The Supreme Court has agreed to hear on Friday the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board's (TNPCB) appeal against the National Green Tribunal's (NGT) order that allowed London-listed Vedanta group firm Sterlite Industries to resume operations at its copper smelter unit in Tuticorin after the state regulatory body shut it down in March. The plea was mentioned before a bench headed by Justice Gyan Sudha Mishra, which posted it for hearing on Friday. Lifting temporarily a shutdown ordered by the state pollution control board on March 29, the NGT had questioned the scientific basis of the Board's “punitive” decision. However, the tribunal had last week allowed the firm to restart operations within a week under the watch of a committee sent to check on the plant and its anti-polluting equipment. The tribunal said TNPCB had acted on “apprehension”, and “the action of the board would suffer from the voice of arbitrariness if it collected no data”, and passed the impugned order in an abrupt manner. Sterlite had argued that the shutdown had led to a production loss of 60,000 tonnes and it had invested R150 crore in environmental control mechanisms in the last two years alone. Following complaints from the public of excessive emission of sulphur dioxide, the TNPCB had ordered the closure of the copper plant, which can produce 4 lakh tonnes of copper annually. The closure was ordered after sulphur dioxide allegedly leaked from the plant on March 23 and affected a large number of residents in Tuticorin. The closure order was challenged by Sterlite Industries before the NGT's southern bench in Chennai. Later, the matter was transferred before the NGT’s bench in New Delhi. An expert committee report found that “largely, the functioning of the plant is in consonance with scientific requirements”. On April 18, a panel was constituted by the NGT to inspect the plant. It made two inspections and submitted its report. Earlier, on April 2, the Supreme Court had imposed a fine of R100 crore on the company for polluting the environment,but stayed a 2010 Madras High Court directive to shut the smelter altogether. The apex court had, however, clarified that the imposition of fine would not stand in the way of any action by the state's pollution control board.