Wednesday, September 24, 2014

SC cancels 214 coal blocks: a temporary respite for forests, environment and local people!

The Supreme Court has today cancelled 214 out of the 218 coal blocks that it had said were allocated to both PSUs and Private Companies by all governments from 1993 to 2010 in arbitrary, corrupt, nontransparent and illegal ways. 

Please see details of the news at the following link: http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/sc-cancels-214-of-218-coal-block-allocations-114092400501_1.html

This is certainly a great news at the time because this not only exposes the unholy nexus that exists between politicians, bureaucrats and the extraction industries; but also because it now shows that coal is not exactly a cheap fossil fuel to be exploited by destroying the lives and livelihoods of people already dependent on the forests and land resources in the coal mines and by killing the local environment.

This is surely going to be a temporary reprieve for millions of hectares of good forests, millions of people who are dependent on these, numerous other species and uncountable amount of water resources. 

The new government at centre must learn a lesson from this and take sufficient measures to see that coal mining does not destroy all the above again.  After all, coal is the most costly fossil fuel if we take into count all the above losses. 


May reason prevail!

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