Barely months after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh broke the impasse on the Navi Mumbai airport by clearing the amendment of the Coastal Regulation Zone Act to permit construction of greenfield airports, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has locked horns with the Maharashtra government and the Civil Aviation Ministry by reopening the debate on the selection of the site itself. And, in the process, putting a question mark on the project itself.

In June, Ramesh wrote to Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan to “clarify” that the Environment Ministry has “at no point given any in-principle approval for the proposed airport”. More so, on the amendment to the CRZ Act, he said that it only made construction of a greenfield airport a “permissible” activity but did not preclude granting of environment clearances.

He then opened up the question of the Rewas-Mandwa site that was selected about a decade ago and dropped due to massive protests from villagers. The alternate site where the airport is being planned has already been identified and land acquisition proceedings started.

But Ramesh has turned the clock back and asked why the state government considered the Rewas-Mandwa site as “more sensitive” than the present one.

“The MoE&F (Ministry of Environment and Forests) is not clear on what basis this assertion is being made by the state government,” he wrote.

This has left the Ministry of Civil Aviation and Maharashtra government baffled. All these arguments had been gone through over the past five years and it was the PM, as in-charge of Environment Ministry during the last months of the previous term, who directed his officials to find a solution to the problems the new site was facing because of being in the CRZ and the presence of mangroves.

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