The National Green Tribunal (NGT) issued notice to the Centre on a petition challenging a Jal Shakti Ministry amendment issued earlier this month that removed the “construction-free zone” tag on the Ganga’s floodplains and redefined what counts as a floodplain.
The Tribunal did not stay the amendment. Environmentalists, however, had flagged concerns that tying protection to shorter return periods and moving to a clearance-based regime could open land closer to the river to construction and weaken its role as a pollution and recharge buffer. A Bench of Chairperson Justice Prakash Shrivastava and Expert Member Afroz Ahmad, hearing the matter on August 19, directed the Union government and other respondents to file their replies and listed the case for October 27. On August 11, The Hindu reported on the amendment notified by the Ministry’s National Mission for Clean Ganga, which, along with the relaxation of construction rules, had also recast the definition of a floodplain into three bands.
The “active floodplain” is the area inundated by a flood with a one-in-five-year return period; a “regulatory zone” covers land flooded once in five to 25 years; and a “warning zone” covers land flooded once in 25 to 100 years. A government official had explained the change to The Hindu as “correcting a legal inconsistency” in the original order.
