Navi Mumbai: Welcoming the appointment of the Aerodrome Environment Management Committee (AEMC) by the Maharashtra government, Green groups have called for changing the composition of the panel and to appoint a retired Supreme Court or High Court judge to head it.

Considering the fact that there have been allegations of environmental violations against City and Industrial Development Corporation (CIDCO), the city planner’s MD should not head the AEMC, NatConnect Foundation director B N Kumar said in his missive to the Chief Minister.

"Airport environmental issues can impact the lives of people hence it is important to have an independent chairman to head the AEMC," he said.

Contrary to the commitment by the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) that the organisation and CIDCO will implement the recommendations of the BNHS for protection and conservation of the biodiversity around the Airport site, there have been a series of violations, Kumar said.

The major wetlands, which are the destinations for thousands of migratory and local birds, are being systematically destroyed either by burying with landfill or by blocking intertidal water flow.

He suggested that the committee must open a complaint box to enable alert citizens to file their concerns. These could be ground-checked by the officials and reviewed by the AEMC, he said.

“Of the six major wetlands listed by BNHS, the one at Belpada was leased out to JNPA and the Bhendkhal and Panje water bodies were sold to NMSEZ (now NMIIA),” Nandakumar Pawar, head of Sagar Shakti, said.

The DPS Flamingo Lake and the NRI Wetlands are in a very bad shape due to the blocking of intertidal water, said Sandeep Sareen of Navi Mumbai Environmental Preservation Society (NMEPS).

This is making the birds skip the wetlands that they are used to and fly helter-skelter which can pose threats to the flights at NMIA, NatConnect said, quoting BNHS studies.

In fact, protection of biodiversity was one of the conditions of the environmental clearance obtained by NMIA which has explicitly agreed to comply with it in all the reports being submitted to the union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) , the environment watchdog said.

For the uninitiated, BNHS was appointed by CIDCO to do the Baseline Survey of Avian Fauna between 2012 to 2016. CIDCO has also signed a long-term MOU (ten-year period ending 2028) with BNHS. Aim of this decadal study is long term monitoring, conservation, and supervision of the terrestrial and water birds with reference to NMIA and associated regions and implementation of Bird Threat Mitigation Plan.

NMIA said in its compliance report that it presented its concerns regarding some of the bird sites (NRI colony (NRI), Training Ship Chanakya (TCS) and Delhi Public School (DPS)) being located close to the airport, as they come within Inner Horizontal Surfaces (IHS) of NMIA. BNHS however allayed these fears by quoting the data visualisation which showed that the birds fly much below the aircraft flightpath over the Thane creek.