With just a few hours left to submit suggestions about the new draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), student groups across the country have been sending mass emails to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, asking it to scrap the draft and reinstate the one that was amended in 2006.
However, a lot of them seemed to have faced a common problem — emails sent to the ministry's email addresses bounced and were never delivered. Many of them took to Twitter to report this. According to the complaints, the issues pertained to these email IDs — eia2020-moefcc@gov.in, mefcc@gov.in and mahesh.png@gov.in. The error message read "the address couldn't be found or is unable to receive email".
Student groups are quick to suspect a conspiracy, however unlikely it may actually be. "This is a part of the propaganda," says Mayukh Biswas, National Secretary, SFI. The student political organisation had a target of sending over a lakh emails to the ministry, asking it to scrap the draft. "it is our ardent expectation that the ministry will uphold its accountability towards exercising the absolute participation of various stakeholderships as well as its commitment towards the ethos of Sustainable Development Goals and Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration and also the Principles of Natural Justice and Human Rights while taking a considered view on the proposed amendments to the EIA notification, 2020," reads the email the organisation's members had sent.
But the fact remains that they were stymied and didn't know what to do next, "Most of them weren't able to send their emails. This is just a gimmick much like what the government did with the NEP. They will quietly get it passed," says Mayukh. "However, we are still adamant about conducting this campaign despite emails bouncing. We want people to see how things work," he says.
However, even though many people raised the issue of emails bouncing, the issue seems to be rectified by Tuesday afternoon. EdexLive had, a few hours ago, sent emails to the ministry's IDs. It was also pointed out by a few that emails may bounce if mailboxes are full. However, in these cases, almost all the time, adding email IDs as a bcc works.
