Sri Sri Ravi Shankar had said he should be given an award for organising World Culture Festival. (File)
Accused of "completely destroying" the Yamuna riverbed in Delhi with its massive "World Culture Festival", Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living foundation today dismissed an expert panel's report to the country's top environmental court as fraud.
Here are the 10 developments in the story
"They took a 45-minute walk and said there was 220 crores damage. But there was no scientific listing of what was damaged, no quantification," said Prabhakar Rao, an environment expert rebutting the report on behalf of Art of Living.
A group of seven experts has said in a report that the three-day festival in March has "completely destroyed and not simply damaged the riverbed".
The experts have been asked by the National Green Tribunal to assess the cost of the damage in 45 days - a job that they say will be "extremely difficult".
The 47-page report says: "The ground is now totally levelled, compacted and hardened and is totally devoid of water bodies or depressions and almost completely devoid of any vegetation."
The floodplain, the report says, has lost "almost all its natural vegetation" like trees, shrubs, tall grasses and aquatic vegetation including water hyacinth crucial to the survival of a large number of animals and organisms.
"These organisms were rendered homeless, driven away by intense activity and many were consigned to graves under the debris. This is invisible loss of biodiversity which cannot be easily assessed and most may never be able to return," it says.
Art of Living was allowed to go ahead with the event on the condition that it would pay five crores against the damage. It had last week accused the experts' group of "bias".
After surveying the area, the experts have noted that a "huge amount of earth and debris have been dumped to construct the ramps."
There has been a change in topography in the riverbed, says the report, and the "construction of ramps and roads, filling up of water bodies and levelling of the ground together with compaction have almost completely eliminated the natural physical features and the diversity of habitats."
The three-day event featured performances on a seven-acre stage and hundreds of thousands of devotees. The opening of the event was attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi; President Pranab Mukherjee dropped out.
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