Archives: Briefs Reports

A problem can occur, no matter where we live, pass by everyday or cross occasionally. One could be living next to an industrial site, which is polluting the nearby river, a power plant, which lands up dumping fly ash on an agricultural field or a beach, where the municipality is dumping the town’s solid waste. A friend or a fellow resident of one’s village might point us to an instance of river bed sand mining causing flooding or a tourist resort blocking access to a drinking water source or even a grazing ground.

Each such activity is more often than not, governed by a legal clause, if approval is required or a condition where an approval is already granted. There could also be a court judgment or order which is so generic in nature that it has a bearing on all activities of a particular kind e.g permissions for sand mining or tree felling, change of land use of common lands, no matter where you are located in the country. It is possible that the problems you notice or are affected by are only occurring because someone, somewhere is not adhering to the provisions of law, conditions or approval, or court directions are not complied with. If this is the case, there is likely to be a clear institutional framework and defined administrative agencies that would be mandated to restrict this activity, monitor non-compliance, and also take penal or remedial action as required by a particular situation.

More often than not, people affected by a problem are not even aware that the problem they are facing has any connection with adherence to or non-compliance of law. If the mandatory requirements had been adhered to, the problem might not have occurred in the first place. This is not a surety but a distinct possibility. Understanding whether a difficulty one is facing is legal or illegal, is one way of attempting to find a resolution. It does not require one to qualify as a lawyer, know how to draft court petitions or speak legal language. Basic knowledge of applicable legal clauses and which institution would be best suited for remedy can be important allies in trying to solve real time problems with people dealing with a range of environmental and social impacts discussed further in this handbook.

One of the most critical components of such problem-solving with law (both in court and outside) is the requirement of evidence or proof. Once the problem is identified and defined and the affected party clarifies what remedy is being sought, community level legal practitioners would need to prepare robust evidence to back the claims. For instance, if it were ascertained that a construction activity is being carried out in contravention to the provisions of any of the laws, it would be important to gather specific evidence before filing a complaint or approaching a relevant institution. A range of documents can be included as proof of illegality, which includes government documents, responses to Right to Information (RTI) applications, photographs, maps and complaint letters. One could also check if the information disclosed by the project proponent at the time of project appraisal is complete and true. Records of public hearing could also be checked to find out if they reflect the mentioned concerns.

This handbook is an attempt to present scenarios where community level environment justice practitioners can use/employ tools of legal empowerment and work with affected communities to seek legal remedies through an administrative route. Each scenario presents a problem type, what the complaints could be and then goes on to suggest some legal clauses through which a remedy can be pursued. It draws from several cases currently being pursued by enviro-legal coordinators (paralegals) associated with the Centre for Policy Research-Namati Environmental Justice Program.
There are two clear caveats while using this handbook. First, the legal clauses listed with the problem are indicative in nature and do not claim to be exhaustive in nature. This does not imply that a practitioner using this handbook does not look out for additional legal remedies for the problem in hand, which would not be listed here. Second, we encourage practitioners to as far as possible, share the legal knowledge and try to interpret the same. This will encourage collective learning and help achieve legal empowerment through practice.

The handbook does not specifically list judicial and court related remedies to any of these problems. In case the problem does not get resolved through the administrative route, clients and community practitioners have the option of accessing avenues such as the National Green Tribunal (NGT) and Courts which are accessed through lawyers. In such instances, the evidence collected, complaints filed and other documentation could form an important basis and support for any legal intervention.

China’s growing water thirst lends an urgency to understand China’s resource choices, the possible conditions under which it is likely to exercise these choices and the ripple effects these are likely to have across the borders. While overinterpretation and hysteria has tended to take the place of informed scholarship and media, India’s official narrative has largely tended to downplay many of these concerns. The paper argues that the debate has also unwittingly ended up being a single-issue debate fixated on water diversion, in the process inadvertently diverting attention away from other equally important issues. Can we frame the water debate with China in ways that can create institutional entry points for a whole set of missing issues that are currently invisible to the mainstream policy and research gaze? India and China’s willingness to begin a subregional conversation on regional public goods could pave the way to designing norms of benefit sharing, negotiating trade-offs, and allocating risks and burdens on collective goods and bads in the region.

On 22.04.2021, India’s Environment Ministry published a Draft Fly Ash Notification, which was open for public comments for 60 days and sought to replace the earlier notifications with respect to fly ash management since 1999. As a response to the draft, we made a submission to the Ministry on the need to reassess the approach, design and content of the fly ash related regulations. This submission highlighted five main issues that lead to enforcement challenges in regulating fly ash.

The Environmental Justice Program at Centre for Policy Research has been studying the issue of fly ash mismanagement and its failures in Chhattisgarh, Gujarat and Odisha. Based on our research on the regulatory gaps in fly ash management and the social and ecological impacts from it, we have put together a report which elaborates on the five main issues identified in the submission made to the Ministry. This report:

Discusses the lacunae in the implementation of the existing fly ash management regulations using primary and secondary data.
And compares the proposed draft against the backdrop of current status of fly ash management efforts.

Food Subsidy is provided by the Government of India (GoI) for the supply and distribution of foodgrains and other essential commodities.

The National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013, ensured nutritional security became a right by providing adequate quantities of quality food at affordable prices to two-thirds of India’s population.

Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, this brief uses government data to analyse:

Allocations, releases, and expenditures under Food Subsidy;
Trends in storage/stocking, procurement and distribution of foodgrains;
Coverage under NFSA;
Trends in foodgrain allocation, offtake and distribution under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY);
Status of adult malnutrition in India.

State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCC) hold potential as an important intervention in the development process. They provide an institutional platform to mainstream concerns of environmental sustainability into development planning and, if done properly, to update ideas of sustainability to include climate resilience. This platform provides a potential opening to enterprising and committed bureaucrats, but is also an opening with which development practitioners, academics, business, and civil society at large could productively engage.

At the moment, this promise is not being adequately realised. As discussed in this study, there are shortcomings in approach, process, formulation of outcomes, and implementation efforts. These shortcomings are united by a common thread – a tendency to prematurely view state climate plans as vehicles for generating implementable actions rather than an opportunity to redirect development toward environmental sustainability and climate resilience. Thin conceptual frameworks, processes that provide no space for generating a vision of change, limited state capacity, and truncated time frames all reinforce this outcome. While concrete actions are indeed important, these may be of limited value unless informed by a broader vision of future directions in key climate-related sectors such as agriculture, water, and energy.

State plans are viewed as the beginning of a complex process rather than as an end in themselves, they provide a foundation upon which to build. The recommendations contained in this report suggest specific measures that the central government, state governments and donor agencies could adopt. In addition, if climate plans are indeed used as an opportunity to redirect development, then they require a much more robust process of engaging civil society and business stakeholders in envisioning alternative futures on a sector- by-sector basis and corresponding interest and engagement from these stakeholders. The path forward requires iterating climate plans with an eye to a more robust framing, a process that enables broader dialogue within and outside government, structured outcomes at different levels of specificity, and staged implementation that prioritizes internalization of sustainability and climate resilience into sectoral departments.

The finance minister presented the interim budget in the parliament on 17th February, 2014. The full budget will be presented in June-July after the general election. The Finance minister ostensibly kept his promise and remained on the path of fiscal consolidation. The revised estimate for the FY14 fiscal deficit is at 4.6% of GDP vs. budgeted 4.8% despite significant shortfall on the revenue front. In FY15, the government has pencilled in a fiscal deficit target of 4.1% of GDP, marginally better than expected (4.2%). About 87% of this deficit will be financed by market borrowing (net borrowing: Rs 4.57 lakh crore). Both net and gross market borrowings (Rs 5.97 lakh crore) in FY15 are better than market expectation.

The Paris Agreement establishes a new multilateral architecture guiding countries’ climate change efforts under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Parties are currently negotiating more detailed rules and procedures for implementing the agreement, including provisions addressing transparency, accounting, compliance, use of market-based mechanisms, and periodic assessment of collective progress. These more detailed rules and procedures—known colloquially as the Paris “rulebook”—are to be adopted in late 2018 at COP 24 in Katowice, Poland. This brief identifies and discusses a set of cross-cutting issues that apply across the full range of decisions to be adopted. These cross-cutting issues are structure, precision, bindingness, differentiation, timing, and inter-linkages among different elements of the Paris rulebook.

Adapting to and mitigating climate change will affect most sectors of our economies. Addressing this problem will require us to rethink our future investment trajectories across the board. Many government agencies and institutions are involved, as well as businesses, civil society, local institutions and communities. Each one of these has its own particular mandates, interests and priorities. Many countries have begun to establish institutional arrangements to direct public finance and investment towards solutions to climate change.

This paper analyses the arrangements that have emerged in Colombia, India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom (UK) and Zambia to draw lessons on the conditions that facilitate or impede coordination across institutions and actors. It seeks to deepen our understanding of what drives existing arrangements for coordination around climate change-related policy and climate finance.

“A key macro-economic variable critical to competitiveness and prospects for export growth is the exchange rate…..If the nominal exchange rate stays steady and the rate of inflation in India is higher than that in the rest of the world (as has been the case for the last decade) the real exchange rate appreciates. The competitiveness of exports is eroded by the effective exchange rate appreciation of the rupee” – Foreign Trade Policy (FTP for 2015-20, page 12).
The Rupee has appreciated more than 20% in nominal terms against the euro in fiscal 2015 (April 2014 – March 2015). The trade weighted 6-currency REER has risen from 109.58 in February 2014 to an all-time-high of 124.34 in February 2015. High REER indicates that the inflation adjusted Rupee has become stronger against almost all major currencies, except the US dollar India’s exports has weakened in recent months, declining 15% yoy in February, 2015 – third successive month of contraction. There are concerns that strengthening of Rupee will lead to loss of competitiveness for India’s exports that will hurt ‘Make-InIndia’ initiative that aims to put India on the world map as a manufacturing hub. The Finance Minister Arun Jaitley also weighed in recently when he said that the government would like the rupee to reflect its real value. Therefore, we decided to look at the impact of exchange rate on exports, particularly manufacturing exports.

In this report, the researchers have examined the Faecal Sludge and Septage Management Framework in the State of Odisha. The study has been conducted in the towns of Berhampur, Dhenkenal and Puri. The differences that these towns show in terms of administrative set-up and population with respect to each other is why they have been chosen as the focus of our study. The first stage of the study involved a desk-review of various laws and policies operative at the national, state and local level in Odisha in the realm of Sanitation and FSSM. The second stage of the study involved field-research in the specified towns with district agencies and stakeholders through structured and semi-unstructured interviews. Broadly, the findings of the study relate to the priority given to on-site sanitation in comparison to off-site sanitation, the mechanism of co-ordination between various institutions involved in Faecal sludge and Septage management, and the complexities resulting from their being multiple service providers with multiple price models in the area of Faecal Sludge and Septage Management. The report is concluded with suggestions with respect to each of these taking into account field and desk findings.