Bhubaneswar: Odisha’s top bureaucrats has been held accountable by the National Green Tribunal for repeated absences that have stalled proceedings in an environmental dispute over alleged illegal sand extraction.
In a firm rebuke to administrative indifference, the east zone bench imposed a collective penalty of Rs 2 lakh on the chief secretary and seven other state officials for failing to ensure proper representation in a case, concerning excess and unauthorised mining at Nizgarhzami Sand Quarry, also known as Gopinathpur sand quarry, in the Brahmani river under Talcher tehsil of Anugola district.
Each of the eight respondents — the chief secretary, the principal secretary of the water resources department, the deputy director of mines for the Talcher circle, the regional transport officer of Angul, the tehsildars of Talcher and Parajang, Anugola SP, and Talcher police station IIC — has been directed to pay Rs 25,000.
The bench, comprising Justice Arun Kumar Tyagi along with expert members A Senthil Vel and Ishwar Singh, ruled that their non-appearance on September 28 had unnecessarily delayed the resolution of serious environmental concerns raised by a Talcher-based NGO through advocates Sankar Prasad Pani and Ashutosh Padhy.
The tribunal underscored that proceedings before it cannot be treated as ordinary adversarial litigation in which “the concerned defendants may opt out to remain absent and suffer ex-parte proceedings”. State authorities and their instrumentalities, it stressed, carry constitutional and statutory duties to uphold environmental norms, which require them to file detailed replies and remain consistently represented through authorised counsel.
The bench noted that while the respondents had been present through the state counsel on earlier occasions, they had failed to appear on recent dates despite notices. This pattern of “deliberate non-appearance,” the order observed, warranted exemplary costs.
Although the issue of irregular representation by Odisha’s agencies had previously been flagged to both the chief secretary and the advocate general with a request for corrective instructions, the problem persisted.
The officials have been granted one final chance to submit their responses within a month and must deposit the imposed costs with the tribunal’s registrar in Kolkata in the same timeframe. The Anugola collector escaped the fine because the relevant tehsildar appeared on his behalf via videoconferencing.
The matter is next listed for hearing on December 4.