Dr. Geetanjoy Sahu is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Science, Technology & Society, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. His research and teaching interests include environmental jurisprudence, environmental regulation and policy, forest rights and governance, the political economy of public policy and institutions, and environmental movements. He earlier served as Post-Doctoral Associate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development (CISED), Bengaluru. In 2010, he was selected for the Erasmus Mundus (EMEA) Scholarship from European Union and was associated with Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Department, ITC, Netherlands as a Visiting Fellow. He has served on various government committees in different capacities. 


For more details about the speaker, please refer to http://www.tiss.edu/view/9/employee/geetanjoy-sahu/ 


Abstract of the talk:
Environmental regulation in India is at the crossroad today. Perhaps no other country in the world has as many environmental laws as India have but the enforcement of rules and regulations has not been effective. There are several reasons which include: lack of financial and human resource capacity of the regulatory bodies, political interference in the functioning of the regulatory bodies, non-availability of experts in the regulatory bodies, dismal function of pollution control boards, etc. The scale and form of implementation challenges further changed in the post-liberalisation phase due to increasing demands for industrialisation and urbanisation, and indiscriminate diversion of resources in the name of public interest. Though new rules and notifications like EIA have been introduced in 1994, the process of EIA has drawn several criticisms. In this presentation, I primarily seek to establish how the current form and structure of environmental impact assessment has been diluted and violated to serve the interests of neoliberal policies. In doing so, I discuss several policy and legal instruments including the decisions of the Indian Judiciary and argue how the EIA process is increasingly centralised at the cost of community rights and natural resources. While the rhetoric is more about sustainable development at the policy level thorugh EIA, concrete evidence suggests that the process of EIA has been bypassed to serve the interests of the market without emphasis on social justice and sustainable development.