INDIA intends to increase the share of nuclear power from 3.1 per cent of its total energy generation to 25 per cent by 2050. Six nuclear power reactors are under construction and eight are in the pipeline. While the country plans to expand mining of uranium to feed the reactors, a yet-to-be-released study by the environmental group “Toxics Link” pointed out that it lacked knowledge about handling nuclear waste; the existing uranium mines do not follow requisite safety methods.

Most uranium is mined in Jadugoda in East Singhbum district and three other places in Jharkhand. The ore in Indian mines contains a low percentage (0.042-0.051 per cent) of the mineral, except in Meghalaya. The problem with low-grade ore is that extracting a small amount of concentrated uranium generates a large amount of waste. The ore grade is high in Meghalaya but an onslaught of rains makes the terrain almost inaccessible for six months in a year.

The Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) plans to invest about Rs 31 billion to set up new mines and processing plants in Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh and Meghalaya as part of the eleventh plan. “The proposed mine at Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh involves extraction of 3,000 tonnes of uranium per day from underground mines spread over 879 hectares,” said the study done from August to November. Quoting members of the non-profit Mines, Minerals and People, the study said for a uranium concentration of 0.039 per cent, the waste to be disposed of would amount to nearly a million tonnes per year.

The waste rock generated by uranium mining contains a significant amount of radioactivity.

“No inventory seems to have been maintained on how this radioactive waste is utilized and where it has gone.”

said Upasana Choudhry, the key researcher of the study. This waste was reportedly given to people for construction of houses and roads, but that has officially stopped now.

Processing the ore generates slurry called tailings. In Jadugoda, waste ponds in which these tailings are dumped as well as tailing pipes that occasionally burst are occupational hazards. A tailing pipe burst on August 16, 2008, near the Dugridih village in Jadugoda, spewing it with uranium waste.

Nuclear waste management practices in India are governed by the Atomic Energy Act 1962, which states that there should be no human settlement within five kilometres of a waste site or uranium tailing pond. “Even though Jadugoda has been in operation for more than 30 years, seven villages are within one-and-a-half kilometres of the danger zone. Dugridih begins just 40 metres away,” it added.

“UCIL mines at Jadugoda makes use of a ‘revolving door’ contractor arrangement, whereby workers are dismissed as soon as they show signs of increased radiation doses,” the study said, quoting the non-profit Jharkhandi Organisation Against Radiation. The organization works with tribals in the seven villages near the tailing pipes.

According to a survey conducted in 1999 by the organization in the seven villages, 47 per cent of the women respondents reported disruptions in menstrual cycle, 18 per cent said they had suffered miscarriages or given birth to stillborn babies in the past five years, 30 per cent reported fertility problems and nearly all women complained of fatigue, weakness and depression. “The most visible impact of the mine has been deformed children,” the survey said.

When her husband took chronically ill after communal riots drove them to Juhapura, a ghetto on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, poverty made life seem unmanageable. Free will then became a matter of Rs 8,000 for 40-year-old Zainab Bi. For a sum like that she was willing to swallow an unknown pill once in three months. It wasn’t much they were asking for really, so she gladly gave her thumb impression on the dotted line.

For companies researching new drugs the thumb impression was proof that Bi submitted herself to the experiment of her own free will. It was far more expensive to have such proof in countries where the multinational drug companies that sponsored the research had their headquarters. They were far more cumbersome, involved lengthy documentation and rigorous insurance plans. Clinical research organizations (cros) made the task far easier for these companies by carrying out their research in the ghettoes of India’s big cities. Drug trial was far less daunting; and inexpensive. People were more than willing to offer their bodies for bio-chemical experimentation. The official guidelines warned against monetary inducement.

It took Bi, and so many like her in Juhapura, only moments to make up their mind when a woman agent from a newly opened cros, Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd, approached them for participation. She explained they would be required to take newly developed drugs for diseases like malaria, chikungunya, hiv/aids even. The agent spoke of possible risks, side effects and what not. Not all of it made sense to Bi. What did sink in was that she was going to be paid Rs 8000 for some new medicine that could cure hiv/aids. She had heard of this disease in radio messages.

In the beginning, Juhapura’s women were not sure how they would get their family’s permission to spend a night, or may be two, at the clinical research lab on the national highway not far from their slum area. When they learnt they were going to be paid between Rs 4,000 and Rs 10,000 the deal was too sweet to resist. The family could not afford to object either.

The transition from the city centre, where they earlier lived, to Juhapura made economic refugees of most people living here. Before the riots many of the 5 lakh inhabitants of Ahmedabad’s largest Muslim ghetto lived in thriving bustling areas like Naroda Patiya, Gulbarg Society, Vatwa. But Juhapura was a world apart, where the community was both the consumer and the vendor. The tailors, vegetable and meat sellers, small time hair-dressers and watch repairers that practised their trade sold services and products to one another. The vibrant market of the city centre was absent here.

Naturally therefore, if a tailor was making Rs 200 a day in Naroda Patiya, he could barely manage Rs 50 a day in Juhapura, said Noorjahan, community leader attached to a group ambitiously called Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, Indian Muslim women’s movement. Once Bi’s husband fell chronically ill, it was hand to mouth for the couple and their four children. Under the circumstances, nitpicking over side  effects and other safety issues was a luxury. Rs 8000 was what mattered most.

Did they not worry at all? Jannat Bibi said she had heard they were tested for drugs for diabetes, asthma, cancer and even neurological disorders. Noorjahan said some women did complain of stomach problems and rashes on the body. Bi, who has been doing this for three years, said there was no reason for worry. “It is perfectly safe. I haven’t had a single problem in all these years.”

“…All eyes are on the women after a paper printed their photos. But what can they do? Going for these trials is their main source of income” NOORJAHAN, Community leader

Exposé leads to gossip

The problem Bi and her co-travellers in clinical trials faced was of a very different nature and not anticipated by any of the 300-odd women who made an occasional windfall by offering to participate in drug trials. In June this year an Ahmedabad Gujrati daily published an article on clinical drug trial and reported how multinationals made guinea pigs of the city’s poor; the article carried photographs of the Juhapura women with their names. In the uproar that followed, the women became the subject of gossip and criticism for venturing in the night to experiment with unknown drugs. Embarrassed by the fingers pointed at them, 55-year-old Amiya Bano’s son and daughter-in-law made her leave the house.

“These women are angry with me for bringing the newspaper reporter here. They are troubled because all eyes are on them now. But what can they do? Going for these trials is the main source of income for their families,”

said Noorjahan.

The trial

The drug trials were indeed a bit like Kafka’s trial for these women. They were not very clear, like the protagonist in the novel, what they were being tried for. Nor were they sure who was behind the trial. “They make us stay overnight, take our blood samples and then we have to take the pill next morning. We are not supposed to seek remedies anywhere else but the company if some ailment crops up,” said Bi.

So far nothing dramatic has taken place, said Noorjahan. But who can tell what manifestations will show up may be years later? And links between cause and any devastating side-effect will be lost in the hurly burly of India’s ghettoes, where clinical trials are gaining popularity as a livelihood option.

India offered just the perfect setting and plenty of business sense for conducting clinical trials. The subjects and patients who could be recruited at low cost made India a favourite destination for global pharma companies like Pfizer, GlaxoSmithkline, BristolMyers, and others. Add a technically competent workforce and a friendly drug control system and the clinical trial business was set to touch us $1 billion by 2010, up from us $200 million in 2007, estimated India’s Associated Chambers of Commerce and  Industry.

The drug regime would become even friendlier when regulations proposed by the Drugs Controller General of India were formalized; this was likely to be soon. The proposed regulations recommended phase i trials that tested safety and tolerability of a dosage of drugs developed outside India be allowed if the manufacturing company collaborated with an Indian one. At present India allowed phase i trials only for drugs formulated in India and drugs to treat hiv or cancer.

However, phase ii and iii trials for drugs formulated abroad were allowed in the country as they had already been tested safe. Phase ii trials checked the efficacy and side effects of a drug while phase iii trials confirmed its benefits and side effects on a wider sample. “Phase i and ii are the most dangerous stages of clinical trials in human beings.

Opening the doors to these trials will only increase exploitation of the poor. Why should we allow phase i trials of medicines which may not even be used in India and even if they are, it will only be the richer sections that will benefit,” said a public health activist.  “If these trials were for diseases that affected the masses, like tuberculosis and kala azaar (leishmaniasis), then we could support them as the result was going back to them and not feed corporate interest,” said Mira Shiva, chairperson of the ngo Health Action International, Asia Pacific.

An official of the cro, Lambda, was upbeat about the proposed regulations “This will only benefit the community. Even if the mncs do not share their intellectual property now, they will eventually have to come to India to market the drugs.”

The pharma giants collaborated with an Indian research agency for clinical trials that did the job for them at dirt-cheap rates, said a senior sales manager of a leading Ahmedabad based pharma company. In 2005, the government also passed the Patents (Amendment) Act, which assured protection of patents held by foreign companies, thus encouraging them to conduct trials in India. If and when something did go wrong, there was no punitive mechanism. “It is a long chain where work has been sourced down from the company to a clinical research organization to a hospital and finally to doctors. If a problem occurs, all of them will pass the blame to the other. There have been cases of suppression of mistakes in the past,” said Shiva.

Remunerations for clinical trials were also an issue. Volunteers were not supposed to be lured with payments.

“Participants may be paid for the inconvenience and time spent… However, payments should not be so large…as to make prospective participants consent readily to enroll in research against their better judgment, ”

said Indian Council for Medical Research guidelines on clinical trials. Clearly, the guidelines had no bearing on the brisk business of clinical trials in distant Juhapura.

The guidelines also stated a government-registered institutional ethics committee, comprising doctors, activists, lawyers and pharmacologists, would ensure there were no monetary inducements. With a gush in the number of clinical trials, several private ethics committees sprang up overnight. The cros needed an approval from an ethics committee before they could initiate a drug trial. It was simple. These  committees approved of trials for a fee. cros were only too happy to pay.

Construction of an embankment along the 10-km stretch of the Sabarmati has begun in Ahmedabad despite warnings that it may hamper natural drainage in the city and that its design is inherently flawed. The 8.5-m-high embankment is part of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project, the first in India where the river will be squeezed to yield land for commercial, residential and open spaces. Project planners expect to recover the cost by selling this real estate.

The project’s Environment Impact Assessment (eia) report, however, said that embanking the Sabarmati would not just prevent drainage and “cordon the river away from the people”. It would also increase its speed, thereby increasing erosion that would affect the stability of the retaining walls and bridges. The report was prepared by the Ahmedabad-based Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology and the Gujarat Ecology Commission in Vadodara. Project designer hcp Design and Project Management Pvt Ltd, formerly called Environmental Planning Collaborative, said drains from low-lying areas would be directed to the river through underground channels. The riverfront project was proposed in 1997 to develop the banks into recreational zones.

But will it? The Sabarmati is a monsoon river that remains partially dry for most part of the year. But for water from the Narmada canal that met it upstream of Ahmedabad, the Sabarmati lacked aesthetic appeal, noted the eia report. “It (riverfront) is unlikely to be an inviting public place conducive to cultural and recreational activities,” eia said.

Inspired by the riverfront development of the Thames in London, the Sabarmati project envisaged channelizing the river into a uniform width of 275 m from the varying 330m to 382 m. Ahmedabad residents feared that constricting the width of the river, would raise the water level. During the 2006 floods, the water level had reached almost the base of the bridges. According to project consultants who prepared reports on flood estimation, the increased speed of the river will bring down the highest flood level. Nonetheless, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation plans to raise the height of bridges with a hydraulic jacking system.

Two consultants were put on the task of flood estimation in the Sabarmati. C C Patel and Associates estimated a peak flood of 0.525 million cubic feet per second (cusecs) and Sheldia Associ ates India estimated 0.594 million cusecs. They recommend building embankments that can withstand a flow of up to 0.475 million cusecs. “Considering the rainfall may not be uniform over the catchment area, they (consultants) have suggested a reduction of 10-20 per cent…. This may have serious implications in case of recurrence of most unlikely event of 5.9 lakh cusecs (0.59 million cusecs) flood,” the eia report said.

EIA had suggested terraced or sloping embankments.

“Sloping embankments offer greater resistance to flood water by helping dampen the flood velocity, dissipate the impact of floods over a much larger surface area and withstand hydraulic pressures several times higher than vertical embankments such as the ones proposed in the project,”

it said.

The flood estimation studies were done before 2002. Since then the rainfall pattern has changed. In August 2006, a flash flood washed away slums and damaged pathways constructed along the river in the first phase of the project. The peak discharge in the river then was less than 0. 3 million cusecs and the estimated loss, Rs 20 crore. “The retaining walls will protect the city against greater floods,” said an official of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Corporation Ltd, set up by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to oversee the project.

Environmentalists are sceptical. “They haven’t learnt lessons from the Kosi. Embankments can never stop floods,” said Anupam Mishra, who heads the environment division of Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi. Riverfront development on the Tapi was put on hold after floods in Surat in 2006. Biswaroop Das, faculty member of the Centre for Social Studies, who co-authored a citizens’ report on the Surat floods, said Indian rivers could not be compared to the Thames and the Hudson. “Our rivers are monsoon-fed, while there’s are snow-fed rivers. Why don’t the planners understand this simple fact?” he asked.

At a time when efforts are being made in the West to bring back small retailers into the mainstream, the Indian government has come up with a study that lauds the role of big retail chains. It claims that the growth of supermarts in India will not harm street vendors and small shop owners, and will only spur a healthy competition in the retail sector.

“Both unorganized and organized retail are bound not only to coexist but also achieve rapid and sustained growth. Both will see a massive scaling up of their activities. In fact, the retail sector, left entirely in the unorganized and informal segment of the economy, could emerge as a major bottleneck to raising productivity in agriculture and industry,” states the study, Impact of Organized Retailing on Unorganized Sector, commissioned by the Department of Industries Planning and Promotion, commerce and industry ministry.

The government asked the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (icrier) to carry out the study after protests in a few states last year against new grocery and fruits and vegetable retail chains. Several development observers and economists, however, do not agree with the study’s conclusions. They say small retailers are already being edged out by organized retail houses, especially because the government’s policies are biased against the unorganized retail sector that employs about 30 million people. After farming retail is the biggest occupation in India.

Study of contrast

The study estimates that the total retail business in India will grow at 13 per cent until 2011-12. The unorganized retail sector is expected to grow at approximately 10 per cent per annum. Organized retail, which constituted 4 per cent of the total retail in 2006-07, is estimated to grow at 45-50 per cent per annum and attain a 16 per cent share of the total retail by 2011-12, says the report. At the same time, it notes, 4.2 per cent of small retail shops close down every year and 1.7 per cent of them close down because of severe competition from retail chains. The study stressed that small shop and retail dealers will make losses initially and in five years will come up with innovative techniques to survive alongside organized retail.

“Even in the medium run I don’t see a positive spin-off,” says Praveen Jha, associate professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, JNU, Delhi.

The study was conducted in 10 cities over 14 months and surveyed 2,020 small traders, 1,318 consumers, 100 intermediaries and 197 farmers. The organized retail chains studied include Subhiksha, Mother Dairy, itc Choupal, Trent ltd (Westside, Star India Bazaar), Futures Group and Spencer’s Retail, but none of the new ones, like Reliance Fresh, More and 6 Ten that have penetrated small cities, was included. Reliance Fresh was the target of protests in Uttar Pradesh that lead to the study.

Upsetting the apple cart

Advocacy group ACORN-India FDI Watch, which, with Navdanya, studied the Paharganj, Nangloi and Lakhshmi Nagar areas of Delhi, contends that supermarket chains have an immediate and considerable impact on small players. “Many could not compete even for a month,” says Dharmendra Sharma, director, ACORN-India FDI Watch.

“All these chains are following the Wal-Mart strategy of predatory prices, that is to sell at low prices initially and when you have established a monopoly, reverse the trend. Look at what they have done in India; they have introduced ‘predatory’ prices on things like onion, potato and tomato, while making other vegetables expensive, but the impression is that vegetables are cheaper in these shops. And when one comes to these shops in a car, he will not go out with just onions but a lot more,” he says.

The icrier report shows how this strategy is working in India when it mentions that low-income consumers save more than others by shopping at organized retail outlets, whereas overall consumer spending has increased with the entry of the outlets. “This is a result of targeted discount shopping,” it says.

The study has applauded Wal-Mart. “Wal-Mart had become the largest private employer in the world with two million employees. The company’s annual revenue totalled us $350 billion in 2006,” it says.

As Wal-Mart is set to enter the Indian market, with Bharti Group tying up with it, the study ignores cases of the retail giant monopolizing the market and killing local manufacturing industry by sourcing most supplies from China. “The organized sector will similarly open a giant pipeline of cheaply sourced goods from China, Thailand and asean, leading to a massive livelihood loss in the indigenous manufacturing sector and small-scale industries,” adds Sharma. Take Iowa state in the us, for instance. Wal-Mart wiped out 43 per cent of its apparel stores and 37 per cent of its grocery stores between 1983 and 1993.

But organized retail stores in India are still far from employing Wal-Mart’s strategy, says Madhu Kishwar, senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

“Land is expensive in India. These stores are in stinky small places. They need ac s to run their store and a cold storage chain to keep their supplies from perishing and then there is the parking problem. So how can they provide goods cheap? If one thing is cheap, the other is expensive,”

she says.

Where’s level playing field?

The icrier study calls for modernizing vegetable markets through public-private partnership and facilitating formation of farmers’ cooperatives to directly sell to organized retailers. The study also recommended formulation of a “private codes of conduct” by the organized retail for dealing with small suppliers and simplification of the licensing and permit regime for the organized retail.
According to Kishwar, even if half the facilities provided to the organized retail are given to the street vendor, things will be much better.

“Provide a level playing field to street vendors and then see who comes out the winner. Legalize street vendors, give them space to sell and other amenities as per the national vendors’ policy and they will be better retailers then any of these stores. At present, half their income goes into paying bribes to the police and goons,”

she says. The National Policy for Urban Street Vendors was drafted in 2004 but has not been implemented. The draft policy aims at making street vendors an integral and legitimate part of the urban distribution system.

The study admits that regulatory restrictions on the growth in modern retail are more stringent in developed countries. “In most West European countries setting up of hypermarkets has become very difficult since the late 1990s as governments became alive to the demands of small retailers and non-mobile consumers. Merger and acquisition plans are looked at more critically by competition authorities,” it says.

“In Germany efforts are being made to bring small retailers back into the mainstream by giving them training and other support mechanisms. I don’t think in India we are even looking at all that. Even in the us, there are studies damning big retail chains. So when developed countries are not able to handle this phenomenon, how will developing counties, where there is so much labour surplus, do so?” asks Jha.
“According to the Census 2001, there are 26.9 million main and 2.4 million marginal workers in wholesale and retail trade. Of these nearly 17 million are not even matriculates. If we count the dependents, at least 120 million will be impacted by the retail revolution created by big corporations,” says Sharma.
While the report cites positive spin-offs of the organized retail—investment in support industries like information technology, warehouse, distribution services and agro-processing—critics warn against climate impact of these amenities. “For refrigeration of vegetables and fruits and for air-conditioning the retail outlets will need at least 20,000 megawatt of energy,” says Sharma. But, of course, no one is factoring this cost.

The study noted that transferring, a protein that transports iron from the blood to the brain, may not be doing its job well. That may lead to exposure of other cells to iron, and their subsequent degeneration and the diseases. The protein binds iron on to its surface. It then curls around the iron and seals it. This prevents the iron from getting exposed to other cells till it reaches its destination organ—the brain.

In the experiment, transferring was placed on an open surface and observed over a period of time.

“We simulated conditions for ageing so that the existing molecules interacted with each other. We found the molecules self-assembled into fibres and iron that was earlier wrapped inside the protein started settling in bands along the length of the fibre,’

says Sandeep Verma of the Department of Chemistry, IIT, Kanpur. “Iron when exposed to molecular oxygen, leads to degeneration of cells,’ says Verma. The study was published in Angewandte Chemie (Vol 9999, No 2008). Although the researchers say exposure of brain cells to iron leads to the diseases, they say there is no clear reason for the exposure.

“Dehydration may be responsible for it. There are restricted membranes where water does not go easily or has been removed from the vicinity of the protein, resulting in the protein malfunction,’ says Verma.

However, their experiment is not foolproof because the biological environment is more complicated. Experiments need to be conducted in that medium. “Definitive proof will come only from clinicians who can slice out a part of the brain and test for iron deposition,’ he added.

The researchers, Michael Worobey and team from the University of Arizona, say the finding will help in the development of an efficient vaccine against aids. The researchers say they studied blood samples of five patients who were among the first recognized aids victims; all of whom had immigrated to the us. They compared the samples with those of another 117 aids patients from different parts of the world and traced back the family history of the virus. The study appeared online on October 30, 2007 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But many experts say the results might not be useful in developing a vaccine against the deadly virus. So far, an effective vaccine has been elusive as the character of the virus changes frequently from place to place.

“There are eight major subtype of HIV-1 in addition to the existing recombinants within the subtype which are accumulating and these type of changes are increasingly occurring as days progress which poses a great challenge to vaccine development” says Smarajit Jana, member of the National Aids Council in Delhi.

He says, “When an epidemic spreads, it goes to 3-4 different directions, not just to one area. So, a lot more archival samples have to be tested to get the truth.’ In India, the major circulating stain is the subtype C and scientists say the vaccine developed on the strain collected from one country may not be effective in other countries because of the very nature of the virus which is not predictable and changes rapidly.

Meanwhile, the report has sparked off a controversy outside the us . Haitians see it as a ploy to vilify the country. “This report is just an extension of a larger campaign by the us to squash the people’s movement in Haiti,’ said Noluthando Williams, a Haitian activist.

“Inventory of existing captive elephants will help us know the facilities they have in terms of health care, nutrition and training. We will then come up with a set of guidelines towards effective management of captive elephants,’

says Raman Sukumar, the founding trustee of Asian Nature Conservation Foundation (ancf). ancf along with the Bangalore-based ngo Compassion Unlimited Plus Action (cupa), initiated the study.

After the study, a manual has been prepared in Karnataka. It contains body measurement, dung circumference and weight, details of space, water, bath, interaction, training, behaviour and veterinary doctor’s availability for 158 captive elephants in the state along with their mahuts and their socio-economic status, Suparna Baksi Ganguly, vice president of cupa, said.

“The social status of mahuts is very low. The government doesn’t want to build infrastructure for them. We need to raise their standard of living so that they take interest in the animal,’ says Sukumar.

The three main aims of the project are to arrive at the total number of captive elephants in India, sample them to assess their status and management and then explore different models of elephant keeping and develop a concept to initiate care centres, says the cupa annual report.

The global population of elephants is 55,000, of which 15,000-16,000 are in captivity.

“A cultural association has always existed in temples and festivities. For instance, it’s a matter of prestige to own an elephant for the Namboodri community in Kerala,’ Sukumar said.

Activists say elephants should not be made a showpiece, but Sukumar says they can’t be wished away as it is very difficult to put elephants back in the wild as there is just no habitat.

“According to present regulations, somebody owning an elephant cannot sell it even if he can’t take care of the animal. This is not realistic,’ he added.

The second phase of the project will study health assessment of all captive elephants to know the common diseases afflicting them. “Elephants are very social animals. In captivity, most of them are afflicted with stress, aggression and tuberculosis. We are thinking of designing guidelines for their health next,’ says Ganguly.