MP Tiger Corridor Cleared for 1,800 MW Power Project Despite Forest Officer's Warning

When "Noted With Reservations" Becomes a Clearance Stamp

Imagine you are the District Forest Officer who walked the Panna-Ranipur corridor before this file reached Delhi. You saw the tiger pugmarks, the leopard scat, the bear trails, all crossing exactly where the reservoir and access roads are meant to go.

You wrote down, honestly, that this land sees continuous, unhindered wildlife movement, that it has no alternative dispersal path left because the Ken-Betwa project has already swallowed part of the core area and that the proposed project is likely to block the corridor.

Then you watched the Standing Committee "take note" of your warning and clear the project anyway.

THE FRAMEWORK

This is not a case of an obviously corrupt decision versus an obviously correct one. That would be easy. This is a genuine collision between two real state obligations. India's clean-energy transition depends on pumped storage capacity like this 1,800 MW project to stabilise a grid increasingly powered by intermittent solar and wind.

Denying it outright is not cost-free either; it is a real trade-off against decarbonisation targets the country has committed to. A strict deontological reading would say the state has a duty not to knowingly authorise probable, serious and largely irreversible harm to an endangered species' only remaining corridor, regardless of the compensating benefit elsewhere.

A utilitarian calculus would weigh the certain, quantifiable gain of 1,800 MW of grid-stabilising clean power against a probabilistic, harder-to-measure loss of habitat connectivity - and that asymmetry is precisely why utilitarian reasoning tends to favour development in these files, since immediate economic benefit is always easier to price than a corridor's long-term ecological function.

THE RESOLUTION

The honest answer is that the SC-NBWL did not resolve this dilemma; it deferred it and called the deferral a resolution. Recommending "mitigation"

• three overpasses, relocated muck-dumping sites - while explicitly recording the field officer's fragmentation warning is not the same as demonstrating those measures will actually preserve the corridor's function. The correct course was not automatic rejection of the project, but a conditional clearance genuinely contingent on independent, pre-construction verification that the specific overpass design would preserve tiger, leopard and bear movement in this particular terrain, with construction paused if that verification failed. What was sacrificed by not doing this is precautionary honesty: the file now proceeds carrying the appearance of due diligence, while the actual ecological risk the DFO flagged remains unverified and unresolved. Development can still happen in a functioning corridor; it should not happen on the promise that engineering will fix what field evidence says it may not.