New regulations that would ease the environmental impact assessment process for oil and gas exploration in India could lead to more incidents like the Baghjan oilfield blowout and fire, a prominent Indian environmental policy expert has warned.

Incidents such as the Oil India Limited (OIL) blaze raise alarms about the country's commitment to environmental safety, said Manju Menon, senior fellow at the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

Public hearings are mandatory for projects such as OIL’s Assam operations under India's Environment Impact Assessment Notification, the law that governs the green clearance process, Menon told Upstream.

“Although OIL has claimed that they took permissions under the 2006 Notification, projects under this sector have required a detailed scientific appraisal and a public hearing from the 1990s when this notification came into existence,” she said. India has witnessed a number of environmental infractions due to project operations going awry, including several during the coronavirus lockdown alone, Menon said.

“We haven't learnt the most crucial lesson from past disasters, which is that the decision-making on projects, including the procedures for clearances, have to carefully assess every project for the risks it poses to workers, to neighbourhoods and to ecologies.

“These assessments take time and have to be done thoroughly by independent experts who are not under political pressure to do the government's bidding.

“In the Indian context, this very important process of assessing the risks of projects is done in a very rushed and slapdash manner because our governments don't want to turn away project investments or are concerned about short-term economic goals,” she said.

India’s central government recently passed an amendment whereby oil and gas exploration can be undertaken without a full environmental assessment and public consultation. “It is certainly not the right move, mainly because this seems to have been done at the behest of some large company that is interested in exploration in Tamil Nadu,” noted Menon.

In the past, energy players have lobbied government to reduce the legal standard of environmental assessments, she said.

Many public sector utilities keep petitioning the government to declare that none of these procedures should apply to them, as they exist for public interest.

“These are all very absurd arguments if you consider that projects can jeopardise food security, public health and the rights of children to grow up in safe environments.

“But I would put the blame most of all on the economic planners of our country. We continue to use very old and irrelevant logics of economic growth and GDP when we should be exploring new models of ecological prosperity for all our people.”

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