KARACHI: The Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) is poised to hold a public hearing of an important project on Monday (today) in violation to an environmental tribunal order, which requires that the department make available Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports on its website, it emerged on Sunday.
Contrary to this order, the environmental watchdog, sources said, had planned to hold a public hearing, though it hadn’t uploaded the EIA report of the relevant project on its website.
Today’s event is planned to hear out public concerns pertaining to a residential-cum-commercial project titled Credible Towers proposed to be built in the jurisdiction of Malir Cantonment Board.
According to the public notice published in a local newspaper dated Sept 8, “The proposed project has seven residential towers and one commercial building, which has 07, 12 and 15 floors. The total land requirement is 19360 square yards/04 acres”.
Upon contact, a Sepa official said that the department’s website had been ‘having technical issues’ for the past one month.
“We can’t add or remove information from the website. So anyone who is contacting us for the EIA report, we are either emailing the document or providing them with a hard copy,” he said.
About lack of public access to the document, he argued that “it was not legally required under Sepa rules to put the EIA report on its website”.
Violation of fundamental right, court order
According to sources, Sepa in this particular case is violating an order of the Sindh Environmental Protection Tribunal dated Sept 13, 2017, which binds Sepa to upload EIA reports on its website.
“We are thus of the view that the agency must make available a copy of the EIA report that it receives on its official website to be accessible by the general public, and must provide a practically usable link to the same in the public notice that it issues to ensure that concerned citizens, members of the general public, experts and stakeholders can actually read and examine the report in a practical way.
“We are of the firm opinion that the above standard is the mandatory requirement of Section 31 of the Sindh Environmental Protection Act, 2014, and Regulation 11 of the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (Review of Initial Environmental Examination and Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations, 2014, and therefore would seek to fulfil the aims and objects of a holding a public hearing as required by the law.”
The environmental watchdog, according to senior lawyer Zubair Abro, would also violate Article 19 (A) of the Constitution pertaining to the right to information which required that government institutions provided maximum information to the public.
“In this day and age, it’s beyond common understanding that a government department is unable to fix a website in a month,” he remarked.
It is important to mention here that a public hearing is a legal process which the department is required to conduct for all projects requiring an environmental impact assessment (EIA).
What has been a routine affair by Sepa for some years was to put the EIA document on its website in advance to the hearing so that people could come prepared for the discussion.
This method, sources said, was adopted after the department was repeatedly criticised at public hearings for having too many gaps in its system, which deprived people of their right to information and to have an effective hearing process.
“By not uploading the document on its website, Sepa has defeated the purpose of the hearing,” said senior environmentalist Dr Raza Gardezi, adding that providing maximum access to a public document was important to ensure transparency.
The Sindh Transparency and Right to Information Act 2016 also called for measures to facilitate citizens to get maximum information, he said.
Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2019
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.