Greenpeace India guilty of lobbying, says govt dossier

A dossier prepared by the Union Home Ministry on March 4 claimed that Greenpeace’s foreign contribution was used “to influence and lobby” for the formation of government policies.

It claimed that the “foreign funded campaign and protest creation by Greenpeace India led to wastage of financial resources, prevented creation of productive capital and caused loss of jobs and incomes for locals, apart from depriving the country of energy”.
The dossier, prepared after investigations for six months beginning last September, said the non-operationalisation of Mahan coal block was due to the “protest-creation” of Greenpeace in Singrauli and eight other locations.

Another result of Greenpeace protest was “slowing down Government of India’s energy policy implementation by physically preventing the commission of new nuclear and coal based energy projects” and “creating hurdles in the path of existing coal based plants”.
The green body is also accused of “conspiring with foreign NGOs and donors” at the Coal Strategy Conference in Istanbul in 2012 to create “people-centric” protests in India.
Another accusation was the creation of “unionism among construction workers in order to use the manpower to populate protest movements by deploying UK-based Greenpeace activist Benjamin David Hergreaves, who in contravention of his business visa trained Greenpeace India activists”.

It also said Greenpeace India published a research report titled “Trouble Brewing on Indian Tea”. It claims to have identified hazardous pesticides in leading Indian tea brands, all of which are exported in large quantities to the US, UK and Europe.

Greenpeace also ran “international negative advertising campaign against India’s most popular tea brands so as to reduce India’s exports by publicising questionable forensic tests in an undisclosed foreign lab”. However, Home Ministry officials claim they were not vindictive towards Greenpeace saying they gave them adequate time to respond to their findings and even accepted certain explanations given by them.

“In one case we found that two rooms were booked in the name of one person for same period in two different places. They explained that it was booked in one person’s name but two separate persons stayed there. We accepted it even though we could reject it,” an official said.