CHENNAI: More than 75 youth groups from Tamil Nadu and 1,951 children and youth below 30 have staked their right to the future and called for the withdrawal of the controversial Draft EIA Notification, 2020.
In a letter to the Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar, the youth have called the draft “short-sighted” and warned that “any economy that is based on a premise that nature is expendable is
doomed to self-destruct.”
As young people from Chennai and its surroundings, "we have seen enough environmental disasters resulting from the mindless activities of our previous generations. While the decisions of earlier generations could be forgiven as actions undertaken in ignorance, the actions of today’s decision-makers will be judged differently. The Environment Ministry’s decisions to weaken environmental laws and to undo the meagre protections offered by the current EIA Notification, 2006 come at a time when the world is staring at the very real prospect of climate mayhem," the letter said.
“Friends of my age have witnessed cyclones, floods, droughts and (now) pandemic; we don’t want to witness anymore environmental disasters as a result of careless and insensitive environmental decisions,” said Kanishk G, a 17-year-old homeschooler and volunteer with the city-based youth collective Chennai Climate Action Group.
“The proposed EIA Notification weakens the body of laws that protect the environment at a time when we need to be strengthening such statutes. Worse, the proposed rules seek to enrich businesses and the corporate sector by emasculating democracy, limiting public participation and due diligence, and rewarding environmental offenders by facilitating post-facto environmental clearances for projects that begin or are completed without license,” the letter states.
The youth have asked the Minister “to abandon this draft, to commit yourself to our well-being and future and initiate a wide-ranging participatory exercise to strengthen our environmental laws, and bring our development and economic plans in line with the increasingly visible limits being imposed by nature.”
Referring to the violent trolling of Padma Priya, a YouTuber whose EIA2020 explainer in Tamil went viral, organisers of the letter campaign requested “people to engage with the content of our objections, and not to attack us personally.”
Chennai Climate Action Group is a city-based youth collective that uses science, law and media to support community struggles against environmental injustice.