How to check environmental clearance for a project in India.

Which projects need environmental clearance

Under the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006 (item 8 of its schedule, as amended):

Item	Projects covered
8(a) Building and construction	Built-up area of 20,000 square metres or more, and below 1,50,000 square metres
8(b) Townships and area development	Covering 50 hectares or more, or built-up area of 1,50,000 square metres or more

Both are appraised at state level, by the State Expert Appraisal Committee (SEAC) and the State Environment Impact Assessment Authority (SEIAA). Where a state has no SEIAA in place, the proposal goes to the central ministry. Thresholds have been amended over the years; check the current notification on the ministry's site before relying on an exact number.

Step by step on Parivesh

1. Open parivesh.nic.in, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change portal.
2. Choose Track Your Proposal.
3. If you have the proposal number, enter it with the CAPTCHA and search.
4. If not, choose Show Advance Search. Set Clearances Type to Environmental Clearance, pick the State, and narrow by year, proposal status or dates if you know them.
5. Enter the project or developer name in the text box, type the CAPTCHA, and search.
6. Open the proposal to see its current status and the documents published with it.

Older proposals may also be on the ministry's earlier site, environmentclearance.nic.in.

How to read the result

• A filing is not an approval. A submitted proposal tells you a project of a certain size is planned at a certain place. It does not tell you it will be approved, or when it will launch.
• Look for the clearance letter itself before treating a project as cleared.
• Note the dates. A proposal that has not moved for a long time may have stalled.
• The project's location, area and built-up area are usually in the application documents, not in the search result.

Why it matters if you are buying land

A large project files for environmental clearance before it can be built, and a project cannot be sold before it registers with the state RERA. So an EC filing near a plot is one of the first public signs of what is being built around it. It sits alongside the airport height NOC, Fire NOC and building permit in the approval trail.

The limits of searching by hand

The search works by name or proposal number, not by map or survey number, so finding every proposal near one plot means reading many results. EarlyPlot reads these filings, matches them by survey number and shows the ones around a plot on one map, each linked to its record. For a plot you are about to buy, the land buying checklist covers the other checks.