HC dismisses review plea against Nirma plant

Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court on Monday dismissed the review petition filed by a group of farmers against the court verdict giving green signal to Nirma Ltd to construct a cement plant along Mahuva’s coastline.
Shree Mahuva Bandhara Khetiwadi Pariyavan Bachav Samittee, which had fil-PIL in the high ed the court, has also approached the Supreme Court.


Meanwhile, the farmers also filed a review petition citing environmental issues, which according to them were not taken into consideration by the high court while rejecting their PIL. Appearing for the petitioner, senior counsel SB Vakil contended before a bench headed by Chief Justice S J Mukhopadhaya that the bench itself had accepted the fact that water body existed on the land. Still allowing the company to put up construction and accepting Nirma’s offer to surrender a plot was nothing but an effort by the high court to protect the project, and not to protect the water body.
Advocate Vakil argued that the order of the high court can be seen in violation of earlier order, wherein a bench issued directions not to disturb a water body at any cost. He also contended that the high court’s order looks like “fine-tuning” of the state government’s order, though the court is neither an executive body nor an expert body.
The state government and the company’s counsel opposed the petitioner’s arguments.
In April, the high court permitted Nirma to put up the cement plant at the disputed land on certain conditions for protection of reservoir. The court directed Nirma to surrender 46 hectare land to the state government within four weeks as per the proposal mooted by the company itself in order to appease the agitators during the hearing. Earlier, the company had surrendered 54 hectare land as per recommendations of a government’s advisory committee. Thus the cement plant, for which the government had allotted 268 hactare land, will have to come up on 168 hactare land.