The contentious draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), which has been facing protests from all corners, received a record 2 million comments on the deadline on Tuesday. While there have been several petitions for extending the deadline for submission of suggestions, government sources denied there was any extension.

The Central government-controlled National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) will compile and streamline the comments and suggestions. After this, the final draft of EIA would be placed before a committee headed by S R Wate, former director of NEERI, for further scrutiny, in which experts from various sectors would also participate, said a senior official.

According to the Environment Protection Act, the government now has 724 days to issue the final EIA.

The draft EIA notification 2020, proposed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in March this year would replace the last notification that goes back to 2006. EIA is the process of evaluating the environmental impact of a proposed project. “The EIA 2020 is an effort to create a monitoring mechanism in a proper way,” said an official close to the development.

The draft EIA has been facing protests from top environment groups, public policy organisations, education institutes and opposition parties including the Congress. Most of them in their submissions, have contested the terms of the EIA, citing it as anti-public and pro-industry. Several agencies have also called out the process to amend it.

Kanchi Kohli, senior researcher with the Centre for Policy Research, said with the government asking its own agency to vet the suggestions, it disregards the popular sentiment. “Most of the comments on the draft EIA are with regards to overhauling the process of amending the EIA. The government should initiate a whole new process to review the EIA, rather than dilute the tenets of the EIA further,” Kohli said.

Several agencies cited the timing of the EIA draft, as due to the Corona pandemic, a lot of stakeholders, especially those dwelling in mining and industrial zones, river and forest areas, have been left behind in the consultation process. Some agencies also raised concerns that the draft was not issued in all Indian languages.

Among the major issues raised by several players, the most prominent is the exclusion of public hearing in several key projects under the B2 category of projects. B2 category includes ambitious inland waterways projects, offshore and onshore oil, gas and shale exploration, small hydroelectric projects up to 25 MW and irrigation projects between 2,000 and 10,000 hectares of command area.

A government official source however said that the exclusion in the oil and gas sector and shale are only for the exploration stage, not for the commercial or developmental stage. Another major criticism the draft has faced is that it proposes post-facto environment clearance for projects by paying a penalty.

MoEFCC also courted controversy when websites of several non-government organisations (NGOs) which sent mass emails to the minister were banned. The ban was later revoked. One of them ‘Let India Breathe’ restarted the mass polling against EIA and received more than 200,000 submissions, which were shared with the ministry.

“The comments that we have received on our site are from across states, there is no district from where we have not received comment and all of them are showing concern. But, most of them are urban. Government should get on-ground feedback from the affected regions as they are the real stakeholders. We have sent out letters to the MPs today. Thankfully, a lot of them have shown concerns,” said Yash Marwah, founder, Let India Breathe.

Several political leaders such as Jairam Ramesh of Congress, Aditya Thackrey of Shiv Sena have asked the Central government to relook at the EIA draft process and also consider the several objections made against it.

“The notification in its present form fails to align with the Paris agreement and poses a great threat to our goal of achieving sustainable growth,” Thackrey said in his three-page note to MoEFCC citing several changes in the EIA draft.