Residents of Chutka, the village in Mandla district which is the site of proposed 1400 MW nuclear power plant, staged protest and submitted memorandum to the District Collector demanding that the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report of the project should be made available in Hindi.
Notably, a public hearing on the EIA report is scheduled on May 24 at Chutka village. The villagers have warned the administration that in absence of Hindi version of the full report they will not allow the public hearing to hold on that day. The villagers say that none of them can even read the report, so the public hearing is merely a sham.
Nauratan Dubey, a Chutka resident and member of Chutka Paramanu Sangharsh Samiti said, “The report is in English and it runs in more than 900 pages. Nobody in the village is able to even read English and the public hearing has been organised to know the objections of the villagers about this report. This makes the public hearing merely eyewash, a formality that government wants to complete to get the required no-objection certificate from Union Ministry of Environment and Forests.”
“The Hindi document that the Government has provided is a 10 page summary of the report, which is not only too short, but also, contains complicated technical details that even an educated person cannot easily understand. We have made it clear to the Collector that the full report should be made available in Hindi and villagers should be properly explained about the environmental fallouts of the project before the public hearing,” he added.
Nearly 100 villagers from Chutka were present at the dharna in front of Collector’s office. The dharna was also supported by People’s Initiative Against Nuclear Energy and Communist Party of India – Marxist-leninist (CPI-Ml).
Arun Velaskar of the People’s Initiative said that the Government is trying to impose nuclear power on people at a time when the developed countries are winding nuclear operations. “Germany has already closed its nuclear reactors and Japan is also following the suite. But Indian Government has refused to relent despite massive people’s protest against nuclear power,” he added.
Notably, the notice for the public hearing was issued in April giving the people even less than two-month time to read the EIA report for the proposed nuclear project prepared by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI). The nuclear plant is being opposed by the villagers who had constituted the Chutka Paramanu Sangharsh Samiti to protest against it.