PILAP plea against EIA: LHC holds first hearing of plea challenging RUDA’s project

LAHORE: The Lahore High Court held its first hearing over challenging of Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA) Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) of the River Ravi Urban Development project Thursday.

The RUDA is undertaking the development of over 100,000 acres of land along some 40-km of the riverbank and floodplain of the River Ravi along Lahore. The RUDA project involves the channelisation of the Ravi and the use of land acquisition to convert thousands of acres of agricultural land for commercial residential use. The Public Interest Law Association of Pakistan (PILAP) has challenged the EIA prepared on behalf of RUDA by Engineering Consultancy Services Punjab (Pvt) Ltd (ECSP). The Punjab Environmental Protection (Registration of Environmental Consultants) Regulations, 2017 further protects the fundamental rights of citizens by ensuring environmental assessments such as EIAs are prepared by environmental consultants registered with the EPA Punjab.

PILAP has challenged the EIA for the RUDA project on the grounds that ECSP is not a registered environmental consultant and that the EPA Punjab should therefore be restrained from reviewing the EIA. PILAP is concerned because an EIA prepared by a non-registered consultant compromises citizens’ fundamental rights.

The Lahore High Court allowed the EPA Punjab to continue with the public hearing of the EIA of the project scheduled for February 20, 2021 but has restrained the EPA Punjab from passing any final order on approving or otherwise the EIA of the RUDA project until the final outcome of the case.

Civil society members have expressed their deep concern on the process of public hearings of EIA. The whole concept of public hearings appears to be a sham. Although as per Regulation 11 of IEE/EPA regulations which stipulate all decision making will take into account comments received by the public, the comments are not taken into consideration making public hearing useless. It has been seen in the past EIAs have been approved by regulators and the courts have given verdicts precisely on the basis that the regulatory authority has given its approval. We quote here an example of an EIA that was submitted for the Signal-Free Corridor which was a cut and paste job taken from an EIA of a chicken hatchery which had left references to regular cleaning of chicken feed intact in the recommendations sections.

This is an indication of the poor quality of EIAs prepared by unregistered consultants. After the poor quality, EIAs were exposed in the proceedings in the Signal-Free Corridor and Orange Train proceedings. The EPA passed regulations requiring registration of consultants, however, since then EPA to date has not passed any guidelines for registration nor have any consultants been registered.