The Madras High Court on Tuesday asked a batch of litigants to approach the National Green Tribunal (NGT) challenging Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board’s July 31, 2019 notification which relaxed the 2004 requirement of maintaining a distance of one kilometre between stone crushing units.
Chief Justice Sanjay V. Gangapurwala and Justice D. Bharatha Chakravarthy granted 10 days’ time for the litigants before the High Court to approach the NGT and said, an interim stay granted by the High Court in September 2019 to the TNPCB’s notification would expire after the period of 10 days.
Though Advocate General R. Shunmugasundaram requested the court to not extend the interim stay since it was granted prior to a study conducted by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-National Environmental Engineering Institute (CSIR-NEERI), the judges said, they had extended it only for a limited period.
The A-G also told the court that the CSIR-NEERI study, conducted with respect to air pollution caused by stone crushing units in Tamil Nadu, had concluded that there was no need to prescribe any distance criteria between the stone crushing units and that they could function even in clusters.
He said CSIR-NEERI had prescribed a safety distance of 500 metres only between the stone crushing units and national/State highways, inhabited sites, educational institutions, public offices, places of religious importance and so on in order to avoid the influence of dust emission.
However, Senior Counsel T. Mohan, representing the litigants, claimed that the study report was wrong.
