News: The Union environment ministry has notified the Environment Protection (Management of Contaminated Sites) Rules, 2025 for remediation of contaminated sites by those responsible for contamination.
New Rules for Contaminated Site Management Notified
- The Environment (Protection) Rules for Management of Contaminated Sites, 2025 are framed by the Ministry of Environment, forest and climate change (MoEFCC) under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.
- The rules create the country’s first dedicated legal framework for identifying, remediating and monitoring contaminated sites that pose serious risks to human health and ecosystems.
- Aim: They aim to tackle contamination in soil, sediment, and water caused by industrial discharge, hazardous waste dumping, and past neglect.
- Objective: The objective is to prevent further environmental degradation while ensuring polluters are held accountable through a structured process involving scientific investigation, risk assessment and mandatory clean-up actions.
Key features
- Identification of sites: The framework mandates the identification and classification of sites as either suspected, potentially contaminated or confirmed – based on evidence from industrial activity, community complaints or historical waste records.
- Tracking of sites: Once a site is flagged, a centralised online portal, to be developed by the central pollution control board (CPCB), will track its status, enabling transparent public access to information and regulatory oversight.
- Public participation: State boards must seek comments from affected stakeholders within 60 days of listing a site as contaminated and must publish the final list in regional newspapers.
- Responsibility: The Rules create a ‘responsible person’ mechanism, holding individuals, companies, or entities accountable for environmental damage.
- Such responsible parties must bear the full cost of remediation and are barred from transferring ownership or altering land use without prior approval during or after the clean-up.
- If the polluter is found, these costs must be repaid within 3 months.
- ‘Orphan sites’: Where a responsible party cannot be identified, commonly referred to as ‘orphan sites’, the government may step in with financial support drawn from multiple sources, including the environment relief fund, penalties from environmental violations and central or state allocations.
- Such responsible parties must bear the full cost of remediation and are barred from transferring ownership or altering land use without prior approval during or after the clean-up.
- Voluntary clean-ups: The rules also introduce provisions for voluntary clean-up, allowing private entities to remediate sites if they demonstrate technical expertise, financial capability and consent from landowners.
- Monitoring
- The Rules call for the formation of monitoring committees at both state and central levels, comprising experts, ministry officials and regulators.
- These committees are tasked with supervising implementation, recommending additional actions where necessary, and submitting annual compliance reports to the central government.
- The Rules call for the formation of monitoring committees at both state and central levels, comprising experts, ministry officials and regulators.
- Funding
- The Rules adopt a tiered model for financial set-up –
- Himalayan and Northeastern states, the Union government will bear 90% of the clean-up costs, with the states contributing 10%.
- Other states, the Union government-state ratio will be 60:40.
- Union Territories (UTs), the entire cost will be borne by the Union government.
- The Rules adopt a tiered model for financial set-up –
- Exceptions: The Rules exclude sites contaminated by:
- Radioactive waste (covered under Atomic Energy Act)
- Mining-related pollution
- Marine oil pollution
- Municipal solid waste dump sites (covered by separate legislation).
