NEW DELHI: The environment ministry has plugged a loophole in the statute which allowed large integrated projects get away by taking piecemeal environmental clearances without ever disclosing the full and cumulative impact of their projects. Now, the ministry will consider only comprehensive environment-impact assessment ( EIA )) studies, which report on all the components of such mega projects. 

The most recent and controversial case of this type has been the Posco Integrated Steel project. Till now, for example, an integrated steel plant built over several years, could have applied separately for the port, the steel plant (separately for each capacity build-up), the iron ore mining, the rail head and township. It could have blanked out information regarding the rest of the components while seeking clearance for each of them, one at a time. 

This had become the practice in many large projects, undercutting the logic behind environmental clearances. Thus, environmentalists had for long demanded that EIAs be a must.