Byrnihat and the Broken Chain of Consent: An Environmental Impact Assessment Failure in the Assam - Meghalaya Borderlands

Abstract

In the IQAir 2024 World Air Quality Report, a small industrial town, Byrnihat, on the Assam-Meghalaya border in Ri-Bhoi district has been ranked the world's most polluted metropolitan area, with an annual average PM2.5 concentration of 128.2 µg/m³, which is more than 20 times the annual guideline set by the WHO. The focus of this paper is not on a legal vacuum but on an implementation failure in an existing and relatively tight regulatory framework. The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) had earlier marked the Assamese side industrial cluster of Byrnihat as a Critically Polluted Area in 2018 with a score of 78.31, which should have led to a standing moratorium on new project clearances under a Ministry of Environment office memorandum issued in 2010. In 2019, the NGT had issued another order that was to be followed up with remedial action and public monitoring on a half-yearly basis. Notwithstanding, pollution increased further during the next five years to the extent of being ranked as the worst in the world in 2024 and a state sponsored CSIR NEERI study concluded that the bowl like topography of the region had caused the airshed to have negative residual carrying capacity, leading to a ban on new industries of the Red category in July 2026.

The paper breaks down this "EIA failure" into five specific legal failures: no cumulative impact assessment for a fifty five unit industrial cluster, jurisdictional fragmentation of a single airshed between two state pollution control boards, weak consent to operate compliance monitoring, apparent non observance of the 2010 moratorium, and a persistent unresolved factor of two discrepancy between IQAir and state government pollution data. It places these failures in the context of the constitutional right-to-environment jurisprudence in India under Article 21, the precautionary and polluter pays principles, and compares these with the WHO guidelines, the EU Industrial Emissions Directive, and Aarhus Convention's transparency principles, and offers litigation, regulatory and siting reform paths.