Children with congenital disorders linked to the Bhopal gas leak gather at a candlelight vigil. Credit: Chingari Trust

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Jan 11 2015 (IPS)

Three decades after 40 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited plant in the central Indian city of Bhopal on Dec. 3, 1984 – killing an estimated 4,000 almost instantly and maiming and blinding hundreds of thousands of others – the world’s worst industrial disaster remains a sharp lesson on the need for greater safety regulations in Asia’s third-largest economy.

Thirty years on, thousands of children in Bhopal, capital of the state of Madhya Pradesh, as well as in adjoining regions, are still being born with twisted limbs and other physical and mental disabilities caused by their parents’ exposure to the gas.

"Even if we have not seen […] another horrific human tragedy like on the night of Dec. 3, 1984, the country continues to have many mini-Bhopals – industrial accidents, which take lives and throw up a huge challenge of hazardous waste contamination.” -- Sunita Narain, director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)
The poisonous vapours, which leached far into the soil and groundwater over the years, are still killing those victims who are too poor to move elsewhere.

“No consolidated record exists to show how many people are still suffering. As a result, even after the government paid compensation – however little – to more than half a million victims, fresh claims are still pouring in,” the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) said in a book published last month.

According to Amnesty International, about 350,000 kg of toxic waste still covers the Union Carbide factory site. In 2009, 25 years after the tragedy, CSE conducted an independent assessment and found high levels of contamination in the soil and groundwater at the Union Carbide factory site and its adjoining areas.

In 2013, the centre collaborated with experts from across the country to develop a five-year action plan aimed at remediation of soil and toxic waste inside the plant and decontamination of the groundwater in the nearby area.

Intriguingly, even as the disaster continues to spawn books, movies and debates on corporate liability and poor safety regulations in Indian industries, the country’s ability to tackle a similar fiasco is still seriously in question.

“Post-Bhopal, India improved its legislations for chemical industrial disasters and worker safety, but it is still an unfinished business,” Sunita Narain, director-general of CSE, said at the book’s launch.

“Even if we have not seen […] another horrific human tragedy like on the night of Dec. 3, 1984, the country continues to have many mini-Bhopals – industrial accidents, which take lives and throw up a huge challenge of hazardous waste contamination.”

Several experts who spoke with IPS said that while the government has displayed alacrity in setting up sundry committees to assess the damage and recommend safeguards, mishaps continue to wreak havoc in the country’s mines and factories.

The problem is compounded by a lax regulatory environment, and entrenched corruption. As a result, predict economists, exponential growth in Asia’s third largest economy, home to over 1.2 billion people, will continue to come at a significant cost to the environment and human safety.

This is ironic as corporate law experts emphasize that India has one of the most complex and comprehensive laws on industrial safety.

For instance, safety audits are now mandatory in all factories storing hazardous chemicals over a certain threshold.

The Factories Act appoints site appraisal committees to advise on the location of factories using hazardous processes and suggests emergency disaster control plans for workers and local residents.

The Chemical Accidents Rules 1996 was introduced to ensure better safety standards while the Factories Act was remodelled to appoint an “occupier”, from the company’s top management, who would be totally responsible for a mishap, according to risk management consultant B. Karthikeyan

“However, the most significant piece of legislation to be introduced in the aftermath of Bhopal was the Environment Protection Act (EPA) of 1986, which empowers the [Central government] to issue direct orders to close, prohibit or regulate any violating industry,” explains Gita Sareen, a Mumbai-based corporate lawyer.

“The umbrella legislation also implements the mandate of the United Nations Conference on Human Environment to protect and improve the human environment and prevent hazards to human beings and other living creatures,” she told IPS.

But the gap between promises and practices is huge. Health facilities at most factories are still not up to scratch and violators are rarely punished. According to CSE’s records, in 2011 over 1,000 people lost their lives in factory accidents across India and several thousand were injured.

Contamination of land and water is also a growing problem. In 2010, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests identified 10 toxic sites housing thousands of tonnes of hazardous waste.

“The worst part is that despite so much brouhaha, the site of the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal has still not been cleared of the toxic waste. Various parties are squabbling over how to clean the site, what should be done with the waste and who should pay for it even as the pollution continues to wreak havoc and engulf more areas,” Chandra Bhushan, deputy director at CSE, told IPS.

And while safety consciousness and compliance have improved somewhat in the organised sector involving large corporations due to their corporate image, the unorganised sector is still messy.

“Fire in cracker factories [and] repeated mishaps in acid factories are rampant [and] point to the need for greater surveillance in this sector,” he added. “The crux of the problem is that ‘safety’ still hasn’t become a culture in India unlike the West.”

According to Dr. Shashank Shekhar, a professor with the department of geology at Delhi University, industries continue to pollute, their rampant discharge of industrial effluents being the single biggest reason for water contamination and ill-health of millions of people in India.

In a study he co-authored, Shekhar points out how groundwater across the country is contaminated with cancer-inducing lead, and cadmium, as well as other hazardous materials such as arsenic, nitrate, manganese and iron.

“Heavy metals even in small quantities dissolved in water are highly toxic for a human body and can cause irreparable damage,” the scholar told IPS. “Yet the problem remains unchecked.”

Another problem, point out legal experts, is that in India, the processes for environmental impact assessments (EIA) are flawed.

“The country needs a thorough overhaul of these processes to ensure that there’s objectivity and due diligence involved in the exercise. Currently, industries hire independent assessors for EIA and pay for it from their own pocket. Naturally, the supervisor who is getting paid by the company for the audit will tend to favour his employer and not be impartial in his report,” explains Shekhar.

Rather than adding to the avalanche of existing laws, what will be more effective, say experts, is to have stricter execution of regulations.

Social audits by local citizens’ groups around polluting factories and a transparent remediation process involving stakeholders like the local affected community will produce far better results, suggests Bhushan.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

An Indian farmer points to his modest plot of farmland, which no longer yields enough to feed his family. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 6 2014 (IPS)

Ramanjareyulu, a 55-year-old farmer from the southern India state of Andhra Pradesh, has been struggling to find his feet ever since inadequate rainfall dealt a blow to his harvest of groundnut and red gram (a pulse crop that grows primarily in India).

A man who once sustained his family of five off his small patch of farmland, Ramanjareyulu now finds himself in abject poverty, and is considering joining a massive exodus of farmers heading for the big cities like Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad in the hopes of finding work as unskilled labourers.

“I don’t know why nature is so unkind to us,” the desperate farmer told IPS.

Dr. Y. V. Malla Reddy, director of the Bangalore-based Accion Fraterna Ecology Centre, which works with farmers in the region, has the answer to that question and is quick to articulate it: climate change.

"How do we adapt to disasters like [...] flash floods, to drought, to unseasonal rains, to multiple cyclones - all of which occurred in 2013-2014?" -- Chandra Bhusan, deputy director-general of the Centre for Science and Environment
“The farmers are now living in dire straits,” he told IPS. “Of the nearly 700,000 farmers in Anantapur [the largest district in Andhra Pradesh], 500,000 are in this situation due to a drastic reduction in the number of rainy days per year.”

All across India, similar warning signs indicate that the country is on a dangerous trajectory. From the disappearing Sundarbans (the largest single bloc of mangrove forest in the world situated in the Bay of Bengal), to the vast tracts of parched farmland in southern, western and northern India, to the plight of all those caught in the disaster-struck Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, extreme weather is taking its toll.

With carbon emissions increasing by 7.7 percent in 2012 – and CO2 emissions from coal plants shooting up by 10.2 percent that same year – the country seems to be contributing towards its own demise.

And the “worst is yet to come”, according to a report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found that the highly fertile Indo-Gangetic plains are under threat of a significant reduction in wheat yields.

Currently the area produces 90 million tons of grain annually, accounting for nearly 15 percent of global wheat production, but projections indicate a nearly 51 percent decrease in the highest yielding areas due to hotter temperatures.

Such a scenario could be disastrous for the roughly 200 million residents of the plains, whose food intake is dependent on harvests, experts say.

India is also one of the 27 countries that are “most vulnerable” to sea level rise caused by global warming.

According to the Geological Survey of India, a one-metre rise in sea level is expected to inundate about 1,000 square kilometres of the Sundarbans delta.

Nearly half of the 102 islands that comprise the U.N.-protected biosphere reserve have become uninhabitable due to rising seas and coastal erosion over the last four decades.

About a fifth of the southern part of this delta complex, the heart of a major tiger reserve, is already submerged. At the current rate of erosion, scientists are predicting a loss of 15 percent of farmlands and a further 250 square km of the national park.

Increased soil salinity has resulted in miserable agricultural yields and thousands of climate refugees.

Another major red flag for India was last year’s Uttarakhand tragedy, when cloudbursts and glacial leaks caused a flash flood that swept away thousands of pilgrims and tourists in the northern state in what scientists called a ‘Himalayan tsunami’.

International legislation

Against this backdrop, Indian lawmakers are joining some 500 delegates descending on Mexico City on Jun. 6-8 for the second World Summit of Legislators organised by GLOBE International for the purpose of drafting an international climate agreement centered on national legislation.

India Ready for ‘Robust’ Stand on Climate Change from IPS News on Vimeo.

According to Pranav Chandan Sinha, director of GLOBE India, the Indian public is waking up to the realities of climate change, thus pushing the government to seek a balance between development and environmental protection.

Sinha told IPS the new government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has an absolute majority in parliament, is likely to pursue sustainable development goals, in line with GLOBE International’s emphasis on the importance of wealth accounting, valuation of ecosystem services and legislative reforms.

Ever since the Uttarakhand disaster, for instance, GLOBE India has been engaging legislators from various states, particularly in the north, on the need for legislative reforms and combined efforts to tackle climate change.

The purpose of forums like the summit currently underway in Mexico “is not only to educate but to demystify international negotiations on environment, sustainability and climate change and communicate them at the national and state level,” Jayanat Chaudhary, former Indian parliament member and founder of GLOBE India, told IPS.

Although these meetings cannot hope to generate binding action, they serve to inform lawmakers who can push their respective governments to take a more robust stand on issues like emissions targets, said Chandra Bhusan, deputy director-general of the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, India’s leading green pressure group.

Bhusan says India has to meet multiple challenges on the climate change front, particularly due to the centralisation of power that stymies action on a local level.

“One challenge is adaptation itself,” he told IPS. “How do we adapt to disasters like the Uttarakhand flash floods, to drought, to unseasonal rains, to multiple cyclones – all of which occurred in 2013-2014. This has been a period of extreme weather and we have to adapt to the variability,” he asserted.

“There is an energy challenge too. About 800 million people in India still cook on cow dung and firewood stoves. So we need clean energy for all and we cannot say we will not do anything,” Bhusan added.

Still, the forecast is not entirely bleak, with various local governments taking some positive steps towards accountability and sustainability.

Uttarakhand, for instance, recently became the first state in India to start tabulating its gross environment product (GEP) – a measure of the health of the state’s natural resources – to be released annually alongside its GDP figures.

In partnership with Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Economic Systems (WAVES), the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh has begun tabulating costs of timber, water and minerals.

A 2013 report entitled Green National Accounts in India also spells out the Union Government’s plans to include the value of natural resources in its annual economic calculations.

Green activists say these positive steps give India a stronger voice in the international arena, which it should use to press polluting western nations for a binding agreement on carbon emissions.

(END)

The Indian Defence Force rescues a pilgrim after the floods in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Sujoy Dhar/IPS

By Sujoy Dhar
NEW DELHI, Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

On the outskirts of Rudraprayag, a town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand whose many temples draw tourists and Hindu pilgrims with magnetic force, visitors often stop for a meal at a popular hotel built right on the river Alakananda.

One of the two head streams of the Ganga, the holy lifeline of India that gushes from the Gomukh snout of the massive Gangotri glacier in the Himalayas, Alakananda is revered as a goddess.

A night in the hotel is cheap, and budget tourists from home and abroad come here for the breathtaking view from balconies overlooking the mountains and glaciers that comprise 90 percent of the state.

As idyllic as it sounds, this hotel unwittingly played a role in one of the worst natural disasters the state has ever seen when, on Jun. 15, flash floods caused by a cloudburst and glacial leaks swept thousands of unsuspecting pilgrims away in what scientists are now referring to as a ‘Himalayan tsunami’.

The state’s chief minister said Thursday that the death toll could exceed 1,000, with 300 bodies found just this morning buried beneath silt beside the largest temple in the town of Kedarnath.

Countless tourists were trapped for days in pitiable conditions until the Indian Defence Force came to their rescue in one aerial sortie after another.

Thousands are still missing and many towns and pilgrimage sites remain inaccessible, as the raging waters carried away whole strips of roads, along with homes, shops and hapless victims.

As the government scrambles to complete a haphazard rescue operation, environmentalists are taking a step back, pointing out that the disaster was not simply a freak natural hazard but a result of unbridled development in the Land of the Gods.

Hydropower projects 

For years, a booming tourist industry, made possible by thousands of illegally constructed guesthouses, has spawned massive hydroelectric power projects on the rivers, while other infrastructure development designed to accommodate hoards of visitors has proceeded at a steady clip, putting undue stress on this fragile ecological zone.

Scientists also say the damming of the Ganga, riverbed encroachment and mining activities are wreaking havoc on the region.

“There (have been) no credible environmental or social impact assessments for hundreds of projects,” Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, tells IPS.

According to Mallika Bhanot, member of Ganga Ahvaan, a public forum to save the holy river, about 244 dams are being constructed along the water channel, while only three were cancelled after a 100-km stretch, from the glacial mouth of Gomukh to Uttarkashi town, was declared an eco-sensitive zone (ESZ) in December 2012.

“Even that notification by the government in New Delhi has been opposed by the Uttarakhand government,” Bhanot tells IPS, despite the fact that it was designed after a thorough assessment of the topography, and with the intention of preserving human lives in a landslide-prone zone.

Frightening footage of the recent disaster captured multi-storey buildings collapsing into the river like a pack of cards, while cars, bridges and shops were easily swept into the vortex. Activists say all of this could have been prevented if the state government had heeded the call to cease construction and encroachment on the riverbed.

The New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has also traced the link between the disaster and the manner in which development has been carried out in this unique region.

Acknowledging the economic importance of energy generation, CSE Director-General Sunita Narain questions whether or not “the Central or state government ever considered the cumulative impact of the hydropower projects on the rivers and the mountains.”

“Currently, there are roughly 70 projects built or (slated to be built) on the Ganga, expected to generate some 10,000 megawatts (MW) of power,” she told IPS.

She referred to this model as “bumper to bumper development”, with one project immediately following another.

Diversion channels and reservoirs will affect 80 percent of the Bhagirathi, the Ganga’s second head stream, and 65 percent of the Alakananda, Narain stressed. During the dry season, large stretches of the river will be completely dry.

Such activities, she said, are fantastically lucrative for developers, making it next to impossible for small environmental groups to have their voices heard.

“There is a strong construction lobby in Uttarakhand,” said Bhanot, adding that many politicians’ election funds come directly from hydropower projects.

Green alternatives abound, including electricity generation using smoke from burning pine needles to propel turbines; biomass; or mini hydro plants, capable of generating two MW of power. But these, less profitable schemes do not sit well with corporations.

Narain says this particular disaster cannot be attributed solely to climate change, but the growing trend of intense and extreme weather events – particularly a heavier, more unpredictable monsoon – is undeniable.

With climate change widely acknowledged to be the result of the burning of fossil fuels and emission of excessive carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it is clear that the ongoing tragedy is human-induced, Thakkar said.

The glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) that poured down the mountains bringing boulders and rocks is just another sign that the delicate balance of nature’s forces has been disrupted – and Uttarakhand is paying the price.

Regulation required

Tourism may form the backbone of Uttarakhand’s economy, but it is now clear that visitors and pilgrims number too many: according to government data, 42.2 million domestic tourists and 227,000 foreigners flocked to Uttarakhand in 2012.

Those numbers are expected to double by 2017, with the state gearing up to welcome 77.7 million domestic travelers and nearly 400,000 foreigners.

These arrivals will be accompanied not only by increased human waste and pollution from transport, but also by endless construction of hotels and the justification of ever more mega development projects.

Experts like Thakkar insist that the sector be regulated based on a proper scientific assessment of the region.

This will not be easy, since tourism brings much-needed revenue to the state. The government estimates that each tourist spends an average of 38 dollars a day, much of which goes directly to the government via entrance fees for religious sites.

But while this income from “religious and cultural tourism is a lifeline for many, it will not be sustainable…(unless) all development activities take into account the vulnerability of the area,” Thakkar says.

The youngest mountain range in the world, the Himalayas are already prone to erosion, landslides and seismic activity.

“Development cannot come at the cost of the environment in any region of the country; but particularly not in the Himalayas,” Narain stressed.