On The spot
Tavleen Singh
The venerable Jayanthi Natarjan spent many hours on prime time last week denouncing Narendra Modi for speaking of a ‘Jayanthi tax’ allegedly imposed during her tenure as Minister of Environment. She gave interviews to famous TV anchors to make the case that it was because of her vigilance on environmental ‘violations’ in Gujarat that Modi was targeting her. She added that another reason was that she had been unafraid to attack Modi for snooping on that mysterious Gujarati lady who to this day has not complained. Ms Natarjan said she never lost a chance to charge Modi with ‘genocide’. So he was now taking revenge on her. When asked why she had been removed from her job and why the man who now has charge of it has cleared so many projects in such a short time she had no answer. Just as she could only say that the Indian Express newspaper (for whom I write an exclusive weekly column) was ‘motivated’ in the stories it recently produced giving details of files found in her home when she ‘resigned’. Of these there were 180 that Madame had not signed and 169 that she had but that she had not yet cleared.
The famous TV anchors asked her tough questions about this stash of files mysteriously gathering dust in her ministerial residence. But, it saddened me that none of them asked her why she had not come up with objective and measurable norms that would have made clearances so much easier and more transparent. Neither she nor her predecessor, Jairam Ramesh, chose to come up with norms that would have listed exactly what rules needed to be followed for a road, a dam or a port to be built. This meant that every major infrastructure project had to be decided individually and this meant that a country with some of the most decrepit infrastructure in the world was unable to renew it soon enough for India to start catching up with the rest of the world.
This also meant that the Ministry of Environment began to function like the license raj used to do in those bad old times when our biggest industrialists were forced to wait days in the smelly corridors of Delhi’s ‘bhawans’ just to be granted a license that often decided whether their industries could continue to function or not. By the time the tenure of Jairam and Jayanthi ended more than Rs 10 lakh crores worth of projects were stuck because of environmental clearances not being given in time. And, often whisperers in the corridors of power would let it be known that there were ‘orders from the top’ that prevented these clearances from being given.
Rumours that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi were personally involved in the business of environmental clearances got confirmed when Rahul went to Odisha with Jairam Ramesh to close down the aluminium refinery in which the Vedanta group had already invested Rs 11,000 crores. Had this refinery gone ahead with refining bauxite from the Niyamgiri Hills it is possible that one of India’s poorest states would today have become the aluminium production centre of the world. Reduced costs for transporting bauxite from its source to a refinery could have resulted in the international price of aluminium coming down by half and the Adivasi tribes of Koraput and Kalahandi may finally have had a chance to dream of prosperity.
These simple, primitive people were encouraged by NGOs of dubious repute to insist that the Niyamgiri Hills could not be mined for bauxite because they were ‘sacred’. The ‘sacred’ spot was only on one hill but the entire range was suddenly considered sacred. These NGOs, unfortunately backed by Rahul Gandhi, also persuaded the local Adivasi people that they alone had the right to the bauxite reserves in the hills. The truth is that natural resources belong to the entire population of India and not to local groups who happen to reside in the vicinity. Or Bihar’s coal would not be considered a national resource and nor would Karnataka’s iron ore.
The Ministry of Environment was so busy denying licenses to major projects that it paid no attention to infinitely more important environmental issues like the pollution of our sacred rivers and the cutting down of what is left of our forests. It should be the Ministry of Environment’s job to improve waste management and sanitation in our cities but this was not something that either Jairam or Jayanthi paid any attention to. Instead there was direct interference in such things as how high a building should be in Mumbai and whether helicopters should be allowed to land in the city. When Jairam Ramesh became so tyrannical, in his tenure in the ministry, he had to be kicked upstairs by the Prime Minister who was then ordered by ‘the top’ to install yet another loyalist of the Dynasty in his place.
The Prime Minister knew that the Environment Ministry was behaving like a license raj and that this was frightening away investors so behind the idea of replacing Jairam with Jayanthi was the hope that she would rectify the damage that her predecessor had done. She quickly belied this hope by squatting on files in a way that left everyone puzzled until rumours started to spread about the ‘Jayanthi tax’. Towards the end of her tenure these rumours became so strong that the environment in the ministry began to have about it the reek of A. Raja days when officials spread rumours far and wide that there was a rate card on the minister’s desk.
Not much was done to protect India’s environment in his time but by the time that Jairam and Jayanthi finished their stints in this ministry there were people who were almost nostalgic for Raja. They said this was because you knew exactly where you stood and what the price of a clearance was. Jairam and Jayanthi draped themselves in a cloak of probity but beneath it the ministry worked as nefariously as it has always done and with as little genuine concern for saving India’s environment. For me personally this is much more of a criminal act than if there was a ‘Jayanthi tax’. The one thing that can be said with certainty is that India’s real environmental problems have not even begun to be dealt with because of ministers who concentrated only on stopping big infrastructure projects in which huge investments had already been made. So if people are talking about a ‘Jayanthi tax’ nobody should complain.
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