I have been signing petitions and participating in campaigns to stop the clearing of large forest areas for the construction of some major road or highway for almost a decade now. Clearing of forests also involves forced rehabilitation of tribal communities and of course the habitat loss for biodiversity. In 2016 and 2017, I naively sent emails to ministers to inform them why constructing a 6-lane highway through a tiger reserve would be a bad idea. Unfortunately, all of my letters and signature campaigns fell on deaf ears. In most cases, the agencies responsible for felling trees had already secured the clearances needed to do what they were doing, and those roads would eventually be built. The projects had already been approved by various authorities, including those who were responsible for protecting those forests in the first place, many months before the protests or petitions. I could only sit back and watch forests being destroyed in the name of development. The interaction between development and conservation, and the idea of attaining a balance between them (if that’s even possible) has always been of interest to me. Therefore in 2018, I decided to study infrastructure impacts on the environment as part of my master’s thesis. It was while conducting the research for my thesis that I came across an absolute goldmine of information on a website called PARIVESH: (Pro-Active and Responsive facilitation by Interactive and Virtuous Environmental Single window Hub). This is a web-portal launched by the Ministry of Environment Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC) in 2018 which has a historic database of all new and old projects seeking environmental, forests or wildlife clearances, along with links to relevant documents and assessment reports. It also allows the user to track project clearances and review comments put forward by government officers. As a real-time clearance portal, This website seemed to be an honest attempt to bring about transparency in the approval process for development projects that require various environment-related clearances. Although not fully accessible unless one knew their way around on the website, it seemed to be a good start to know about projects beforehand. I assumed everyone in the conservation space, especially the groups who often initiated those petitions I had been signing, would be using the website extensively . I was glad about the existence of the portal and amazed with the government’s initiative to come up with it.

However, fast forward to a few months later in 2019. Whilst working with one of the leading conservation organizations of the country, I realized that the reality was that far from PARIVESH being extensively utilized by many people, it’s existence was not even widely known. This was a shock to me, to say the least, but it was also my chance to understand the PARIVESH portal and find ways to make use of the huge amounts of information it made available. This seemed like a fun thing I could do through which I could somehow revolutionize the entire process of advocacy for sustainable, wildlife friendly infrastructure in India. Naive, I know, but this was my first job ever.

I soon realized the revolution was not going to happen easily. The more time I spent on the portal the more I realized that while the government’s intentions for this portal may have been that it would make the clearance process transparent and efficient, the design, as implemented, would do just the opposite. I realized that there were a number of major issues with PARIVESH (either on purpose, or due to sheer ignorance) which made information on the portal inaccessible and unusable. For instance, anyone interested in learning more about a potential project must know some very specific keywords to find the project details via the available search options. For updates on the project, they would have to check the portal every day. The projects uploaded for approval would be in the last phase of project planning, with very little scope for any stakeholder to put forward their concerns and recommendations. Although there are some other government websites that allow one to look up new projects in the initial planning phases, those websites happen to be much more complicated than PARIVESH. One would have to be extremely patient to collate information from all of those. Moreover, PARIVESH allows the spatial visualization of projects uploaded on the portal but this useful function is not accessible to the general public. This GIS section is accessible to only government officers with state-authorized login credentials (as of October 2021). For everyone else, it’s a matter of skill, expertise and patience for they would have to download each spatial file individually before beginning any sort of spatial analysis. Finally, I cannot count the number of times the portal has just blocked my access to it, whilst in the middle of research about some upcoming problematic mining or highway development project, almost as if it knew what I was trying to get at!

Personally, having spent so much time just exploring the various buttons and functions of the portal, I believe that the only way for conservation organisations to use PARIVESH effectively is to have a person dedicated to the task. Their role would be only to monitor the portal and make sense of its information and processes to be able to effectively use it for any conservation purpose. However, it turns out there is an alternative. We can develop a better model, something that actually bridges all the gaps and limitations of PARIVESH, allowing for a smoother, more pleasant user experience. I did not know something like this could be done but, currently I am part of the team which is doing it! I am working with colleagues who have been as frustrated as I by the multiple badly designed portals and websites containing lots of crucial information for both development and conservation, lying there in inaccessible formats. We are all motivated by the vision to accomplish what the government may have initially envisioned – a user friendly, transparent and efficient portal which allows easier access to all the information on various development projects within environmentally fragile areas collated from different sources. This is something that I, as a PARIVESH user, wished existed for the past 3 years and it is absolutely exhilarating for me to be a part of something that might make it a reality. The portal would make discussions about upcoming projects in ecologically important areas more evidence-based and would allow for more effective stakeholder involvement.

If you have ever tried to find information on PARIVESH or have signed petitions to stop the construction of roads which already had all the requisite clearances, the urgent need for the existence of a transparent system that we are building may resonate deeply with you.