Until now all construction projects anywhere in India worth Rs 50 crore and above, discharging 50,000 litres of water per day or meant for 1,000 people, had to come to the Centre for clearance. Now they won’t.

After the intervention of the Prime Minister’s Office, the government is ready to scrap this requirement and frame new guidelines for environmental impact assessment (EIA) of large real-estate projects — IT parks, hospitals, malls, housing societies and cinemas.

Expected to be announced early next week by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, under the new norms, the public hearing, as is mandatory now for projects of a certain size, will be substituted by a web posting of the EIA report which will call for public comments.

Under the new regulations, there will a three-member state-level authority that will clear projects above 1.5 lakh sq m. The head of the authority will be a government official, the other two will be experts.

For projects between 20,000 sq m and 1.5 lakh sq m, a self-assessed EIA will suffice.

Once the notification comes into effect, the projects already with the expert committee in Delhi — as of September 1, there were 314 of these — will have a choice to wait for a central clearance or could go to the state authority once it is set up.

Bringing in these changes hasn’t been easy.

It was Minister of Environment and Forests A Raja’s predecessor and his DMK colleague T R Baalu who, in 2004, brought the Centre into clearing the EIA. But several in the Government, including the Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, the Finance, IT, and Industries Ministers argued that this only meant delay and more red-tapism.

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