India to launch single window for all environmental clearances

The ministry addressed state environment ministers on the new Parivesh system, which is being updated, during the National Conference of ministers of environment, forest, and climate change. Pro-Active and Responsive facilitation by Interactive and Virtuous Environment Single-window Hub or Parivesh will be a single window system, used to clear environmental, forestry, wildlife, and coastal regulatory zones.
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Compensatory afforestation rules also relaxed for private land.
  • Many responsibilities shifted to regional offices instead of central.
New Delhi: According to a statement released on Saturday, the Union Environment Ministry will introduce a single-window system for environmental, forest, wildlife, and coastal control zone clearances by the end of the year in an effort to speed up the approval process for various infrastructure projects, Hindustan Times reported.
Pro-Active and Responsive facilitation by Interactive and Virtuous Environment Single-window Hub or Parivesh will be a single window system, used to clear environmental, forestry, wildlife, and coastal regulatory zones.
By the end of the year, the administration now plans to launch Parivesh 2.0.
The ministry addressed state environment ministers on the new Parivesh system, which is being updated, during the National Conference of ministers of environment, forest, and climate change held in Ekta Nagar, Gujarat, on Saturday.
The ministry said that the COVID-19 pandemic drove our society to look for more technologically advanced ways to get services without having to physically interact with people. The statement stated that there was a need to improve users' experiences on Parivesh by utilising cutting-edge technologies for quicker green clearances.
This would decrease the number of query iterations, improve transparency, and shorten the processing time.
The regional offices of the ministry will have the power to deal with some of the cases that were dealt with earlier by the central government and would ultimately result in reducing the time taken for the clearance process.
Every state has been given the option to set up a land bank beforehand so they can start the necessary compensatory afforestation as soon as the recommendations are presented to them. Additionally, there wasn't a system in place previously for exchanging private land for the forest acreage that was intended to be diverted in place of compensatory afforestation, which will be taken care of now.
Under this, any individual or organisation may substitute plantation in an area of 10 ha that is older than 5 years and has a 0.4 density for fulfilling the requirement of compensatory afforestation.
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