Asia Times: Industry poisons land and water in Gujarat



	December 17, 1999	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Industry poisons land and water in Gujarat
By Laxmi Murthy

ANKLESHWAR, India - To state government officials, a series of sprawling industrial estates stretching 400 kilometers from the busy city of Ahmedabad to Vapi, in western India, is the ''Golden Corridor''.

Here hundreds of small and medium factories manufacturing chemicals, dyes, paints, fertilizer, plastics, pulp and paper, spew untreated wastes into the air and water, poisoning farmland for miles all around.

Yet the Gujarat government is pushing ahead with its infrastructure development plan, Vision 2010, to make the second most urbanized Indian state into a dream destination for business, ignoring its impact on people and the environment.

In Nandesari Village, 220 hectares of fertile agricultural land has been turned into a chemical industrial estate. Ankleshwar, further south in the adjoining Bharuch district, on the Narmada estuary, is Asia's largest chemical zone.

In addition, policy planners have targeted Gujarat's 1,600 km Arabian Sea coastline for port-based industries. Already private investment worth $1.2 billion has been mopped up.

Mega cement plants are coming up on the coast in Kachchh and Saurashtra, while giant refineries of the Reliance and Essar group of industries are under implementation alongside the protected Marine National Park in the Gulf of Kachchh.

The industries' lobby is seeking denotification of the park and its fragile mangroves, through which a proposed pipeline will carry crude oil from Oman to central and north India. A major portion of all future oil imports will arrive through Gujarat's ports. Already oil spills have affected vast stretches of mangrove forests in the Gulf of Kachchh.

''Vision 2010 is far from being a dream. It's a nightmare,'' laments Vijay Prakash Jani, of Janpath, an Ahmedabad-based organization working on environment and community mobilization issues through a network of NGOs in the state.

Gujarat's Vision document glosses over the environmental and ecological concerns or the impact of displacement, from land acquired for industrial estates, on people.

The independent Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti or the Environment Defence Committee have found evidence of severe air, land, and surface and ground water pollution. ''Unbridled exploitation of natural and common property resources has ravaged this area, and some of the damage is irreversible,'' it says.

For industrialists the Golden Corridor is a haven where all rules have been given the go-by by the government.

A majority of the one million workers here are unorganized migrants from the poorer Indian states of Orissa, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, who are ''scared to raise issues of occupational health and safety'', points out Jagdish Patel, a worker.

Patel, who works in a chemical unit in Nandesari, is the founder of the Vyavasaik Swasthya Suraksha Mandal or the Occupational Health and Safety Group in the city of Vadodara, a big industrial center in Gujarat.

''Not only do we suffer from pollution related health problems, there is always the threat of accidents when containers explode, pipes burst, and put our lives at stake,'' says a poorly-paid and equipped worker in Ankleshwar, 340 kilometers north of India's financial capital, Mumbai.

India is one of the few countries still manufacturing the notorious family of chlorinate pesticides, many of which are banned in the industrialized north. Studies by Greenpeace show the effluents contain the most dangerous toxic chemicals known.

In the Golden Corridor multi-coloured hazardous waste lies in heaps on which children play. Discarded chemical drums are also part of their playground, while industrial gases hang in the air, especially in the winter, making breathing difficult.

Most industries here are water intensive - Vision 2010 envisages a high dependence on surface water, primarily from the controversial Sardar Sarovar multi-purpose project on the Narmada river, which has been challenged in India's Supreme Court. The anti-dam people's movement, Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), estimates that industry will claim some one million acre feet of water, although the authorities say the dam is being built to slake the thirst of drought-prone Saurashtra and Kutchch.

Says Shripad Dharmadhikari of the NBA: ''Industrialization in Gujarat is based on the availability of cheap resources. Tribal land was acquired at throwaway rates by the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation and re-sold to industrialists.'' There is no record of how many thousands of people were uprooted, or adequately compensated, by the 170 large and small industrial estates that have sprung up in the Golden Corridor - the densest part of which is between Vadodara and Vapi.

Abundant harvests of cotton, sugarcane, peanuts and wheat are being poisoned by factory wastes. Once-clear streams like the Amlakhadi are now noxious and foul-smelling channels of black sludge which have killed livestock that drank from it.

According to Ashok Rathi of the Vadodara-based Center for Environment, Science and Community (CESCOM), ''Most of these industries have no safe disposal system for toxic wastes, causing grave damage to the riverine ecology.'' A Gujarat High Court order on October 21 this year, in response to a petition by CESCOM, prohibited the dumping of effluents into the Amlakhadi unless they are treated.

Instead the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) has recommended that effluents be disposed in the deep sea - indifferent to what happens to marine life. A 55-kilometer pipeline is under construction at a cost of $3 million, although the National Institute of Oceanography is yet to complete its assessment of the impact on marine life.

Regulatory boards which are the watchdogs on industry appear to be working at cross-purposes in Gujarat. ''There is lack of coordination between NEERI, Gujarat Pollution Control Board, Gujarat Water Supply and Sewerage Board and Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation,'' says Rohit Prajapati, an activist.

Vision 2010 is the government's blue-print for industrial development. But at what cost to people's livelihoods, health and the environment?

(Inter Press Service)