SC panel inspects Noida park, meeting on Aug 12

SC panel inspects Noida park, meeting on Aug 12
Smriti Singh , TNN 7 August 2009, 01:09am IST

NOIDA: Mayawati's ambitious Noida memorial was under scrutiny yet again when members of the Supreme Court's centrally-empowered committee (CEC)

visited it on Thursday. The high-level committee including P V Jaikishan, chairman, Sanjeev Chaddha, member-secretary and Mahinder Vyas, member inspected the park along with the petitioners and residents of Noida who had approached the CEC. The inspection took place at 11am amid tight security. Noida police officers were deployed at each entrance, and other than the petitioners, no residents were allowed to go inside. The visit lasted for about an hour. A team of enviromental experts, along with the Uttar Pradesh chief secretary, was also present. The panel has now fixed a meeting with all the parties on August 12. The CEC has asked the ministries of forest for Delhi and Lucknow to be present. After the inspection, petitioner Kanan Vihari Jaiswal said that questions were raised by the panel about the number of trees felled during construction of the park. "The Noida authority confirmed that the project was worth over Rs 600 crores,'' Jaiswal said. The main concern expressed by both committee members and residents was that the memorial park is being constructed next to the Okhla bird sanctuary, in violation of several environmental laws. Commodore Lokesh Batra, an intervener in the PIL and also a resident of Noida, said the panel sought original records which were prepared before execution of the construction plan. Several residents had approached the apex court a few months earlier, accusing the state government of cutting down more than 6000 trees to make way for statues of Mayawati, Kanshi Ram and Dr BR Ambedkar. They had faulted the memorial on three counts it was too close to a protected sanctuary, was located on the riverbed and was almost next to a state boundary. Five parks in Noida had been cleared to make way for this memorial, and until recently, no official from the Noida authority was willing to speak about the project. Recently, Supreme Court advocate Ravi Kant filed a petition in court after which a two-judge bench sent a notice to the UP government. While the bench refused to stay installation of the statues, the government had been given four weeks to reply to the notice, only after which the case could be listed for hearing. However, it has been over five weeks now with no reply from UP. Barely a month ago, a team of the central environment ministry had also inspected the site and found several violations. Soon after its inspection, the area, that had been a virtual sea of concrete till then, was greened with several thousand saplings and grass being planted almost overnight. Workers at the park had reportedly been instructed to finish the work on priority. Last week, 11 statues, wrapped in blue and black, arrived at the park and were installed without much ado.