Latest news with #Clearances
The Hindu
16-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Supreme Court strikes down ex post facto environmental clearances to building projects, constructions
The Supreme Court on Friday (May 16, 2025) held the grant of ex post facto or retrospective Environmental Clearances (EC) by the Centre to building projects and constructions a 'gross illegality' and an anathema against which the courts must come down heavily. A Bench of Justices A.S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan, in a judgment, restrained the Union government from granting ex post facto clearances in any form to regularise illegal constructions. The court struck down the 2017 notification and 2021 Office Memorandum (OM) of the Centre, which in effect recognised the grant of ex post facto ECs, and connected government circulars, orders and notifications as illegal and completely arbitrary. However, the Bench clarified that ECs already granted till date under the 2017 notification and the 2021 OM would be unaffected by the judgment. Accusing the Centre of 'crafty drafting' to clear illegal constructions through retrospective ECs, the court said the government was only protecting project proponents who had committed gross illegality by commencing construction or operations in these illegal constructions without obtaining prior EC. 'Before undertaking a new project or expanding or modernising an existing one, an EC must be obtained… The concept of an ex post facto EC is in derogation of the fundamental principles of environmental jurisprudence and is an anathema to the EIA Notification of January 27, 1994,' Justice Oka observed. The judgment said the government had issued the 2017 notification despite a clear declaration of the law in favour of prior EC by the Supreme Court in the Common Cause judgment the very same year. 'The reason why a retrospective EC or an ex post facto clearance is alien to environmental jurisprudence is that before the issuance of an EC, the statutory notification warrants a careful application of mind, besides a study into the likely consequences of a proposed activity on the environment,' Justice Oka explained. The effect of granting an ex post facto clearance would amount to giving permission to complete the construction of a project which had started without prior EC. In cases in which the construction was already completed and activities had begun, the retrospective EC would facilitate continuation. Thus, in effect, the ex post facto EC regularised something which was illegal with retrospective effect. Referring to the 2021 OM, the court said the Union government had not 'cleverly' avoided the words 'ex post facto', but the provisions had the effect of allowing a retrospective regime. 'The 2021 OM talks about the concept of development. Can there be development at the cost of the environment? Conservation of the environment and its improvement is an essential part of the concept of development. Therefore, going out of the way by issuing such OMs to protect those who have caused harm to the environment has to be deprecated by the courts… Even the Central government has a duty to protect and improve the natural environment,' Justice Oka underscored.
The National
12-05-2025
- Business
- The National
The Scottish poets whose lines feature on RBS bank notes
I gave the text of Munro's poem in full and received a message from a correspondent saying that the poem 'paints a sad picture of cleared Highlands, which must rank in its own way with Consider The Lillies, the moving short novel by Iain Crichton Smith. In so far as I had been appointed 'literary adviser and validator' for the project of redesigning the banknotes, I thought again about the value of Munro's poem in that context. It's surely important to remember that a bank note (especially a large denomination banknote) should carry a very acute message about the authority of devastation that money brings about. Who knows if any folk might read it so deeply? Does anybody notice what's inscribed on banknotes, beyond the pictures? But it's there. Intentionality counts, no matter what they say. I explained last week that RBS asked the Edinburgh design company Nile to take the lead, a few years ago, in redesigning the notes. Through the research, the central theme emerged: The Fabric Of Nature. Thus each note contains a feature or cultural element 'deemed important in the eyes of the Scottish people'. READ MORE: Cash in your pocket carries more value than at first appears Among a team of specialists, designers, calligraphers and photographers, I offered my advice on literary aspects of the redesign and suggested various quotations from the writers and poets that could form part of the notes themselves, and my research for this was serious. I scoured the anthologies, visited libraries, drew on what I knew, made lists of possible lines that I thought might work, and discussed the meanings and priorities and implications of having one poet or another, one language or another, and different forms of poem, before settling on our selection. This week, I'd like to unpack two of the other quotations – Norman MacCaig's, from the £10 note, with lines from his poem Moorings: 'The cork that can't be travels – / Nose of a dog otter'. This connects with the image on the note, two otters at play. And the lines on the £20 note, from Mark Alexander Boyd: 'Fra banc to banc, fra wood to wood, I rin / Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie'. Neil Munro's poem reflects on the devastations wrought upon Scotland by the Clearances, and there are connections from MacCaig to the Gaelic world that must not be forgotten. MacCaig's poems are exclusively in English but his Gaelic ancestry was important to him, and his poems show clearly their affinities with the three traditional Gaelic poetic modes of celebration, condemnation, and lament. Without irony, in Praise of a collie ('She flowed through fences like a piece of black wind'), Praise of a boat ('in still water gurgling like a baby') or Praise of a thorn bush ('an encyclopaedia of angles') he uses metaphors and similes that retain cut-crystal brilliance. His laments (especially in the sequence Poems for Angus) show how, with minimum language resources – no multisyllabic rhetoric, phrases pared down to essentials – the utterance of grief at the death of our loved ones is meaningful on the verge beyond which words become silence. And his hate poems, condemning the loss of language in the Gaelic world, particularly Aunt Julia and Two Thieves, are poems that remain forever angry, partly through the skill of their composition (their use of repetition, imagery, argumentative development) and partly because the reason for their anger is still with us. In fact, simile is relatively rare in Gaelic poetry and metaphor is primarily a form of straightforward identification. So while MacCaig's brilliance of observation and allusion might indicate an essential aspect of Gaelic poetic practice, it is not directly aligned with it. READ MORE: What's to be done with Hugh MacDiarmid's historic cottage home? In MacCaig's most explicitly political and longest poem, A Man In Assynt (1967-68), he writes of the Highlanders, asking, has it come to this: that this dying landscape belongs to the dead, the crofters and fighters and fishermen whose larochs sink into the bracken by Loch Assynt and Loch Crocach? – to men trampled under the hoofs of sheep and driven by deer to the ends of the earth – to men whose loyalty was so great it accepted their own betrayal by their own chiefs and whose descendants now are kept in their place by English businessmen and the indifference of a remote and ignorant government. Consider especially that phrase: 'men whose loyalty / was so great it accepted their own betrayal'. There is pathos in that description as well as a kind of modern critical condemnation of outmoded ways of thinking, self-destructive habits of mind and self-sacrificing attitudes of respect and humility. And is that not something our independence-pledged political parties today should remember? MacCaig's Collected Poems are an enormous thesaurus of similes and metaphors. Overtly descriptive of animals, reptiles, birds, creatures of the natural world, particular people, specific places in the north of Scotland around Lochinver and in Edinburgh, his poems are also quizzical about the inadequacy, uncertainty, inefficiency, unreliability and the limits of language itself, the borders of what language permits us to understand. Writing exclusively in a clear, unaffected English, the tone is usually conversational and wry. He did not typically use capitals at the beginning of lines or even (after the first letter) in titles of poems. In A man in my position, MacCaig writes: 'Hear my words carefully. / Some are spoken not by me, but / by a man in my position.' And in Limits we are told that 'our knowledge goes, / so far as we know, only / so far as we know'. Yet the limits to our knowledge do not excuse us from certain understanding: when molecules jump from one figuration to another they may not go hallelujahing into heaven or howling into hell, but water becomes ice. MacCaig began with two slim volumes in the 1940s which he later disowned, claiming that their avalanching obscurities were too much of their time, part of a quasi-surrealist movement in poetry called the New Apocalypse that had been prompted by Dylan Thomas, asserting the value of imagination over that of social realism. After a pause of a decade, MacCaig returned with Riding Lights (1955). While his poems up to the 1960s were usually metrical and regularly rhymed and, after the 1960s, normally in free verse, the absolute precision of his unmistakable tones of voice was maintained throughout his writing. All his poems, even when they seem slight, are the work of a mature intelligence. He is characteristically ironic and, at times, wildly and wittily funny, yet the predominant ethos of the Cold War, the existential anxieties of the era, have specific correlatives in MacCaig's work, in his sensitivity to the provisional and sometimes duplicitous nature of language, and the virtues of peace. READ MORE: Poets' Pub and Scotland's Voices prompt a more thoughtful understanding Like other poets of his generation, he was an educationalist, a primary school teacher and, undemonstratively, an exponent of Scotland's cultural and literary history. He is also one of the funniest poets ever. His extraordinarily dry, ironic humour delivers from unsuspected corners a shrewd sense of value. This can be both withering and comforting. Consider how precise observation and meticulous annotation of trivial things seen in Five minutes at the window implies a profound understanding of people, and about what political idealism always neglects at its peril. Its message is urgent but the poem gives no sign of anxiety. We are invited to note that 'a tree with lights for flowers' says 'it's Christmas' and a 'seagull tries over and over again / to pick up something on the road' while 'a white cat sits halfway up a tree.' Each observation invites the question, 'Why?' and then another: 'What are trivia?' They've blown away my black mood. I smile at the glass of freesias on the table. My shelves of books say nothing but I know what they mean. He is suddenly 'back in the world again / and am happy' even though he acknowledges 'its disasters, its horrors, its griefs.' In the middle of the poem is a single line, 'Oh, the motorcars'. No other poet could have written that line. It is imbued with a precise inflection, a sigh of recognition and an invisible shaking of the head at the vanity of people spuriously rushing to unnecessary appointments, instead of simply pausing to take pleasure in the virtues and values of trivia in a world of fortunate and vulnerable peace, surrounded, as he knows, by other worlds, of violence, torture and war. Here, then, is the poem from which the RBS took its lines, Moorings: In a salt ring of moonlight The dinghy nods at nothing. It paws the bright water And scatters its own shadow In a false net of light. A ruined chain lies reptile, Tied to the ground by grasses. Two oars, wet with sweet water Filched from the air, are slanted From a wrecked lobster creel. The cork that can't be travels – Nose of a dog otter It's piped at, screamed at, sworn at By an elegant oystercatcher On furious orange legs. With a sort of idle swaying The tide breathes in. Harsh seaweed Uncrackles to its kissing; The skin of the water glistens; Rich fat swims on the brine. And all night in his stable The dinghy paws bright water, Restless steeplechaser Longing to clear the hurdles That ring the Point of Stour. Every observation of this watery, nocturnal scene relates its human occupation and material economy to the natural world it inhabits. That, in itself, should always be the context in which money, the RBS banknotes, the priorities of finance and commerce, need to be understood. Moving back 400 years, let's go to the RBS £20 note and find Mark Alexander Boyd (1563-1601). He was the oldest of three cousins, all literary figures, of the Boyds of Penkill family. Boyd studied at Glasgow University, where apparently he was an insubordinate scholar, leading a rebellion against the principal, Andrew Melville, and quarrelling violently with his teachers. He travelled to Paris, gambled away his money, joined a troop of horse-soldiers fighting German and Swiss mercenaries and journeyed through France, Italy and the Low Countries, having various adventures. He published a collection of letters and poems in Latin and Greek in Antwerp in 1592, finally returning to Scotland where he died at Penkill, in Ayrshire in 1601 and was buried in the churchyard at Old Dailly. His biography by Lord Hailes was published in 1783. This is my version of one of his Latin poems, a poem of gratitude addressed to his teacher Patrick Sharpe: If you were the first to show me how to see The mountains to their topmost peaks, and how to drink As deep as earth from replenishing springs – Now, face to face – It is not only words, nor poor prayers sent by me, Nor fragile flowers, nor the simple strength of my arms, I think, But thanks from my soul this poem brings – Now, let's embrace! Cupid and Venus is Boyd's greatest poem and one of the finest sonnets ever composed. Ezra Pound, in his indispensable book ABC Of Reading (1934), wrote of it: 'Boyd is 'saying it in a beautiful way'. The apple is excellent for a few days or a week before it is ripe, then it is ripe; it is still excellent for a few days after it has passed the point of maturity. I suppose this is the most beautiful sonnet in the language, at any rate it has one nomination.' READ MORE: Inside the Kolkata Conference bringing India and Scotland together By which I take it Pound means that Cupid and Venus is the most beautiful sonnet because it is most perfectly ripe. Fools will quibble. Check out the brilliant setting by Francis George Scott (1880-1958), a major songwriter in the European tradition, available on Moonstruck (Signum Classics, SigCD096). If we paraphrase the poem into English, we'd have something like this: 'From bank to bank, from wood to wood, I run, overwhelmed by my insubstantial fantasy, like a leaf fallen from a tree or a reed blown over by the wind. Two gods guide me: one of them a blind child, one of them a woman born of the sea, whose touch is lighter than a dolphin's fin (that is, Cupid and Venus). Unhappy forever is he who tills the sand and sows seeds in the air, but twice unhappier is he, I know now, who feeds his heart with mad desire and follows a woman through fire, led by blindness and infantile hope.' Here's the poem: Fra banc to banc, fra wood to wood, I rin Ourhailit with my feeble fantasie, Lyk til a leif that fallis from a trie Or til a reid ourblawin with the wind. Twa gods gyds me: the ane of tham is blind, Ye, and a bairn brocht up in vanitie; The nixt a wyf ingenrit of the se, And lichter nor a dauphin with hir fin. Unhappie is the man for evirmair That tills the sand and sawis in the aire; Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn, That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre, And follows on a woman throw the fyre, Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn. The 'banks' in the poem are riverbanks, of course, so seeing those first two lines on the £20 RBS bank note is a kind of deep pun. Maybe Richard Stark, the creator of literature's greatest professional thief, that most beautiful character, Parker, would have appreciated it!
