela, Sambalpur, Jharsuguda, Angul, Cuttack, Bhubaneshwar, Paradip, Jamshedpur, Durgapur, Kolkata and Haldia.

Five residents of Khuntabati had sought the Court’s intervention against the Collector’s order alleging that construction of the station may adversely affect the people as the site is located near the village.
A bench of Chief Justice Mohammad Rafiq and Justice Savitri Ratho said, “The impugned order reveals that the Collector was satisfied about the distance from the report of the Revenue Supervisor as well as the written statement of the DGM (Const), GAIL.

We see no reason to interfere with the factual finding recorded in the impugned order,” the bench said in its order on Tuesday. In his order, the Collector indicated that as per guidelines of Oil Industry Safety Directorate Standard-226, the distance of pipeline should be more than 15 metre from any private dwelling or any building. The revenue officer in his report had submitted that the station is constructed at a distance of more than 100 metre from buildings and Khuntabati school.