What is an EIA?

It is not surprising that many would ask what an EIA is.

The answer is simple - EIA basically expands into “Environmental Impact Assessment”. A self explanatory term, is a big paperwork and many-a-times a bureaucratic hurdle where the project agency itself quantifies your human project’s impact into the larger environment where it is intervening.

The paper news of ET, Gujarat (the most ambitious of the Indian states), version reported that now the time required for carrying out EIA’s has been increased from 13 months to 18 months. The current total investment of about 25,000 Crore Rupees - which if directly converted to US Dollars is about 5 Billions USD, and in terms of spending equivalence is 50 Bill USD. Most are tourism or trade development related projects. And the delay has sent the developers of the state, they are who have stake in it, run helter-skelter in various government offices to find relaxation from this new clause.

Well, everywhere in the world, the Great EIA is known to be a mere paper exercise conducted and thereafter checked by people or companies or their consultants like you and me. The farmer or the fisher man who understands his own natural habitat and protects it since ages is nowhere in the damn picture. It is now left to the people, incompetent people (in all fairness and allegedness in the case here) who haven’t lived in any natural environment in their own lives. How can one conduct EIA properly if the word environment itself is not clearly understood to them?

Projects struck here may amount to 100Million USD only, and their crudest manifestation can be pictured as some ten thousand people grouped together like ants digging a hole and building something in some 10 hectares of land for next three years.

Surely, nothing like this or collective many may affect the environment, because environment or nature is much larger than humans itself. What one human can do is to cheat the other, or cheat oneself for making his petty ends meet.

One example of an EIA is in a protected reserve along the A92 road in the beautiful eastern highlands of commercial Scotland, where the intervening agency was forced to improve their noisy underwater drilling technology to a noiseless one, so fishes were not to be impacted. Since the bridge was to be built it has to be built -but, please do it quietly. British people are sensitive to construction noise, so are their fishes too.

Untouched parts of Scotland are as similar barren as of Gujarat in India, and both want to attract monetary investment for their local prosperity, and this is how some parts of the world are goin’ to be. No one at these places is ready to hug mangroves and fishes.