DEVELOPMENT-INDIA: Thousands of Jobless Workers Question Green Concerns

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 29 2000 (IPS) - For the past month, Mahendra Goyal has been at his wits end, trying to think of ways of supporting his family, which lives in a congested low-income quarter in the Indian capital.

The middle-aged man is one of the tens of thousands of workers who have been jobless ever since authorities began shutting down thousands of small polluting industrial units in Delhi under orders from the country’s apex court.

“I don’t know how I and my family will survive,” says Goyal who has four children. He worked in a small plastic moulding factory, which was shut down by officials who came to the unit with the police to force the closure.

Thousands of low-income households in the capital city are facing the same dilemma. Their cause has been taken up by influential people, including the provincial government of Delhi state, which includes the national capital.

The provincial government is complaining that the apex court has gone too far with its concern for environmental protection, which will snatch away the livelihood of some two million people.

In November 1999, authorities were ordered by the court not to delay in complying with its four-year-old order to remove thousands of polluting and hazardous industrial units from the capital.

The action then led to large-scale violence by mobs of angry workers backed by their employers, which paralysed life in the capital for nearly a week. Some 100,000 small industrial units are to be relocated according to the court’s orders.

These units make an assortment of electrical parts, automobile accessories and household goods. Most of these are located within residential areas of the capital and are considered to be a serious environmental and public health hazard.

Pollution control laws are rarely enforced in India and in recent years the country’s apex court has been compelling the government to ensure compliance.

However, the chief minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit has opposed the closure saying the small units together generated business worth more than one billion U.S. dollars annually and provided employment to millions of people.

But even powerful politicians are finding themselves unable to help the jobless workers in the face of the Supreme Court orders.

“The massive police action against small and household industries in Delhi in the garb of removing pollution and implementing Supreme Court orders is a human rights disaster,” says Ambrose Pinto of the New Delhi-based ‘Indian Social Institute’.

Non-governmental groups are gearing up to take the cause of the workers. They will hold a public meeting early January to decide on a course of action for the “defence of the rights and livelihoods of the people of Delhi,” says Pinto.

“Most of the units that are being shut are in fact non- polluting and their owners and workers now face destitution or criminalisation,” he says.

Critics of the closure say that the court’s order to relocate the polluting factories outside Delhi will not work. They give the example of the relocation from Delhi — also under the Supreme Court’s orders — four year ago of several large textile, steel and edible oil mills.

The action made some 50,000 people jobless. While the owners of these large units gained from selling the factory land located in prime residential areas, the workers were left in the lurch with meagre compensations, which in most cases were never paid.

However, industrial chambers are supporting the closure. “The crux of the issue is environment and if a unit is polluting, say with cyanide dyes, there is no way you can defend it,” says K.P. Nayati, who heads the environmental division of the influential Confederation of Indian Industry.

Famous Indian environmentalist Anil Aggarwal blames the government for actively promoting small-scale industries without thinking of the environmental implications.

“The government ignored the pollution potential of the low- grade technology, small sector and allowed notoriously dirty industries like leather tanning, electroplating and textile dyeing to come up by the hundreds, making it impossible for any kind of regulatory system to work satisfactorily,” he says.

According to Aggarwal, the owners of small industrial units have shown no interest in working together to make their factories cleaner by using common effluent treatment plants.