Of the three substances listed for PIC at the fourth meeting of the Conference of Parties (cop-4) to the Rotterdam Convention, only tributyltin was listed at the meeting held from October 27 to 31 in Rome. While seven countries opposed asbestos from being blacklisted, in case of endosulfan only India was responsible for its exclusion.

“India was put in a spot when country after country joined in accusing it for its entrenched position of not allowing the listing of endosulfan, a highly toxic pesticide,”

said Madhumita Dutta of Chennai-based advocacy group The Other Media.
Kerala, where endosulfan killed hundreds of people before being banned in 2002, passed a resolution on November 5 demanding that India retract its statement at Rotterdam Convention. Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan said India should ban the use of the pesticide. State agriculture minister Mullakkara Ratnakaran said he was surprised the Centre did not find evidence to ban it. “We have given them enough social and statistical evidence and data provided by the Kerala Agricultural Univerisity,” Ratnakaran said.

Sruthi, a young girl of Padre village in Kerala’s Kasargod district, was born with stag-horn limbs, an ugly result of 25 years of spraying endosulfan on cashew plantations. Sixty-something Mangabhai Patel was exposed to asbestos for over 25 years at the Ahmedabad Electricity Authority in Gandhinagar before being diagnosed with asbestosis, a chronic respiratory disease. Both are unaware of the meeting that took place miles away to discuss the hazardous substances they and thousands like them are victims of.

“In case of chrysotile asbestos, not a single country which opposed the inclusion has any objection to the scientific process or document. They all opposed it politically,”

said Datta. The countries that opposed the inclusion of asbestos were India, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan Republic, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Ukraine and the Philippines. The Indian delegation, led by environment and forests ministry officials, said it was tough to decide on asbestos because the study on it by the

National Institute of Occupational Health was still under way. “The Indian delegation acted under pressure from representatives of the chrysotile asbestos and the chemical industry,” said Gopal Krishna of Ban As-bestos Network of India, a group of health, environment and labour activists.

“The rather unusual use of two similar meaning yet different terms—waste and material—is bound to lead to enormous confusion,’ note D B Boralkar and Claude Alvares, members of the Supreme Court Monitoring Committee on Hazardous Wastes and say that the state pollution control boards won’t be able to deal with the confusion.

The draft rules have been criticized on other fronts as well. The rules exclude biomedical waste, solid waste, waste water and exhaust gases from the category of hazardous waste.

The focus of the rules, experts say, is on recycling. “The proposal states that if a material contains less than 60 per cent contamination by a hazardous constituent, it is eco-friendly,’ says Gopal Krishna, of the Ban Asbestos Network of India.

The rules make the ministry the nodal agency on import and export of waste, sidelining state pollution control boards.

“What is the institutional monitoring/regulatory set-up available with moef for this, especially when field organizations are left out? Will moef now grant permission to transport hazardous materials from Kerala to Noida and issue copies of permissions to state pollution control boards?’ ask Boralkar and Alvares.

Even the new definition of “disposal’ is limited. It is defined as treatment and deposition of any hazardous wastes on land but does not talk about disposal in water bodies and oceans, besides incineration and indefinite storage. Ravi Agrawal of Toxicslink, a Delhi-based ngo, says instead of new rules, better implementation of the existing rules through regular evaluation and monitoring is required.

“The draft rules also violate the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and flout supreme court judgements on hazardous waste cases. In a May 1997 judgement, the apex court had ordered that no authorization/permission would be given by any authority for the import of hazardous waste items which have already been banned under the Basel Convention or to be banned hereafter with effect from the dates specified therein,’ he says.

The draft Hazardous Materials (Management, Handling and Trans boundary Movement) Rule, 2007, have been put up on the ministry’s website and will replace the existing Hazardous Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules 1989, if given the go-ahead.