Gail Alexan­der

The re­port by the James Arm­strong re­view com­mit­tee on the Debe to Mon De­sir seg­ment of the new high­way was flawed and de­fi­cient in its com­ments con­cern­ing the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty's ac­tion in the is­sue, EMA chair­man Joth Singh said yes­ter­day.Speak­ing in the Par­lia­ment com­mit­tee room yes­ter­day, Singh re­spond­ed to Arm­strong's com­ments which were made re­cent­ly when Arm­strong re­leased his re­port on the high­way seg­ment.

Arm­strong said sev­er­al de­fi­cien­cies–for which the state was re­spon­si­ble–were found es­pe­cial­ly in the En­vi­ron­men­tal Im­pact As­sess­ment/Cer­tifi­cate of Clear­ance and oth­er as­pects con­cern­ing EMA weren't met. Arm­strong sug­gest­ed im­proved con­sul­ta­tion among the par­ties to work the sit­u­a­tion out.

But Singh said EMA wasn't asked by the re­view team to meet or dis­cuss any­thing with them. If talks were held, he said, some of the items Arm­strong's team flagged would have been eas­i­ly re­solved via ex­pla­na­tion."There were de­fi­cien­cies in their re­port and it was in­com­plete...The fact we weren't con­sult­ed makes it in­com­plete so that was a huge flaw in their pro­ce­dure," Singh said, adding the team was neg­li­gent.

"We're talk­ing so much about con­sul­ta­tion and a ma­jor stake­hold­er in this is­sue (EMA) wasn't con­sult­ed. We re­viewed the en­tire re­port and felt EMA went through all the process­es of con­sid­er­ing and award­ing a CeC.""Some of the con­di­tions their team flagged were ac­tu­al­ly made manda­to­ry in the project, for ex­am­ple re­lo­ca­tion one of the main is­sues in the mat­ter and which EMA felt con­sid­er­a­tion should be giv­en to ac­cord­ing to World Bank stan­dards. We al­so high­light­ed is­sues which made it manda­to­ry to ad­dress them."

Say­ing there are for­mal chan­nels to chal­lenge EMA de­ci­sions, Singh said none of that was ever done."So we some­times won­der at the ap­proach of the re­view com­mit­tee ques­tion­ing EMA's de­ci­sions when the for­mal mech­a­nisms to chal­lenge it were nev­er used," he said.Singh said EMA is await­ing the ap­point­ment of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty Com­mis­sion, to be done by the Pres­i­dent .

The High­way Re-route Move­ment is ex­pect­ed to hold a fo­rum on the high­way is­sue to­day.