ENVIRONMENT IMPACT ASSESSMENT: CHANGES AND CRITIQUES

Abstract

Around the world, many countries are competing in the rat race of development. To maintain a position and to be in pace with developed countries, developing countries putting efforts to flourish in terms of urbanisation, industrialization and infrastructure development. In a journey to be a developed country, government become oblivion of its people, their rights and protection of the environment. Articles 48A and 51A(b) of the Indian constitution emphasized the obligation of the state to protect the environment and duty of the citizens toward environment respectively. Before 1980, issues relating to environment and forest was the concern of the department of science and technology and ministry of agriculture then responsibility shifted to the department of environment established under within the ministry of agriculture. Later on, in 1985, the ministry of environment and forest(MoEF) started handling this department. Development is an ever-growing process, thus accelerating its impact.therefore in the process of it, there is a huge impact on environment consequently affecting the lives of the people.so there are laws which use preventive approach by taking a prior cognizance of impact by different projects on environment.one such law is environmental impact assessment(EIA). So EIA aims to predict future changes by projects and to evaluate its impact on the environment also Guiding to make informed trade-offs among conflicting aspects of environmental quality and between environmental quality and other societal objective.