Cleared Files, Shrinking Forests: Who Pays the Price for Modi Govt’s Corporate Tilt?

When Congress leader Rahul Gandhi walked through the rainforests of Great Nicobar Island last week, he was not making a political pilgrimage. He was bearing witness to a crime. A million trees marked for felling for a Rs 92,000 crore project whose crown jewel is an Adani transshipment port.

The Modi government has granted environmental clearances to itself. No public hearing, no consent. Just the machinery of state serving the corporate interests.

This is not an aberration. It is the direct and crystalline articulation of a governing philosophy that has been in operation since 2014: one that treats the environment not as a commons to be protected but as an obstacle to be cleared. One that makes development antithetical to the environment, that forecloses any choice between infrastructure and healthy living before citizens can exercise it. It ensures that corporates prosper and people suffer.

The public suffering is undeniable: look at the list of the world’s 100 most polluted cities – it features over 90 Indian cities. Look at the heat map – it shows 92 Indian cities among the 100 hottest across the globe. 

Right now, Indian cities are hotter than the Sahara desert, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

These numbers are not aberrations. They are the ledger of a decade of governance choices made consciously – systematically – and in full view of their consequences. 

The evidence is not in government reports, judicial orders, or media dispatches. It is in your lungs, on your skin, in the eyes that sting on a winter morning in Delhi, Kanpur or Muzaffarpur. 

Why is there no solution in sight? 

In 2014, the Modi government started with a stated intention to break the shackles of environmental regulation and end ‘policy paralysis’ of the UPA government. It immediately implemented 60 urgent action points submitted by the Confederation of Indian Industry. Every one of them aimed at dismantling hurdles to environmental clearances. 

The then environment minister, Prakash Javadekar, boasted of clearing over 500 files in a single day. By 2019, the BJP manifesto listed 'speed in issuing forest and environmental clearances' as a governance achievement. 

Speed, not scrutiny. The intent was never ambiguous.

The negation of environmental concerns by the Modi government was a commitment by the BJP to its industrial and corporate constituency. It was a price it was willing to pay in exchange for their support.

What followed is measurable. Between 2018 and 2022, the number of environment, forest, wildlife and coastal zone clearances granted jumped from 577 to over 12,000 in a single year – a 20-fold surge. 

In 2023-24, approximately 29,000 hectares of forest land were diverted, the highest in a decade. Since 2014, over 16 million trees have been felled for infrastructure projects. 

The phrase “policy paralysis” was not a spontaneous public grievance. It was a corporate lobby’s talking point, amplified by a business media that had long conflated industry’s interests with the national interest. The argument was seductive in its simplicity: environmental scrutiny delays investment, and therefore, scrutiny is the enemy of growth.

The BJP harvested this manufactured narrative with political skill. Its 2014 manifesto placed the entire section on environment under the chapter on ‘industry’. It is not an accident of document design, but an ideological declaration that nature exists only as a subset of commercial activity. 

As it came to power, the Ministry of Environment was renamed to include ‘Climate Change’ in its title, while its budget was cut by more than 50%. While the nameplate expanded, the mandate shrank.

And a decade on, every environmental indicator has moved in the wrong direction. Corporates are thriving. The country is choking.

A legacy that was built and destroyed

India’s environmental governance was not a bureaucratic routine. It was forged through decades of people’s struggles. From the Chipko Movement of 1973, where Himalayan women embraced trees to stop commercial felling, to Kerala’s successful fight to save Silent Valley from a hydroelectric dam in the 1980s, these were battles about survival and the rights of the marginalised to exist in their landscapes.

Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave institutional form to this consciousness. She brought in the Wildlife Protection Act (1972), Water Act (1974), Forest Conservation Act (1980), and Air Act (1981). The Ministry of Environment and Forests acquired genuine regulatory authority. 

The Congress governments that followed deepened this foundation: the Environment Protection Act, 1986, born in the shadow of Bhopal gas tragedy; and the landmark Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Notification, 1994, which made environmental assessment mandatory before any project approval.

The UPA government led by Manmohan Singh advanced this legacy most significantly. The Forest Rights Act, 2006, recognised, for the first time, the rights of forest-dwelling communities to veto forest diversion on their lands. The EIA Notification, 2006, further gave environmental assessment its full legal force.

Also read: Judiciary is Sadly Stepping Back When it Comes to the Environment, Says Former SC Judge

The National Green Tribunal, set up in 2010, created a specialised judicial body to adjudicate environmental disputes and enforce compliance. The National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) was India’s first comprehensive climate framework.

When Jairam Ramesh became Union environment minister in 2009, the ministry briefly became a genuine regulator, denying Vedanta the Niyamgiri clearance, questioning the POSCO project and scrutinising the projects for environmental protection. He was doing precisely what the Constitution requires: protecting the environment. 

The BJP called it policy paralysis. Corporates called it obstruction.

EIA hearing: Democracy silenced by office memorandum

The EIA process was democracy’s instrument, requiring environmental consequences to be studied, disclosed and publicly heard before any clearance. It embodied a simple principle: development requires the consent of the governed.

In April 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown, the ministry published the draft EIA Notification 2020. The timing was not coincidental. It proposed reducing public hearing periods from 30 to 20 days, exempting dozens of project categories from consultation. 

Most extraordinarily, it legalised ex post-facto clearances for projects built illegally. It also proposed stripping citizens of the right to report violations; only the government or the project proponent could flag non-compliance. The polluter would investigate itself.

The public response was unprecedented with 1.7 million written objections. The draft was not finalised. But the story didn’t end there. 

Since 2020, the ministry has quietly issued over a 100 office memorandums amending the 2006 notification, each individually minor, cumulatively transformative. Post-facto clearances are now granted. Hearing periods shortened. Strategic categories removed from scrutiny. 

Seventeen lakh objections were bypassed, not through challengeable legislation, but through a hundred silent administrative orders. 

The EIA hearing exists on paper. In practice, it has been steadily dismembered.

Forest conservation redefined to death

The National Board for Wildlife, chaired by the Prime Minister, mandated to meet twice yearly, has met just once in 12 years. That single fact reveals everything about this government’s ecological priorities.

The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023, rebranded in Sanskritic flourish as the Van (Sanrakshan Evam Samvardhan) Adhiniyam, was passed by the Lok Sabha in under 12 minutes with virtually no debate. 

It dismantled the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, and effectively overturned the Supreme Court’s landmark Godavarman judgment (1996), which had held that any land meeting the dictionary definition of a forest enjoyed statutory protection, notified or not.

The 2023 amendment confines protection only to lands notified under the Indian Forest Act, 1927, or recorded in government records on or after October 25, 1980, explicitly excluding lands converted before December 12, 1996. 

The practical consequence: up to 2 lakh square kilometres of ecologically critical but administratively unnotified forest can legally be felled.

The amendment also exempts all projects within 100 kilometres of international borders, ostensibly for national security. The Himalayan irony needs no elaboration. 

Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland, with forest cover of 72-85%, are so small that virtually their entire territories fall within the exempted zone. Half of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, with nearly 70% forest cover are similarly exposed.

The Act further expands “non-forest purpose” to include zoos, safaris, eco-tourism facilities, and anything else the central government chooses to notify. India’s forests, protected with difficulty over decades, are now open to commercialisation, under the cover of conservation language.

A cycle that tightens

The consequences of a decade of policy capture are not abstractions. Every Indian is living them. They are simply not being told the cause.

India is caught in a self-reinforcing cycle. Temperatures rising, demand for air conditioning surging; forests that might have cooled cities through shade and evapotranspiration are instead being cleared for industry. 

Ecologically critical patches have lost statutory protection. Industrial heat output, without adequate environmental buffers, now measurably contributes to urban temperature loading.

The air has become a public health emergency. Every one of India’s 1.4 billion people breathes air exceeding WHO guidelines. An estimated 6,70,000 die prematurely (2014) from ambient pollution each year. Children in polluted cities show measurable delays in lung development. 

A Lancet-commissioned study estimated the economic cost of air pollution’s health burden at USD 36.8 billion, over 1.36% of GDP, in 2019 alone.

Yet Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said publicly that climate change is a matter of human perception, not reality. When a head of government holds that view, policy reflects it. 

The National Green Tribunal has been systematically weakened through delayed appointments and budget starvation. Cases accumulate, orders go unenforced. 

Also read: ‘Deeply Disappointing’: NGT’s Greenlight For Infra Projects on Great Nicobar Draws Flak

In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, 13 railway projects worth Rs 19,400 crore were exempted from environmental clearance. The Coastal Regulation Zone was diluted in 2018. In just seven years, over 16 million trees were felled for expressways and infrastructure. With forests now redefined, the pace will only accelerate.

Nations are not built for corporates alone. Infrastructure in itself doesn’t define development. Air and water quality are also measures of development. A nation that cannot protect its forests, rivers, and the air, is simply liquidating its future.

The April heat waves are not acts of God. The dying Yamuna is not an act of nature. The unbreathable air is not inevitable. They are all, in significant measure, acts of governance of a decade that chose corporate convenience over citizen survival. Indians are now paying the price.

Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a reminder of what has gone wrong. He is consistent in raising environmental issues, because people of India matter, their health matters, their personal development matters – because India is not merely a territorial nation, it is a nation based on ‘We, the People of India’. 

People matter. It is time to call it what it is.

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