Policy Briefs & Reports

Closing the Enforcement Gap: Groundtruthing of Environmental Violations in Sundargarh, Odisha highlights a community-led groundtruthing exercise carried out in relation to operations of the Kulda Open Cast Mining Project in Sundargarh, Odisha. Through the process of groundtruthing, discussions about the impacts faced by people living around the project area were carried out and the conditions that have been placed on the project under the environmental regulatory framework were studied. Issues were identified based on the impacts arising out of non-compliances of these conditions. Evidence was collected of these non-compliances and presented to specific regulatory authorities for action. This document explains the process of groundtruthing, nature of violations and the remedies sought. Along with Closing the Enforcement Gap: Findings of a Community-led Ground Truthing of Environmental Violations in Mundra, Kutch, Closing the Enforcement Gap: Findings of a Community-led Groundtruthing in Sarguja, Chhattisgarh and a
methodology note on groundtruthing, this document can be used as a guide to carry out more such efforts to attain mandated compliance of other projects

This report has now been updated to cover events on the ground from February 2018 till January 2020.