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What are the chances that a mechanical engineer would be able to effectively treat a patient suffering from a heart ailment? Not very good as you might imagine. The story of the proposed Dhamra ‘minor’ port project in Orissa is similar, rather like that of a timber company being asked to protect forests where it has been given a logging lease!
The proposed Dhamra minor port is located just north of the boundary of the Bhitarkanika National Park on the Orissa coast and about 10 km. away from the Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary, the most important and spectacular nesting site in the world for the olive ridley turtle. This little patch on India’s eastern coast that plays host to an estimated 500,000 nesting ridleys (the biology of the olive ridley sea turtle) every season is probably the most crucial for the long-term global survival of these gentle denizens of the world’s oceans.
The turtles themselves are to Orissa’s natural heritage what the sun temple at Konark is to its cultural heritage and history.
The proposed port, located in the immediate vicinity of this extremely important and fragile zone, was granted environmental clearance not by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF), but of all agencies, by the Ministry of Surface Transport (MoST) of the Government of India. Talk about self-interest!
This bizarre situation has its origins (also see Dhamra chronology)in July 1997, when the MoEF itself amended the 1991 Coastal Zone Regulation (CRZ) notification under the Environment Protection Act (EPA), 1986 and handed over power to the MoST to grant environmental clearance to port projects. Surface transport officials may know as much about olive ridley
turtles and marine ecology as a carpenter might know about extracting a tooth, but that obviously didn’t matter. In January 2000, the MoST granted environmental clearance to the port.
The MoST’s clearance powers were finally taken back five years later in 2002, but as far as Dhamra and the turtles were concerned the die had been cast, the damage done.
The other equally bizarre aspect of this whole episode is the nomenclature of a port project like this one as ‘minor’ (see box – Minor Ports, Major Trouble). Minor ports have another clear and rather exceptional exemption from the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification also promulgated under the EPA, 1986. They don’t need to go through the EIA process and as a result getting clearances for minor ports has been rather simple for state governments and project proponents.
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