THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Union Minister for Environment and Forests (MoEF) Jairam Ramesh said here on Monday that even though the state government had made a brave attempt at getting the Athirappilly power project cleared, it cannot be given the green signal as he firmly believed that the project would not be in national interest.With regard to the 240-MW Pooyamkutty project, he said the ball was in the state’s court and that the project has to be first examined and cleared by the state Forest Department. Also to get an absolute ‘No’ was the cricket stadium at Edakochi, which Jairam Ramesh described as a closed chapter. “They were not playing cricket with a straight bat. There were serious violations of the CRZ rules and there was rampant destruction of mangroves. The gameplan was to remove all the mangroves and get it classified as CRZ II instead of CRZ I,’’ said Jairam Ramesh.“Kochi can think of a cricket stadium elsewhere,” he added. The Union Minister was briefing reporters after a three-hour-long discussion on various projects with Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, Forest Minister K B Ganesh Kumar, Industries Minister P K Kunhalikutty, Ports Minister K Babu, Water Resources Minister P J Joseph, Transport minister V S Sivakumar, Chief Secretary P Prabhakaran and Shashi Tharoor MP.One major decision arrived at during the meeting was setting up Kerala’s own authority for environmental clearances, namely the State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA) and the State-level Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC), which would enable the clearing of projects at the state-level rather than them getting bogged down at the Centre.
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