HEALTH-INDIA: Critics Demand Tough Action on Asbestos Use

By Sujoy Dhar Reprint | | Print |

Sujoy Dhar

KOLKATA, India, Nov 4 2001 (IPS) - Once a robust member of India’s defence personnel, 65-year-old Anil Haldar now has a face which is badly deformed and a body that shakes violently during his frequent fits of coughing.

Halder, who lives in a Laxmikantapur village of West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district, some 50 km from this eastern Indian port city, has cancer of the mouth and throat.

Haldar, the left side of whose face had to be operated on by doctors at the Thakurpur Cancer Hospital her, is not alone. Some of his neighbours too are afflicted and a visitor might encounter many scarred, weak elderly people in this area.

According to Kalyaneswari, a non-governmental group working for better living conditions, Haldar is a victim of asbestos poisoning, a menace that in the United States alone has claimed 2,000,000 lives in this century as per World Health Organisation (WHO) reports.

In many areas of rural Bengal, drinking water is supplied to households through asbestos cement pressure pipes – and this, Kalyaneswari says, is a highly carcinogenic process.

“While researching the cause of water contamination in rural Bengal, we identified that most incidents of contamination have occurred in areas where these pipes are used. It is well known that such products are highly carcinogenic, causing painful deaths,” says Sudam Mitra, an environmental activist with Kalyaneshwari.

The World Health Organisation in 1996 recommended that asbestos should be replaced by harmless substitutes,” he adds.

The Supreme Court of India too has passed an order declaring asbestos and products containing asbestos to be harmful substances and issued directives on their use.

“Despite these recommendations of world bodies as well as our apex court, the Government of West Bengal through different corporations, municipalities and the public health engineering department are supplying potable water through these carcinogenic pipes,” Mitra says.

But the health department in West Bengal differs. “Laying of poor quality pipes leading to contamination or health hazard can be a possibility. In that case, the affected pipelines should be repaired. But we rule out that the intake of water through asbestos pipes can cause cancer. Asbestos can cause cancer when inhaled and not when injected,” a government engineer says.

“The pipes are taken only from manufacturers who have Bureau of Indian Standard (BIS) certificate. There is always a third party inspection,” he adds.

But according to the contractor who received the work order for laying the pipelines in Laxmikantapur, where victims like Haldar live, there was no sign of BIS approval or certification on the pipes used in the area.

Pathology laboratories in the vicinity of Laxmikantapur admitted that the water supplied by the government has a dark yellow tinge and carries heavy sediment.

According to Kalyaneswari, samples of water from broken asbestos pipes were sent to the National Test House in Kolkata and the tests corroborated the presence of asbestos particles.

“Asbestos should be banned forthwith,” says lawyer M C Mehta, the green activist who won the Ramon Magsaysay award, Asia’s version of the Nobel prize, and is at the forefront of the anti-asbestos campaign.

“It is an environmental hazard that in one form or another confronts every community in the nation. It has been silently responsible for over 2,000,000 deaths in the US alone. It will cause millions more deaths worldwide,” Mehta says.

But asbestos manufacturing companies disagree. “It has been proved now that in the United States, the cancer cases were not due to asbestos but owing to other reasons. That is a wrong information. And anyway our industry is sinking, and so all these activism is not going affect us in any new way, ” says Sumit Agarwal, owner of an asbestos product manufacturing company.

According to Mehta, Canada’s asbestos-exporting lobby has been organising seminars in India to inform people that asbestos is safe and eco-friendly (both the technology and the product) by citing WHO drinking water guidelines of 1993.

WHO Health Criteria 203 of 1998 confirms that exposure to chrysotile asbestos poses increased risks for asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma in a dose dependent manner. The WHO Health Criteria also says: “No threshold has been identified for carcinogenic risks and where safer substitute materials are available for chrysotile, they should be considered for use.”

According to Mehta, the asbestos lobby explains that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1991 did not classify asbestos as a carcinogen because it determined that it is carcinogenic only when inhaled, not ingested.

Even then, Mehta adds, the fact is that the United States does not use asbestos products for the simple reason that all asbestos companies have gone bankrupt, after paying 600 million dollars in damages in health problems caused to workers exposed to it.

“In the last ten years, no advertisement on asbestos products have appeared in any newspaper or magazine — new use of asbestos has almost disappeared in the United States and other industrialised countries because of government regulations and market pressure,” he points out.

“The main target of Canada’s drive (on asbestos) has been developing countries. Seven of Canada’s top 10 markets are in the Third World,” Mehta points out.

According to Mehta, the main target of asbestos producing countries like Canada, Brazil and Zimbabwe has been diverted to the developing countries like India, Thailand and Korea. The increase in the use of asbestos in the developing countries like India, is about 7 percent per annum.

“Strangely enough, when all other countries are banning asbestos, the government of India is promoting the business of asbestos by reducing customs duties,” he explains.

According to him, despite Indian Standards on Precaution against Asbestos and the Supreme Court judgement of January 1995, these provisions are not being implemented.

“It is high time that the government of India should ban this deadly carcinogen. It is more so justifiable as all asbestos-based products have technically superior and commercially comparable substitutes. Otherwise, the life of millions of Indians will be at stake. Now the choice stands between human life and asbestos,” Mehta says.

The development commissioner for iron and steel and chairman of Joint Plant Committee of the Union government, R K Prasannan, says the panel is now studying the alleged side effects of asbestos and trying to replace asbestos products with steel materials.