By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 25 2004 (IPS)

If the Indian government carries out a threat to disconnect electricity and water supplies to 16,500 polluting industrial units in Delhi, it will be the first major attempt to enforce the ”polluter pays principle” in this country.

Delhi’s Commissioner of Industries Jalaj Srivastav insists that the industries cough up 50 percent of the estimated 640 million U.S. dollars it will cost to set up 15 common effluent treatment plants (CETPs) in Delhi state, which houses the national capital.

The industries are bound to pay up under the CETP Act of 2000, but claim that they were not consulted on the costs or design of the plants.

”The CETP Act gives a key role to the participating industries but we are being kept in the dark while the government goes on building the effluent treatment plants which are nothing but white elephants,” S K Tandon, general secretary of the Confederation of Delhi Industries, told IPS in an interview.

Srivastav disagrees with that interpretation and said that work on constructing the CETPs had begun even before the act came into being in November 2000. ”It was therefore impossible to involve the industries in the awarding of the contracts,” he said.

While the dispute continues over who picks up the tab for effluent treatment and how much of it, environmentalists warn of the continuing deterioration of the environment around New Delhi, home to 14 million people. Last year, the environmental group Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) proved that groundwater contaminated with pesticides and toxic effluents was finding its way into bottled ‘mineral’ water and into colas marketed by big brand names such as Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

Studies conducted by various government agencies have shown that unacceptably high levels of industrial effluents are seeping into groundwater aquifers or end up in the waters of the snow-fed Yamuna river, which flows through the capital.

Environmentalist R K Pachauri, chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, believes that in all probability, no river of greater purity has been damaged to a greater extent by a small group of people.

Pachauri is among those who have been calling for efforts to restore the Yamuna to its pristine glory through special campaigns that include better pollution control regimes. However, these have been thwarted by the industrialists’ lobby.

The first real breakthrough came in May 2000, when the Supreme Court stepped in to ban factories from discharging untreated industrial effluents into the Yamuna river. It based its order on alarming reports from the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). But the implementation of the court’s order and the CETP Act that followed has been difficult, not least because it threatened unemployment for thousands of workers and brought financial losses to the owners of industrial units.

The 20-kilometre stretch of the Yamuna within Delhi state accounts for at least 70 percent of the pollution in its waters, the CPCB said in its reports. These also point to thousands of small engineering units, textile industries, detergent makers and auto component factories that pollute the river.

Delhi, which was originally intended to be the country’s administrative centre, turned into an industrial one because of easy access to the dispensers of licences in the bureaucracy.

But the haphazard growth that resulted quickly turned many of its areas into a hellish nightmare of polluting factories that include electro-plating units, battery recyclers and leather tanneries – all draining their effluents through makeshift drains into the Yamuna.

Environmentalist M C Mehta, who moved the Supreme Court to take action through public-interest litigation, has blamed the mess on ”corrupt officials who have violated every environmental law”.

Mehta pointed out that many of the units – actually illegal – resorted to stealing electricity and avoiding taxes in order to make profits. But the government has been loathe to shut them down for fear of increasing unemployment.

Industrial and domestic pollution has been steadily choking India’s lakes, rivers, estuaries and groundwater sources. Surveys conducted by the CPCB as early as 10 years ago showed that aquifers across India had become contaminated with industrial effluents and pesticides.

The Yamuna is not only contaminated by industrial effluents, but also by raw, untreated sewage and by pesticide contamination from the farming state of Haryana upstream of Delhi. The extent of damage is such that large stretches of it no longer support fish and aquatic life.

If Delhi’s industrial units are brought to heel and made to contribute their fair share of the costs of cleaning up their own effluents, this is bound to strengthen environmental policy around the country, experts say.

According to Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) researcher Chandra Bhushan, the government’s drive to boost Gross Domestic Product growth rate to eight percent a year calls for a 10 percent growth rate in the industrial sector – and this cannot be a ”pollution-neutral one”.

Bhushan said the government’s regulatory mechanisms, as they stand, are either weak or non-existent.

”Industry today guzzles resources and pollutes freely because it can do so,” he explained. ”What might happen in the future is such a scenario persists is too frightening to even imagine.”

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