ESIA for water bodies: assessing what a river or lake intervention actually changes.

An EIA assesses environmental impacts; an ESIA covers environmental and social impacts together, with the social component (livelihoods, access, displacement, cultural use and vulnerable groups) assessed to the same standard as the environmental one. Lender-financed projects generally require the ESIA form because their safeguard policies place explicit obligations on social outcomes.

Where a lender or funding agency applies safeguard standards such as those of the IFC or the World Bank, where a state programme or a court or tribunal direction requires it, or where the intervention falls within the EIA Notification 2006 and statutory clearance is needed. Many restoration projects require assessment for the first two reasons even when the third does not apply.

Restrictions on access during works, effects on fishing and on cattle watering, disturbance to washing and to religious and cultural use of the banks and ghats, and, where the fringe is occupied, displacement of informal settlement. A restoration is generally beneficial overall, which is exactly why the specific groups who bear a cost need to be identified rather than assumed away.

Water and sediment quality, bathymetry and the hydrological regime, aquatic vegetation, fish, and bird populations with their use of the shallows and fringe, over a period sufficient to reflect seasonal variation. Bird use in particular is seasonal, and a single-visit survey will miss migratory presence entirely, which is why timing of the survey matters as much as its method.

It can, and the assessment should say so. Dredging disturbs benthic habitat, resuspends sediment and nutrients, temporarily raises turbidity, and if timed badly can coincide with fish breeding or migratory bird presence. These are manageable through timing, staged working and turbidity control, but they have to be identified before the works rather than defended afterwards.

Specific, budgeted and monitorable measures: construction-phase controls on turbidity, noise and waste, timing restrictions around ecological windows, access arrangements for dependent users, livelihood restoration where a use is displaced, a grievance mechanism, and a post-works monitoring programme with named parameters and frequencies. A plan that cannot be audited is not a management plan.

Through identifying the actual user groups (fisherfolk, adjoining residents, temple and community bodies, farmers abstracting water) and consulting them on the design and the construction arrangements, with the record and the responses forming part of the assessment. Water bodies are contested spaces, and a scheme that has not spoken to its users tends to meet them later through objections and litigation.