following up on sunita narain's editoral, businessweek has a piece on it.

titled, "Environmental farce", it seems much saner voice is present in a business magazine editorial board than that of government corridors.

the editorial tries to kind of sum up how the government can go on to do projects when it comes to land acquistion. quoting from the link,
"If projects needing land are to go ahead, they can do so only with the support or at least consent of those being displaced. This has been the lesson from the SEZs and from Singur and Nandigram; and the sooner governments realise this, the better."

this suggestion is a little preposterous. it assumes, that 'consent' can be obtained for destructive project. 'support' can be achieved for polluting factories and dangerous mining.

the first step that should happen is an unbiased honest open eia. this has to be followed up with proper and open public hearing. and other crucial thing such as local development versus massive polluting chemical unit, agricultural/diary/etc initiatives versus dangerous mining, track record of the company that is proposing the unit, the lifestyle and livelihood of the local people and many other things has to be considered.

when money is the start all and end all in india, the best way to stop that money is to make sure that honesty stays 100 steps in front of the money. if 'support', 'consent', 'okay', etc comes into picture it will mean that honesty is 100 steps behind the money as the south goa case - on which the editorial takes off from - shows.

well at least the editorial has some sense into it when compared to the utter non sense that the present champions of fake development are holding out.