Government officials will be prosecuted and risk imprisonment for failing to act against polluters: SC | India News

NEW DELHI: It will not be just polluters who will be sent to jail or fined, but government agencies and public servants will face the same consequences if they do not have to pay the fines. were not acting against the polluters to the Supreme Court allowed Monday their prosecution.

A group of judges, Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta, said that misguided officials supposedly acting against polluters but not acting should be accused of connivance with the main culprit. He said government officials and agencies should be prosecuted under Section 15 of the Environmental Protection Act, which provides for a sentence of up to five years in prison .

Article 15 provides penalties for polluters. It provides that any person who contravenes any of the provisions of this Act or the rules or orders or directions issued under this Act shall, in respect of such breach or contravention, be liable to up to five years imprisonment or a fine of up to one rupee lakh, or both. It indicates that if the breach or contravention persists, an additional fine of up to Rs 5,000 per day during which the breach or contravention continues after the conviction of the first breach or default.

The Supreme Court authorized the prosecution of government officials and agencies for their inaction under the provision, which placed them on a par with those polluters. The court issued the order after the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB), the supreme body responsible for combating pollution, told the court that officials and nodal agencies should also be punished. in case of inaction for the control of air pollution incidents.

Supplementary Solicitor General, N Nadkarni, Appearing for the CPCB, told council formation that the Commission had already sent a notice of justification to some of the nodal agencies in order to institute criminal proceedings against them . He has pleaded with the court for it to issue an order giving power to the Commission to institute criminal proceedings against officials and agencies.

Lawyer Aparajita Singh, who attends the court as an amicus curiae, said that the agency had not taken any steps to fight the pollution because nothing allowed to take action against them. She supported the CPCB's plea that misleading agencies and officials would be subject to the criminal provision of Article 15 to ensure that they perform their duties in accordance with the law. In accepting their plea, SC authorized and authorized counsel to sue.

Following the instructions of the Supreme Court that had asked the Commission to create social media accounts to allow people to file an online complaint, the CPCB informed the court that it had created an account on Twitter and Facebook on November 1st. received 749 complaints concerning the NCR region.

"Of the 749 complaints received on social media and by email until November 22, about 52 complaints were followed by 52 CPCB teams during their badociation with the Clean Air campaign from November 1 to 10 . Later, the CPCB continued alone a similar campaign to attend the complaints. The remaining 249 complaints have been attributed to the respective nodal agencies and are being resolved, "said the Council in its response.

The CPCB told the court that, acting in accordance with its instructions, 18 nodal agencies – all the municipal authorities of Delhi, Haryana, Gurugram, Uttar Pradesh and the state pollution control offices, and the transportation department, which is supposed to handle the pollution crisis in the NCR region, have also created their social media accounts where complaints could also be filed.

She stated that in total, 3337 complaints had been received in the past three weeks on her Sameer application, of which 923 were resolved, 1248 complaints were processed and 349 were reported. An investigation. He said that 817 complaints are not yet processed by the nodal agency.