Bill Lockhart, Professor Emeritus at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, was recently interviewed by a reporter for the Delhi-based Economic Times for an article about the developing Supreme Court-ordered rearrangement of the environmental impact and project clearance process under India’s environmental laws.
As Lockhart explained, the interview also afforded him the opportunity to “offer a few key criticisms of that existing process which need to be corrected.” “This comes at a time when the Government of Inda, under Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, has been responding to pressure over India’s diminished GDP growth by taking a whole series of steps of highly questionable legality which, disregarding and overriding the lawful environmental assessment process, have approved clearances for a multitude of new and potentially damaging industrial projects,” Lockhart continued. “These even include projects on lands constitutionally protected for indigenous and tribal peoples whose right to protection was established by enactment of a ‘Forest Rights’ just a few years back.”
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