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.

Most chief ministers, too, echoed these sentiments. Builders argued that this was needless when local authorities were already assessing them on fire, power, water, sanitary, and pollution standards. NGOs claimed that the amendment process was biased as the Ministry didn’t consult “stakeholders” and civil society groups. Even the Ministry is likely to record its objections to the scrapping of public hearings as it brings the new rules into effect.

Several MPs, including Mani Shankar Aiyer, have written to the Ministry criticizing the fact that the Ministry has only spoken to the industry groups. “This is not true. We had consultations for over more than a year before the draft was finalized last September. The industry had sent a detailed set of objections which required further discussion with them,’’ said Prodipto Ghosh, Secretary, MoEF.