The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi granted preliminary approvals in late 2022 and early 2023 to an Adani group company to build three large hydropower projects in old-growth forests and grasslands teeming with wildlife, areas legally out of bounds for such construction, according to government documents and expert assessments.

Officials from India’s ministry of environment, forests and climate change (MoEFCC) interpreted legal regulations in a manner that the law did not allow, said experts. The result was that the projects planned by Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL), in what are called ecologically sensitive or fragile areas, cleared the first step in the approval process, called “terms of reference” in legalese, the documents show.

The company’s own documents, attached with its application, revealed its plans to use more than 150 hectares of forest land (the size of more than 200 football fields) in ecologically sensitive areas to build four dams, access roads, workers’ housing and other infrastructure for the three projects.

These are some of the key findings from an analysis of government and company documents related to the Rs-19,256-crore Adani projects, accessed by Article 14 under India’s right-to-information law and from the Parivesh portal of the environment ministry.

Independent experts said the potential consequences of this interpretation included the destruction of forests and wildlife in the area of the three projects—located in the western Maharashtra districts of Pune, Satara, Kolhapur and Raigad—and would encourage more hydropower projects in other ecologically fragile areas of the Western Ghats.

More than 50,000 sq km—the size of Punjab—within the Ghats are classified as ecologically sensitive, meaning they contain animal and plant species either rare, endemic or especially valuable and easily disturbed by human activity.

The Western Ghats are a chain of mountains older than the Himalayas, dating back 150 million years to the Jurassic age, inscribed in 2012 on a World Heritage List and one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity.


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