The cover story on India Today’s October 15, 2012 edition screamed so loud that I had to buy it. It read “Green Terror: Outdated environmental laws and inflexible ministers strangle India’s economy”. Terror? Strangle? This has got to be big!

But when I re-read the headline, I agreed with just one part of it – “Outdated environmental laws”. Environmental laws in most countries around the world have the primary objective of protecting the environment. And in that obvious sense, yes, India’s environmental laws are outdated. But the headline was strange. It read as if the sole purpose of the Ministry for Environment and Forests was to protect, promote and revive the Indian Economy. Aren’t there other ministries for that? For instance, the Ministry of Finance headed by P Chidambaram.

Semantics aside, I assumed that a magazine of such repute as India Today would not carry such a misleading headline. And even if they did, there would be a good justification for it. But once I started reading the article, I realised that the headline was the least of its problems. The article read like a public relations piece from interests in corporate India who were adversely affected by these “outdated” environmental laws. And it seemed India Today’s senior correspondents – Devesh Kumar and Prachi Bhuchar were on the side of the victims.

Devesh and Prachi could have at least spoken to the communities, environmental groups, etc around some of these failed or even successful developments, and got not just sound-bytes but real evidence on why the environmental laws are outdated. It would have made the article seem a little more balanced and added some journalistic credibility.

I too believe that environmental laws are outdated. But the article has two major fault lines: in making India’s developmental woes the sole responsibility of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, and in being blatantly one-sided in writing about it. They might as well have referenced James Delingpole’s book Killing the Earth to Save It: How environmentalists are ruining the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your job, to add a little more zest.

The authors over-simplify and omit crucial details. Take for instance, the second paragraph where it reads: “Jayanthi Natarajan and Jairam Ramesh, her predecessor between 2009 and July 2011, have succeeded in making MoEF the single biggest stumbling block to India’s growth story.”

I thought “corruption” was the single biggest stumbling block to India’s growth story. Oh wait, its India Today’s trademark hyperbole! I guess they have a template like “_________ is the single biggest stumbling block to India’s growth story.” You could fill in the blank with any random word from the cover story of the week.

The very next sentence reads: “Finally free of policy paralysis, the Government now faces an even bigger threat from within: Green terror. All in the name of preserving the environment.”

The government is finally free of policy paralysis? That’s a sweeping statement.

The first victim the authors defended was Coal India. They have 179 coal blocks awaiting clearances, and forestry clearances for diverting 28,771 hectares of land were yet to be granted – so we are told. And this was upsetting the government’s power generation plans. Strangely, there was no mention of any of the mining scams, let alone the coal mining scam.

It seemed the authors had already made up their mind and they want to us to believe that green is evil and that we should be afraid. The article was laced with phrases like “green curtain”, “green noose”, “rage against the green license raj”, “pressure from the green brigade”, “green activists”, “green shroud”, etc.

In comes a quote from CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) President, Adi Godrej,

“Anything that takes months on end to be cleared is too much. We must learn to clear things very, very rapidly. And by rapidly I mean in a matter of weeks, not months or years”.

Why was it not questioned why the industry would want rapid clearance? Instead the authors write, “Natarajan clearly has a different notion of time.” “Every time a simple way out has been suggested, she has chosen the difficult option.”

The most shocking was the final paragraph which termed the minister, “the inflexible empress of ecological correctness.” Now this was not a quote from the CII president or some disgruntled corporate honcho, it was the authors’ opinion. It is at this stage I begin to question the rationale behind such a cover story. Are the authors really furious at the minister for not rapidly clearing projects, or have they used a quote from someone who commissioned this article?

Further reading suggests more reasons as to why the minister might be “impervious to reason”. She was at loggerheads with the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office) and the planning commission. Moreover, “since the days of Ramesh, the ministry has tended to lean in favour of the need to protect environment, keeping development at bay.”

Says who? Says the usual unnamed PMO official. He/She goes on to add, “We have been pushing MoEF to streamline its procedures, but to no avail”. I bet by “streamline its procedures” he/she means “fast track the clearances”, so the industry can just get on with it.

It gets better. The authors point us to a theory that Sonia Gandhi has given her blessings to the pro-environment lobby in order to woo the aam aadmi vote – demonstrated by the cancellation of forest and environmental clearance(s) granted to Vedanta Aluminium Ltd to mine bauxite at the Niyamgiri Hills in Lanjigarh. If this theory were true, it means Sonia Gandhi is the one who decides which forests are mined and which ones are not. This implies that the MoEF and the ministers are proxies carrying out her orders. In this case, shouldn’t the cover story be more about Sonia Gandhi? Maybe with a title “Green Terror: How Sonia Gandhi’s quest to woo the Aam Aadmi vote is strangling India’s economy”.

We continue to hear voices of rage from India Inc through the remainder of the article. KV Kamath of ICICI wants the government to address land and environment issues that are holding up infrastructure development. FICCI Secretary-General, Rajiv Kumar has a single bullet solution: “Do away with the licence raj system of clearances and, instead, punish corporates for violations of the law, should that happen.”

As if punishing violators was easy. You don’t even have to search for stories on mining and resource-related scams and violations. From coal to iron ore to granite we have seen it all and we all know how environmental law enforcement works. If “environmental laws” are outdated, then “environmental law enforcement” is almost non-existent.

The article then points to the woes of poor businessmen who cannot navigate the maze of clearance regimes across the Environment Protection, Forest Conservation and Wildlife Protection Acts. They point to the ways in which officials at the MoEF use these Acts to sabotage clearance permits. “Rights of forest dwellers, enshrined in Forest Rights Act, 2006, have also come in handy for MoEF to stop projects”. It is quotes like these that make me wonder if it was a commissioned piece. I am no Arundhati Roy, but what is wrong about upholding the rights of forest dwellers?

The last few paragraphs take a dig at “judicial activism”. The blame was placed on environmental activists and lawyers who were challenging “every clearance” granted by the ministry. The authors even doubt the judiciary: “The judiciary has generally leaned in favour of green activists in all its judgments in recent times.”

Says who? Says the unnamed senior Planning commission official. How convenient!

There is also a quote from a former environment ministry official claiming Jayanthi Natarajan’s reign as being more opaque than that of her predecessor Jairam Ramesh. This takes the unnamed-official-quote-count to three.

The last paragraph read like an ominous warning not to the readers, but to the Prime Minister himself.

“No one knows better than the UPA Government that its fate is tied to the state of the economy. Manmohan Singh’s recent reformist announcements have raised investor sentiments. The slide in growth from over 8 per cent just two years ago to around 5 per cent this year may have been arrested. However, to get back to 8 per cent and more, the Prime Minister needs to lift the green shroud threatening to bury his reformist agenda. And for that, he needs to confront the enemies of development within his own Government.”

The Prime Minister had better act on this warning and soon.

Overall I must admit this article was a great read. I’ve got to hand it to the authors. Their choice of pictures of Jayanti Natarajan, the use of phrases like “reigning green queen…presides in imperious silence”, “inflexible empress of ecological correctness”, etc were spot on.

And here is a quick lesson in researching for a story – do not confuse correlation with causation. Take for example the Kudankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu. The media coverage of the events surrounding the plant has clearly contributed to the popular belief among many people in the rest of the state that the power crisis would be resolved by starting the nuclear power plant and the protestors are just selfishly stalling this great solution. In reality though, the power crisis is a direct result of incompetent planning and management (of the power sector) by successive state governments. But now the simple answer is to blame the protestors. And it works. Correlation turned to causation.

The same logic can be applied to this India Today story: with selective reporting of facts, readers are being made to believe that the bad guys who are wrecking the economy are the folks at MoEF. They are the reason why it will be “impossible for India to achieve its target of attracting an investment of $1 trillion in infrastructure between 2012 and 2017.”

With articles like these, India Today will soon become a reliable cheerleader for India Inc. Not that there is anything wrong about it. But next time, at least give us some pom-poms so we can cheer along.

(In interests of full disclosure, I am an environmentalist and strongly believe that Environmental Law enforcement should be strengthened, more so than amendments for stricter Environmental Law).