Carrying out Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is an essential component of most developmental and industrial activities in our country. This has been adopted to ensure that development and environment protection go hand-in-hand. To achieve this objective, it is crucial that quality of EIAs being carried out are of a high order so that possible impacts on environment of such activities can be assessed and mitigative measures adopted. However, the present situation is far from satisfactory, since the EIAs being developed, more often than not, do not measure up to the required quality.

Some of the reasons for EIAs not being of required quality are:

In the new Environmental Clearance Notification of Ministry of Environment & Forests (MOEF), some of the above aspects have been addressed particularly scoping for the EIA (which will now be done by the Ministry or state level authority vide the MOEF notification dated September 14, 2006), check list for environmental impacts, guidelines for EIA report's structure etc. Once a proper scoping is developed then the EIA is expected to remain on rails and address the main issues concerning that project.

Quality Council of India (QCI) was established as an autonomous non-profit organization to establish the National Accreditation Structure, jointly by the Government of India and the Indian Industry represented by the three premier industry associations, Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)

National Registration Board for Personnel & Training (NRBPT), a constituent of Quality Council of India, offers services for registration of Personnel and Training Courses. NRBPT has launched the scheme for registration of EIA consultant organizations. The registration under this criteria is based on the resources available with the organization including technical expertise of consultant, resource persons their educational background as well as experience and expertise. The objective is to meaningfully contribute towards improving the quality of EIAs.

EIAs are essentially multi disciplinary activities where inputs are required from specialists having knowledge of the industry for which EIAs are to be carried out as well as in functional areas like air pollution control, water pollution control, noise and vibration, ecology and biodiversity, land use, ground water and hydrology, socio economy, risks and hazard management etc. The functional area experts are expected to assess the impacts from the proposed development / industrial activities in their respective areas of expertise and then feed the same to the EIA Coordinator. Projects for which EIAs are required to be done can be categorized under the following heads as given in the new EIA Notifications:

The EIA Coordinator would need to have broad knowledge about the project, as well as the above functional areas so that he is able to correlate projected impacts, for which inputs have been given by the various experts on the project activities, and develop an overall impact assessment and management plan.