Context: The Union Ministry of Environment has notified Environment Protection (Management of Contaminated Sites) Rules 2025 to address chemically contaminated sites across India.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: Salient Features of Environment Protection (Management of Contaminated Sites) Rules, 2025.
Environment Protection (Management of Contaminated Sites) Rules 2025
- Notified by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.
- First formal legal mechanism in India to address the issue of contaminated land.
- Aim: To establish a comprehensive legal and procedural framework to identify, assess, and remediate chemically contaminated sites across India.
Contaminated Sites:
- According to the Central Pollution Control Board, contaminated sites are those where hazardous and other waste had been dumped historically.
- These sites may include landfills, dumps, waste storage and treatment sites, spill sites, and chemical waste handling and storage sites.
- India has identified 103 such sites, but remedial operations have been initiated in only seven.
- Some of the sites were contaminated when there was no regulation on management of hazardous waste.
Salient Features of the Rules:
The rules define a step-by-step legal procedure to identify and clean up contaminated sites. Under these rules:
- The district administration would prepare half-yearly reports on suspected contaminated sites.
- A State Board, or a reference organisation, would examine these sites and provide a preliminary assessment within 90 days of being informed. Following these, it would have another 3 months to make a detailed survey and finalise if these sites were indeed contaminated.
- A reference organisation, basically a body of experts, would be tasked with specifying a remediation plan.
- The State Board would also have 90 days to identify the person(s) responsible for the contamination. Those deemed responsible would have to pay for the cost of remediation of the site. Else, the Centre and the State, under a prescribed arrangement, would arrange for the costs of clean-up.
- Any criminal liability, if it is proved that such contamination caused loss of life or damage would be under the provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (2023).