DEIAA (District Environment Impact Assessment Authority)

DEIAA stands for District Environment Impact Assessment Authority, a district-level statutory body created under amendments to India's EIA Notification, 2006, to handle environmental clearance for a narrowly defined sub-category of projects — Category B2 minor-mineral mining with a lease area of five hectares or less. The DEIAA was constituted specifically to decongest state-level appraisal pipelines that were overwhelmed by hundreds of small sand-mining and stone-quarry applications.

Composition and jurisdiction: Each DEIAA is chaired by the District Magistrate of the relevant district, with members drawn from the state pollution-control board, forest department, mining department, irrigation/groundwater authority, and a representative of the district planning office. The DEIAA covers only one category of project — minor minerals such as sand, gravel, ordinary clay, ordinary earth, kankar, building stone, lime kankar, and morrum, when extracted from a lease area not exceeding 5 hectares.

Procedure: The DEIAA receives an application with an EIA report and Environmental Management Plan prepared by a NABET-accredited consultant. The application is examined by the District Expert Appraisal Committee (DEAC), the parallel technical committee, which recommends approval, conditional approval, or rejection. The DEIAA issues the Environmental Clearance order, typically within 90 days. Major minerals and any mining above 5 hectares continue to fall under SEIAA (Category B1) or MoEFCC (Category A) depending on extent and ecological sensitivity.

Relevance and limits: For the recycling and industrial sectors covered in this glossary, DEIAA is rarely directly relevant — recycling units fall under Category B and go to SEIAA — but it matters indirectly when a recycling business sources construction or process minerals from quarries cleared through DEIAA channels. Verifying that a feedstock supplier holds a valid DEIAA-issued EC is part of basic due diligence, particularly for businesses involved in concrete recycling, road-base material recycling, or any operation co-located with a minor-mineral lease. Failure mode: relying on an unverified mining lease document without confirming the EC validity, which can later expose the recycler to ancillary regulatory action when the upstream quarry is found non-compliant.