KOCHI: The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests will not give clearance to the proposed international cricket stadium at Edakochi.
“We will not support a stadium coming up in that area,’’ Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has said.
Replying to a question on the sidelines of a South Asia media briefing on climate change in New Delhi the other day, Ramesh told Express that there was no way that the stadium would get clearance.
Meanwhile, the three-member panel of the ministry headed by the director of the regional office in Bangalore, S K Susarla, has submitted its report to its head office. The panel had visited Edakochi on November 10 to study the extent of the ecological damage at the 23-acre site for the stadium of the Kerala Cricket Association (KCA) at Pambayimoola along the Vembanad lake.
They had also held discussions with all stakeholders, including the locals, NGOs, people’s representatives and KCA officials. The KCA is facing charges of having destroyed mangroves in the area where the proposed stadium is to come up.
The team had visited the site to ascertain the veracity of the allegations that the site comes under the ecologically-sensitive Coastal Regulation Zone-1 and that mangroves have been destroyed there to clear the ground for the stadium. The other members of the expert panel are marine scientist K V Thomas and Environmental Information System coordinator Kamalakshan Kokkal, Pollution Control Board Ernakulam regional office chief environment engineer M S Mythili, former Biodiversity Board chairman V S Vijayan and others.
The Kerala High Court had also issued notices to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, the state government, Kochi Corporation, Kerala Cricket Association president T R Balakrishnan and secretary T C Mathew on a petition seeking a directive against the construction of the stadium.
Several NGO groups had written to the MoEF asking for withdrawal of the clearance, alleging illegal felling of mangroves in CRZ-1.
In his complaint, S Sitaraman, secretary, Association for Environmental Protection, had said that the Kochi coastal area had been subjected to the vast destruction of mangroves (programmes such as the establishment of Cochin Port Trust, Goshree bridges, container terminal, development of bridges, roads, etc), and the only remaining patches of the mangroves in the area were under severe threat.