Moratorium lifted for new projects in 8 industrial clusters

New Delhi: The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has lifted an earlier moratorium on eight more critically polluted areas.

The eight, areas include Ludhiana (Punjab), Varanasi-Mirzapur (UP), Agra (UP), Bhavnagar (Gujarat), Cuddalore (Tamil Nadu), Dombivalli (Maharashtra), Aurangabad (Maharashtra) and Navi-Mumbai (Maharashtra).

This move comes close on the heels of MoEF's decision to grant conditional clearance to the Lavasa hill city project, environment clearances to the Navi Mumbai airport and the 10,000 Mw Jaitapur nuclear power project and revised the coastal regulation zone notification allowing redevelopment along the coastline in Mumbai and other states. Besides, the ministry gave a conditional clearance to South Korean steel-maker Posco for its $12-billion steel plant and also to SAIL for extracting iron ore from the Chiria mines in Jharkhand.

MoEF had imposed a moratorium on January 13 last year on environmental clearance for new projects (and expansions) in 43 critically polluted industrial clusters in order to stimulate environmental remediation/mitigation activities by industry and by the state governments concerned.