MUMBAI, July 9 (Xinhua) -- India will expedite the process of granting environmental clearances by reducing the number of days for clearance to 70-80 days from 108 days, said a release by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce (FICCI) on Tuesday.
The government has already eased the process of environment clearance from 640 days earlier to 108 days now, said Prakash Javadekar, India's Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, who was quoted by the release.
"Unless we implement what we have decided, we can't achieve our goals. Countries such as US and UK implement the laws ruthlessly. We have decided to give importance to the implementation aspect of the industry, and we want to see the disaster management preparedness of the industries," he said.
In India, environmental clearance is required for 39 types of projects to assess impact of the planned project on the environment and people before the project work is commissioned.
The minister was speaking at the three-day "Annual Conference on Chemical and Disaster Management 2019 - Industrial Safety and Emergency Preparedness" organized by FICCI.
Speaking at the conference, Kamal Kishore, Member of India's National Disaster Management Authority said that the ambitious target of making India a 5 trillion U.S. dollar economy cannot be achieved without significant investment in the growth of chemical and industrial activities in the country.
Moreover, if the economy has to be sustainable, the growth in chemical and industrial sector needs to be matched with growth in resilience to industrial disasters, Kishore said.
