POLLUTER MUST PAY

report by tnpcb and neeri found the operational area of the plant to be 172.13 ha, but there was no waste management being done. “What’s worse, tnpcb has stopped the real-time monitoring of the plant since 2013, as is required by the Central Pollution Control Board,” says Jeeva Karikalan, a writer and environment activist based in Chennai and a native of Thoothukudi. This is what has activists worried the most. Since tnpcb has not been monitoring, its pronouncements will not stand in court. Perhaps this is what Sterlite is banking on.

“This is not the first time India’s pollution regulatory institutions are being blamed for ineptitude,” says N Raghuram, president of Delhi-based Indian Nitrogen Group, a society of scientists working on nitrogen pollution. neeri, for instance, has come under fire many times for producing dubious environment reports. In 1993, it prepared two reports on the effects of pollution on the Taj Mahal and blamed the local industries for it, not the Mathura Oil Refinery, a major polluter in the region. The reports had several discrepancies in pollution data (see ‘The trouble with the trapezmium’, Down To Earth, 1-15 April, 1996). Similar was the case in 2014 when neeri bungled the eia report on the construction of the Tadadi Port on Karnataka’s Aghnashini estuary. To mask the pristine nature of the estuary, the eia team under-represented the flora and fauna from the region and exaggerated the area of the estuary (see ‘An ecological faith’, Down To Earth, 1-15 January, 2018).

“The Sterlite Copper has been shut because of a people’s movement, not because of tnpcb or neeri. This should be a wake up call for everyone who is trying to project India as a global environment leader,” says Raghuram. “The operational secrecy of our regulatory systems has rendered them toothless. Science requires public scrutiny to progress,” he adds.

Regulatory mechanism needs to be overhauled and made independent

Thoothukudi typifies all that is wrong with the environmental governance in the country. Our regulatory bodies are susceptible to manipulation and end up taking the side of industries over that of the people. What is needed in Thoothukudi is a permanent closure of the plant, which has happened, and cleaning up of the district, especially its water resources.

“Reclamation of groundwater is very difficult even though technologies for doing so are available,” says Manish Rahate, a former scientist on water technology at neeri. It requires extraction, treatment and re-pumping of groundwater. This can be quite expensive and long-drawn because it is technologically difficult to decontaminate water sources that have been polluted indiscriminately for a long period. Some of the pollutants have long retention time in water, sometimes running into thousands of years. Treatment will depend upon various factors including the water source (whether it is groundwater or surface water), the volume, depth of the water and the type and amount of chemical in the water. “Groundwater pollution, like what has happened in Thoothukudi, is an irreparable environmental loss to the community,” Rahate adds.

Economics of the production of copper might be a major factor for Sterlite’s reluctance to reduce its pollution and manage waste better. The company needs to keep its production costs low enough to be competitive in the market and, therefore, use other methods to get around regulations. “The punitive measures are not strong enough to ensure that companies are forced to meet the environmental norms. For 20 years we have not been able to take action because it is cheaper for Sterlite to pollute, fight in court and get away with it,” says Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of Delhibased non-profit Centre for Science and Environment. We also need major institutional reforms in our pollution control boards, both in terms of capacity-building and in making them more independent.

“The will of the government and tnpcb to stand by their orders will decide the future of Sterlite If they defend the current evidence, the plant will remain shut. If they are not able to do so then Sterlite will be back in operation,” says Raghuram. “These institutions were designed back in 1974 and need major overhaul. We need pollution control boards that understand the realities of the 21st century,” says Bhushan.

instance, was found almost 20 times the permissible limit in water samples taken from borewells and dugwells. “This was the beginning of a bonanza for neeri. An rti query filed with neeri shows that Sterlite paid the institute R1.27 crore between 1999 and 2007 for preparing eia reports,” says Jayaraman (see ‘Running with Sterlite, hunting with courts’). neeri prepared three eia reports in this duration—in 1999, 2003 and 2005. “None of these were as harsh on the company as the 1998 report, which was conducted on the order of the Madras High Court and for which neeri did not receive any money from Sterlite,” adds Jayaraman.

The judgement in the 1996 case came in September 2010 and the Madras High Court ordered the closure of the plant. Sterlite appealed against the decision in the Supreme Court and got a stay within three days. The Supreme Court again directed neeri to conduct another assessment of the site, which it did and submitted the report in June 2011. Remarkably, in the “Observations” section of the report, neeri stated that it did not find any marker pollutants, like arsenic, zinc and fluoride in the ground water samples it tested, while the data provided in the same study showed that fluorides were in more than permissible levels in six of 12 samples from piezometric wells. In one sample, fluorides were almost twice the permissible limit.

The 2011 report also stated that though neeri had found radon, a radioactive gas, in the range of 5-23 Bq/m3 (Becquerel is a unit of radioactivity) in the vicinity of the plant, there were no national or international standards to compare it with the permissible levels. This is incorrect. The United States Environment Protection Agency’s stipulated level for outdoor radon gas is 14.8 Bq/m3. Radon gas is emitted from the natural radioactive decay of uranium, and copper ores used by Sterlite could also be contaminated with uranium.

The 2011 report also found glaring levels of iron, magnesium, calcium and sulphates around the factory, but rather than give an indictment to help the court pronounce a strict punishment, neeri advised Sterlite to improve the scenario. It even stated that in certain instances the high amounts of pollutants could not be directly attributed to Sterlite. It blamed adjacent industries, like Kilburn Chemicals Ltd, which manufactures titanium oxide, for the high concentration of iron. As a result, the Supreme Court in its 2013 judgement accepted that Sterlite had caused pollution in and around the plant, but did not uphold the Madras High Court’s shutdown order. Instead, it asked the company to pay a R100 crore fine. In the apex court, Sterlite said that neeri and tnpcb had provided it advisories to become a model plant, which it would follow. But Jayaraman says that Sterlite has taken no actions to reduce pollution and the people living around the plant are still suffering.

There is another norm that Sterlite has flouted. In the 2011 neeri report, Sterlite said that its operational area was 102.5 hectares (ha) and that it sought to add another 65 ha to undertake waste management operations. In 2012, a joint inspection