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New Delhi: Senior Congress leader and former Union environment minister Jairam Ramesh said on June 3 that the government’s insistence about the adequacy of the environmental impact assessment report (EIA) it had commissioned to institutes under it for the Great Nicobar Project amounted to a “perversion of due process”.   

Ramesh was responding to Union environment minister Bhupender Yadav’s letter dated May 27 in which Yadav claimed that the impact assessment studies for the Rs 92,000 crore infrastructure projects on Great Nicobar island – which has raised numerous concerns from several quarters – were adequate as they used “historical data”, along with single season surveys.

Primary vs secondary data

The studies mentioned by Yadav in his letter are not based on primary data collected over a single seasonal cycle, but on data collected only over a few weeks, said Ramesh, in his response on June 3.

While Yadav highlighted in his latest letter to Ramesh that the impact assessment reports put together by several institutions under the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change were also based on historical data sets collected by these institutes, such secondary data “is just not a substitute for primary data collection and project-specific studies”, Ramesh said.

“You are very aware of the difference between primary data collected at the project site and its impact areas and secondary data collected........

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