BENGALURU: The high court has said the National Highways Authority of India\u2019s statement that \u201cthe Environmental Protection Act has been passed by the Parliament at the instance of foreign powers\u201d is shocking.
\nThe court on Monday directed the NHAI chairman to nominate a senior officer to inquire and come clean on the matter. A division bench headed by chief justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka was hearing a PIL filed by United Conservation Movement and Charitable Trust (Bengaluru), which had challenged the exemption granted by the ministry of environment, forest and climate change on expanding national highways (up to 100km) from the requirement of environmental impact assessment (EIA).
\nIn the statement of objections filed by NHAI deputy general manager (technical) RB Pekam, there were references to \u201cforeign powers\u201d behind the Environment Protection Act. The bench pointed out it has been stated that there are many organisations in India such as Amnesty International which are actively involved in challenging government policies\/ notifications and are indulging in anti-national activities. The NHAI official said \u201cthere are many NGOs receiving money from foreign sources and church funds in contravention of laws\u201d.
\nThe official said \u201cit is not known whether the petitioner, being an NGO, is receiving any such funds from abroad in contravention of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act-2010, and whether they are cleared by the ministry of home affairs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BENGALURU: The high court has said the National Highways Authority of India\u2019s statement that \u201cthe Environmental Protection Act has been passed by the Parliament at the instance of foreign powers\u201d is shocking. The court on Monday directed the NHAI chairman to nominate a senior officer to inquire and come clean on the matter. A division bench headed by chief justice Abhay Shreeniwas Oka was hearing a PIL filed by United Conservation Movement and Charitable Trust (Bengaluru), which had challenged the exemption granted by the ministry of environment, forest and climate change on expanding national highways (up to 100km) from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,221,137],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-roads-the-times-of-india","category-the-times-of-india"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}