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Smt. Meena Gupta,
Secretary,
Ministry of Environment and Forests,
Paryavaran Bhawan,
CGO Complex, Delhi – 110091.
Dear ma'am,
For eons, the over 7,500 km. coastline of the Indian subcontinent has sustained millions of people and served as a rampart against natural disasters. The new draft Coastal Zone Management (CZM) Notification (2007) Rules, however, threaten to completely override the 1991 Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ)Rules, whose foundations were laid by the then Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi.
If the draft CZM becomes a reality, it will cause irreversible damage to our marine ecosystems and the people who depend on it.
The 2007 Draft, purportedly based on the M. S. Swaminathan Committee Report on the CRZ Notification, 2005 (a 13-member panel was set up by the Ministry of Environment and Forests on July 19, 2004) redefines ‘coastal zone’, to include “the area from the territorial waters limit – 12 nautical miles measured from the appropriate baseline – including its sea bed, the adjacent land area along the coast and inland waterbodies influenced by tidal action.”
The Draft CZM completely makes ineffective the 500 m. of the CRZ and the 200 m. NDZ in CRZ III (rural areas) by including what it refers to as setback lines along the coast. Under the Draft CZM, many of the CRZ-III areas will become CMZ-II, opening them up for commercial development projects. The categorisation will now depend on economic considerations of the area.
Going by the CZM Draft, several commercial activities – SEZs, industrial estates, tourism, mineral mining, artificial coastal protection structures and defence installations – may be permissible within ecologically-sensitive areas, spelling disaster for
fragile marine life, livelihoods and inevitably displacing fisherfolk.
Even before the notification has been finalised and gazetted, some reports suggest that the Ministry has received approval from the Planning Commission to seek
Rs. 500-crore in aid from the World Bank, in addition to ongoing aided projects in states such as Tamil Nadu.
We need better implementation of the existing law with immediate effect instead of regressing to a ‘new Draft’ altogether. We urge the Centre and the MoEF to withdraw the current Draft.
Yours sincerely,
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