The Tuberculosis (tb) bacteria kill two people every three minutes. The bacteria uses iron from the human body to survive. But the mechanism by which they source the iron was not known. Researchers from the University of Hyderabad have recently cracked the mechanism. Their research paves the way for new medicines to treat the disease better.

The tb pathogen sources its iron through molecules called siderophores, which have high affinity for iron. First, the pathogens release these molecules, which extracts iron from human cells, leaving them iron-scarce. The molecules are then transported back to the pathogen, which synthesizes the iron to sustain and grow at the cost of the host. These actions are dependent on two proteins that help complete the transportation cycle of siderophores. Blocking this transportation through medicines can be a breakthrough to cure tb. First, it will stop the iron uptake and secretion. Since there will be no export pathway for siderophores, it will extract iron from the microbe itself.

“A proper pool of iron needs to be maintained because low or even high concentration of iron is harmful to the cell,”

says Aisha Farhana, the lead author of the study published in the May 7 issue of PLoS One. The other concern, she says, is that anaemia is often an offshoot of tb. This is because iron is a major component of blood.

According to K K Chopra of the New Delhi Tuberculosis Centre,

“Till now, the anti- tb drugs that we have been using target protein uptake, not iron uptake. If developed and compared with a placebo, the drug might be more effective than the currently available drugs.”

Treatment at present involves a combination of drugs introduced in India in 1997, according to who recommendations. Also, who surveys in 1997 and 2007 found that multi-drug resistance tb strains were present in 63 of the 72 countries surveyed.

The 10-year-old tiger – they usually life for 14-15 years in the wild-in Corbett National Park killed Bhagwati Devi of Dhikuli village in the buffer zone of the park on February 6 when she went into the forest to collect firewood. The villagers said the tiger attacked the 50-year-old from behind as she sat collecting wood. Following protests by people, the chief wildlife warden of Uttarakhand issued orders to kill or catch the “man-eater”. The forest department trapped the animal and sent it to a zoo in Nainital on February 10.

Bhagwati Devi’s husband B C Nainwal, however, does not blame the tiger. “It is the policies of the government that made the tiger a victim of public ire,” he said. “The tiger was roaming near Dhikuli for four-five months. The main reason was elephant safaris by resorts here. They are known to throw meat in front of the tiger to increase the sighting of the big cat.”

A forest official admitted the resort operators’ role was suspicious. “They conducted elephant safaris in the area though it is not a tourist zone,” he said. Thirty-six resorts line the state highway in Dhikuli, on the other side of which is the park boundary. The department has now banned elephant safaris in the buffer zone. The forest department says the tiger was observed in the area for more than a year. “We warned the villagers not to go inside the forest but they did not heed the warning,” said Umesh Tiwari, the Bijrani range officer.

It is believed to have been lured out of Deoria forest range in Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh in November 2008 while chasing a wild boar, which ran into adjacent sugarcane fields that mimicked the tiger’s natural habitat, grassland. On November 9, it attacked a farm labourer in the sugarcane field in Pareba village when he was cutting sugarcane. The next day it attacked Kishan Pal Gangwal in nearby Dammupura village but the teenager survived. “The first victim was in a hunched position, so probably the tiger mistook it for an animal,” said Pradeep Tyagi, a forest guard in Deoria.

The first incident happened 3 km from the forest and the second one about 5 km. The forest is continuous with sugarcane fields. The tiger was around three years old and was probably trying to set up its territory and found the adjoining sugarcane field a good habitat, said P K Gupta, divisional forest officer, Pilibhit.

The tiger was next spotted in Shahjahanpur, some 60 km from Pilibhit. On December 21, a teenager’s flesh-eaten body was found 150 km away in Barabanki district. This was when the chief wildlife warden of Uttar Pradesh B K Patnaik declared the tiger a man-eater. “The boy had been missing for three days, so it is difficult to say if he was a victim of the tiger,” said an official in the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA). The chief wildlife warden countered this, saying a tiger’s pugmarks were found near the body.

The district magistrate announced an award for shooting the tiger, but the decision was soon reverted because it was against the NTCA guidelines. By now a frenzied mob was chasing the tiger. Four elephants, trackers, forest guards, tranquillising experts from the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun and wildlife NGOs from Delhi, were on the hunt. Some NGOs even set dogs on the trail of the big cat. Scared, the dogs hung close to the elephants’ legs.

The tiger wandered around human habitations in Lakhimpur, Sitapur, Barabanki and Lucknow before reaching Rudauli forest range of Faizabad district of Uttar Pradesh. It covered about 300 km. On January 10 and 14, it killed two more people in Kumarganj range of Faizabad. Except for the first kill in Pilibhit, the three other victims were killed inside forest. This shows the tiger did not come to the village to make a kill-a characteristic of a man-eater.

On February 24, it was shot between the eyes by Nawab Shafath Ali Khan, a shooter who came from Hyderabad. NTCA guidelines do not permit a non-forest services official to shoot a man-eater unless the forest department is not equipped to do so. To forest officials’ embarrassment it turned out to be a tigress though all the while they inferred from the pugmarks it was male.

A tiger, not more than two years old, killed its first human prey on January 4 outside the Kishanpur sanctuary in Dudhwa National Park close to the border with Nepal. Since then it has killed four more people and injured one. It claimed its last victim on February 19. The chief wildlife warden issued orders to shoot it.

“It did not eat the first two victims but only the third kill. It had lost the fear of humans. The last time we saw it, the tiger refused to move away when he saw a crowd,” said Mudit Gupta, senior project officer of WWF at a camp set up by the forest department near Kishanpur.

“The tiger was getting used to feeding on cattle carcasses thrown outside villages in the critical tiger habitat. Only once in the past two months it tried killing a wild animal in a wheat field. But the marks of struggle – badly damaged crop – show it was very young not trained in killing a wild prey,” said Anil Kumar Singh, coordinator, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), a non-profit.

Here also sugarcane fields served as a good habitat for the tiger, where it got enough prey too. “The tiger was weaned early from its mother. When the sugarcane crop was cut, it took to killing humans,” said Anjan Talukdar, a veterinary doctor with the trust who tranquillised the tiger on March 1. The tiger was sent to the Lucknow zoo.

The Uttar Pradesh forest department is still on its toes. A tiger is roaming around Basti in eastern Uttar Pradesh. It probably wandered out of Valmiki sanctuary in Bihar and entered Ghazipur across the Bihar-Uttar Pradesh border.

“It doesn’t seem to be a man-eater. One person it killed was in self-defence. It is a 10-year-old tiger who is probably dislodged from its territory. It may reach Sohelwa Wildlife Sanctuary in Balrampur district,”

said Patnaik. These incidents have provoked a debate among wildlife managers and experts on whether the tigers were man-eaters and what compelled them to kill human beings. “Most of these tigers killed their first human prey in an accidental meeting. None of them considered humans their sole prey and in that sense they could be called problem tigers, but the term man-eater is for a tiger that learns to kill and subsist on humans in an efficient manner. The tiger then almost exclusively subsists on humans and actively seeks them out as prey,” said Y V Jhala, scientist at the Wildlife Institute of India. “None of these tigers fit into this category.”

In the three cases, the first victim was in a hunched position. “If surprised or cornered, a tiger can mistake human beings as a prey species and kill them. This is not man-eating,” Jhala added.

In two of the cases, tigers entered sugarcane fields. According to NTCA guidelines, tigers killing humans in sugarcane fields can be declared man-eaters only when they start living in the fields and attack people regularly. “All big cats venture into fields. This happened in the 1980s too, but then there was no 24×7 television,” said Vidya Athreya, a research associate with the Pune-based Kaati Trust that works on leopard rescue.

The Corbett tiger was captured in a hurry after what seemed like an accidental attack and the Faizabad tiger was chased around, pushed to make attacks, said Jay Mazoomdaar, journalist and filmmaker who broke the news about the absence of tigers in Sariska in 2005.

Hunter-turned-conservationist Billy Arjan Singh said tigers now have to live close to humans because there is no prey left in Dudhwa and forest mafia have destroyed the forest. More herbivores are now found in the buffer area of Corbett than in the core, added Iqbal Hussain, former sarpanch of Dhikuli.

It is not always out of compulsion that tigers move out of the forest. Experts say young tigers are expected to go out. “Usually they come back to the forest but sometimes they go too far and lose track,” said conservation biologist Raghunandan Singh Chundawat. Search for territory is a major reason for tigers moving out of forests. “Most tiger reserves are too small to contain a viable population of tiger for a long period. The prime habitats are occupied by dominant tigers. Sub-adult and old tigers are forced to use marginal habitats or disperse to other forests,” said Jhala.

However, today there are no connecting forests between tiger populations and when tigers disperse, they have to move through human habitats searching for a forest patch to settle in. Not finding any forest, they are forced to kill livestock and humans, said Jhala. “Till the 1960s, there were grasslands between the forest and agricultural fields in Pilibhit. Now the fields have extended up to the forest,” said P K Gupta.

The authorities in Corbett said they were forced by public ire to shoot the tiger or send it to a zoo. Chundawat questions the logic of sending tigers to zoos when there are very few tigers in the wild. “They need to trap the animal and take it back to a suitable habitat. When this can be done in Sariska, why can’t it be done in terai?”

Tiwari of Corbett said it is not easy to rehabilitate every tiger in the wild, especially a male who is not readily accepted by tigers in their territories. But there are forests like Rajaji National Park, which can accommodate tigers.

Wildlife experts also point out it is crucial to take quick action in case of a wandering tiger because if it adapts to eating humans, rehabilitating it in the wild becomes difficult. The authorities are then forced to take extreme steps like shooting. “We need a special team to deal with such situations.

The forest department should start monitoring tigers as soon as villagers report their straying. They do not have to wait for a kill to happen and then people to get angry and the politicians to pressure on them to act,” said Chundawat.

Athreya suggests tracking through GPS collars, though it is expensive-one collar costs Rs 2-3 lakh-and will require capturing tigers. The long-term solution to avoid such conflicts, point out wildlife experts, is better training of forest officials in pugmark identification and arms handling, and better habitat management, like ensuring a gradual, not abrupt, decrease of forest cover.

OVER 120 nations have agreed to have legally binding measures to control the pollution by mercury, a neurotoxin. Formal negotiations for the treaty will begin in 2010.

The agreement, reached at the 25th session of the Governing Council of the UN Environment Programme (unep) in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, is a change from previous years, when major powers, including the US, China and India, sought voluntary reductions. On February 18, they agreed to consider the binding treaty.

Some countries, including India, had earlier said a legally binding agreement is not necessary for unintentional mercury emissions. It was supported by China and Indonesia.

“Switzerland agreed that different mechanisms were necessary for unintentional and intentional emissions, but stressed that all mercury emissions must be addressed under the legally binding measures,”

said Prashant Pastore of Toxic Link, Delhi-based non-profit, who attended the meeting.

A consensus was reached after the US supported the call to ban mercy use worldwide. Changing its stand, the new US administration under President Barack Obama wanted a legally binding international treaty to reduce the toxic pollutant’s content in the environment. Till now, the US had supported only voluntary and partnership measures.

“This came as a surprise,” said Pastore. “Several non-profits said they were floored during the US announcement,” said a press release of the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (enb), a news service for environment and development negotiations. “The US said the measures should address all significant sources of mercury, especially sectors with the greatest global impact including coal combustion,” said the press release.

The treaty would mandate signatory countries to follow measures to phase out the toxic pollutant.

An Inter-governmental Negotiating Committee will begin formal negotiations on the treaty in 2010, which will be wrapped up by 2013. The committe will devise modalities for phasing out mercury in terms of addressing the anthropogenic sources of the chemical, capacity building and technical and financial assistance to countries.

On behalf of developing countries, India called for a committed financial assistance to introduce mercury-free technologies. The EU rejected the proposal initially, but after consultations delegates agreed that developing countries and transition economies should be provided with technical and adequate financial assistance to help them implement the legally binding obligations effectively.

Widely used in chemical production and small-scale mining, mercury is also known to affect the cardio-vascular system. It persists in the environment once released and can travel long distances. Thus even countries which release little or no mercury and areas far away from industrial activities are at the risk of being contaminated. The Arctic, for instance, has high mercury levels, although it is far from major release sites. Its toxic forms such as methylmercury can cross the placental and blood-brain barrier affecting foetuses and children.

A fire at Ankleshwar forced India to rethink how it handles hazardous waste. Drums carrying dangerous industrial sludge flew amid leaping flames and burst in the air at a waste storage at the industrial complex in Bharuch district of Gujarat on April 3 last year. Ash fell all around. People in nearby villages were told to evacuate; many suffered coughing, headache, nausea and burning sensation in the nose and throat.

It could have turned into a disaster worse than the Bhopal gas tragedy but for the change in the wind direction away from other factories (see ‘Bhopal to Bharuch’, Down To Earth, April 30, 2008).

Fire at Ankleshwar exposed careless handling of waste
Photographer:Ravleen Kaur

The fire burnt 250 tonnes of toxic industrial waste at the treatment, storage and disposal facility or tsdf in Ankleshwar. This waste had been sent there for incineration at 1,100°C because it was too dangerous to reuse or dump in a landfill. And burning it under ordinary conditions could release pollutants like cancer-causing dioxins and furans.

Waste oil and sludge—all paid for by industries—were leaking from barrels at Bharuch Enviro Infrastructure Ltd (BEIL), the tsdf that caught fire. Though BEIL —of which pesticide giant United Phosphorous is a major equity holder—cannot incinerate more than 50 tonnes of waste a day, it had crammed over 12,800 tonnes in sheds with narrow passage in between.

Prompted by the accident, the Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb) in April 2008 set up a committee under its former adviser R K Garg to stipulate detailed and explicit guidelines for storage of incinerable hazardous waste at captive incinerators and tsdfs, which are landfills with or without incinerators. In November, the board announced new guidelines (see Storage guidelines). Till then tsdfs were not bound by any time limit for storing hazardous incinerable waste, though being reactive and inflammable, the waste is risky to store— BEIL and the factory inspector in Ankleshwar believe the April fire occurred due to a reaction between the waste and the steel drum in which it was stored. Only industries were told not to store such waste for more than 90 days on their premises.

The committee decided that a tsdf should not store hazardous waste for more than six months. It noted sampling, analysis and mixing of the right kind of waste before incineration could take three months, but considering the time an incinerator requires for repairs, which is an annual affair, six months’ storage time is appropriate.

BEIL had waste lying there for up to two years, even though the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (gpcb) had allowed it 90 days’ storage time.

Industries in India produce hundreds of tonnes of waste every day that cpcb classifies harmful to our health and the environment. It can be toxic, flammable, corrosive, radioactive or reactive. Of this inflammable organic waste produced by industries like pesticide, pharmaceutical and refinery has to be incinerated. These are mostly synthetic chemicals that, scientists say, do not easily break down in the environment and deposit in human bodies through the food chain. They interfere with our biochemistry that affects our intelligence, immunity, behaviour and reproduction. Benzene used in bulk drug factories, for example, is a carcinogen. Exposure to it for a long time can be fatal.

Ten months after the fire—and despite orders to do so—neither gpcb nor the factory inspector of the area nor BEIL itself knows the nature of the waste burnt and the company it came from. On July 8, cpcb issued directions to BEIL regarding safety—like installing smoke and fire detectors, water sprinklers, providing ventilation, labelling drums to identify waste—under the Environment Protection Act 1986. The facility was asked to submit an action plan for incinerating the 12,800 tonnes of waste lying on its premises, and not to accept fresh waste till it had done so.

BEIL was given three months to act upon the directions. It trimmed the size of some sheds to create a wider passage between them, laid the storage areas with concrete flooring, installed fire hydrants and smoke detectors and labelled the drums.

“We have spent over Rs 7 crore on upgrading. Each drum has been painted and labelled as per the categories in hazardous waste rules,” said P N Parmeswaran, vice-president (environment) of United Phosphorus.

However, 4,000 tonnes of waste was still lying at the facility in December end. According to cpcb, 7,000 tonnes remained to be treated on October 13. So in more than six months, the company could take care of only 5,800 tonnes. Of this 1,000 tonnes were sent to another tsdf, Gujarat Enviro Protection and Infrastructure, in Surat, according to the documents obtained from gpcb under RTI. As per BEIL’s stated capacity at least 7,500 tonnes should have been incinerated in six months.

Environmental activists in Ankleshwar are now angry over the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s order in December allowing BEIL to incinerate 350 tonnes of toxic waste from the Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) plant in Bhopal. “When they are not able to manage the waste of this industrial area, how can they take care of the waste in the Union Carbide factory?” asked Zia Pathan, a lawyer in Ankleshwar and member of Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti, a non-profit active in Gujarat.

Will BEIL be nailed? No criminal case is filed against it (see Where is the punishment?). Pollution control boards can act against the BEIL director under section 15 of the Environment Protection Act in case of loss of health or vegetation, for which the culprit can get jailed for five years. But they have not done so. Proving impact on health and vegetation is not easy. “If people have breathing disorders how can one know it is because of BEIL?” asked Pathan.

This will make it difficult for industry to set up projects, CII said. Assembling land from numerous owners is not a task which the corporate sector can undertake effectively. The government should retain its role of acquiring land for industrial development, as industrialization is key to job creation, CII said.

It further said that the clause ‘public purpose’ should empower the state to acquire land not only for infrastructure or defence purposes but also for developing land for economic activity.

CII criticized another provision in the bill that requires the acquirer to share the capital gains with the original owners or their heirs whenever the acquired land is sold. It is an impossibly onerous task for the private sector, the CII said. It suggested setting up state land bank corporations, that would acquire non-cultivable land, develop them and pass them on to the private sector.

The Ministry of Rural Development refused to comment on CII’s press statement saying that a group of ministers is vetting the bill. “We will table the bill only after the ministers submit their report,” said Rita Sinha, secretary (Department of Land Resources), Ministry of Rural Development.

In October 2008, a Parliamentary Standing committee had criticized certain clauses in the bill. In its report, the committee said the clause relating to states acquiring 30 per cent of a project land is vague and can be misused.

“The previous definition (which broadly says that the government will acquire land for projects that benefit the public) was much better and should be retained,”

the report said.

Land rights activists, however, hail the bill and say it offers a good chance to farmers for negotiating the price of their land with the industry.

“Industry’s reaction was bound to come as it cannot forcibly acquire land like the government does,” said S Parasuraman, director of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. According to Parasuraman, the entire process of land selling should be governed by market forces. “Otherwise, the process will get complicated as the price difference between acquisition prices paid by private buyers and the government will be huge. And nobody would want to give land to the government at low prices,” he said.

With less time left for the Parliament session, it seems unlikely that the bill will get through, said a CII official. And this will give industry a chance to push its agenda.

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.

The government has several schemes supporting and subsidizing various kinds of solar power systems.The emphasis is on encouraging manufacturing and industry rather than on installations as solar PV manufacturing is capital intensive.

Through the special incentive package scheme, the government offers capital subsidies to state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing and related units, including solar PV. Eligible semiconductor “fab” projects must have a net present value of at least Rs 2,500 crore. The subsidy available is 25 per cent of the capital expenditure; it is 20 per cent for projects in a special economic zone. The response was good. “Most of the manufacturers who have applied under the scheme want to invest in photovoltaic technology. Proposals roughly worth Rs 1,40,000 crore from 14 manufacturers are lying with the ministry of which 12 are photovoltaic manufacturers” said K S Chari, director in the Union Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the nodal ministry. Most of the proposals have been forwarded to a technical evaluation committee and decision is expected “shortly”.

The recently announced feed-in-tariff incentive scheme of MNRE has also sparked considerable interest. The scheme is aimed at encouraging a small number of megawatt-level projects. Under the scheme, the project developer makes a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the state utility at the highest existing market rate. The MNRE, through the Indian Renewable Energy Development Agency (IREDA), augments this rate, to a maximum of Rs 15 per kWh. The maximum supplement incentive from MNRE is restricted to Rs 12 per kWh. This will be reduced by 5 per cent for projects commissioned from the beginning of 2010 onwards. The supplement is available for up to 10 years. Till June the ministry received applications to set up PV plants totalling 2000 mw. The proposals are currently being scrutinized.

Globally, solar pv projects are being installed in large numbers each year. In 2007, more than 2,260 mw of pv capacity was installed, an increase of more than 50 per cent over the previous year. This brought the total installed capacity to 7,800 mw. About three-fourths of the total solar pv capacity was installed in Germany and Spain alone. If Japan and the us are also included, then over 90 per cent of pv installations in 2007 occurred in four countries.

Germany Powering ahead
Germany currently accounts for about half of the world’s installed solar power capacity—3,862 mw. This growth happened due to its market support measures promoting grid-connected rooftop systems and large pv power plants.

Germany’s innovative feed-in tariff (fit) scheme has been the main driver for the solar market. The German fit scheme, governed by the country’s Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) guarantees generous fixed rates for all solar pv electricity generated for 20 years from completion of the project. An important feature is that the rate guaranteed for new projects decreases every year—currently by 5 per cent but this is set to increase in 2009.

The decrease in tariff is part of the policy package as it works to push manufacturers to reduce costs and to increase efficiency of their systems. This tariff reduction encourages industry to develop cheaper, more efficient systems and to lower installation costs. The precise rates given depend on the system size and location.

In 2008 they stand as shown in Table 2.
The fit scheme is backed by favourable loans from KfW, a government-owned financial institution. Loans are provided in collaboration with individual banks; interest rates are dependent on credit ratings and the value of collateral, starting at 4.63 per cent. The programme as a whole has created a very large consumer base for solar pv in Germany. This, along with special financial incentives packages for manufacturing in certain regions and funding for research, has helped to create a flourishing pv production industry in Germany.

Critics of the German scheme say it is too generous—the cost to energy consumers is too high and the use of such an expensive technology in a country with relatively low sunlight hours is inefficient. However, on the whole, it is estimated that the fit programme is responsible for an increase of €1.01 in monthly household electricity bills.

Leading the charge: California

California was the first state to introduce feed-in remuneration. Its tightly restricted feed-in programme will supply the development of up to 480 mw of total generating capacity (roughly equivalent to a small coal based power station). In all cases, feed-in contracts for 10-20 years can be entered only for installations up to 1.5 mw capacity and the range from us 8-31 cents per kWh, depending on the time the power is delivered—peak consumption time, winter or summer. As a result of this policy directive, the two big power utilities of the state—Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric Company have signed power purchase agreements—for 245 mw with eSolar and 500 mw with Bright Source, respectively. In 2007 around 70 per cent of all pv installations in the us were in California, which aims to install 3,000 mw in the next 10 years.
The California Solar Initiative provides two kinds of financial incentive depending on the system size. Systems under 50 kW are eligible for the expected performance based buy-down, a one time, up-front payment. The size of the payment is calculated from the estimated output of the system, based on rated capacity, but also an assessment of the quality of the installation, including geographical factors such as location, tilt and shading. Systems over 50 kW can receive the feed-in-tariff. For both payment methods, the rates applicable are linked to the cumulative capacity installed under the scheme, reducing in 10 steps as capacity increases.

India’s solar future

Harnessing power from the sun is one of the biggest answers to challenges of energy security and climate change. Both solar thermal and photovoltaic will play a key role in addressing energy needs of the future. It is clear that the biggest challenge is to bring down the costs of solar pv— by cutting costs or by increasing efficiency.
The government has shown commitment but implementation and the nature of schemes have been found wanting. Take for instance, the heaters promotion scheme. “The problem with such schemes is that it comes through dealers designated by the government so it is difficult to trust the quality mostly,” said Mathew Kochu SJ, director of Xavier’s Institute of Technology in Mehsana district of Gujarat, who have installed solar heaters and lights in their entire institute. A national level certification and labelling programme is a must to ensure quality and performance.
Once this is done laws and regulations like changes in building bylaws making it compulsory to install both solar thermal and pv features are the kind of reforms the sector needs. “Like Europe and the us, we should make at least two to three per cent contribution from solar generation mandatory. Then, policy-making on the same will become faster,” said an ireda official.

Finances and the limited technical know-how remain the key barriers for the solar projects in India. Innovations are needed to make solar projects financially and technologically feasible. A hybrid system or a system with high fossil fuel back-up, along with increased government technical and financial support and incentives, facilitation of technology transfer, will increase the market interest in csp technology.

The Indian government has announced a generation-based incentive scheme. It is even considering ramping up solar generation to 20,000 mw. But finances will remain a big issue. The feed-in (or preferential) tariff provides an incentive to set up the plant, but it also puts a huge burden on the exchequer. This is why governments only extend the high tariff incentives in a restricted capacity. India’s solar programme must therefore be able to source new funds—through a programmatic cdm— instead of each project applying separately for cdm. The government can collect all the carbon credits from solar projects and sell it collectively in addition to securing international finances to pay for national mitigation actions.
The money generated from selling carbon credits can then be used to fund feed-in-tariff schemes and reduce the subsidy. Reducing or even eliminating import duties, will reduce indirect costs and ease technology transfer from countries such as Germany, the us and Israel—the world leaders in technology. Its strong engineering and manufacturing foundation will surely allow India to become a leader in solar technologies in the future. After all, a massively scaled up solar programme is good for India. It is good for the world.

With inputs from Ravleen Kaur and Arnab Pratim Dutta

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.

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.

It’s official. The Central Pollution Control Board (cpcb), the nodal body for regulating environmental norms in India, is being “reduced to a near-defunct body”. The parliamentary standing committee on science and technology, environment and forests for the first time took note of the problems ailing cpcb in a report tabled in Parliament on October 21.

Issues like unqualified members and lack of enforcement power have long plagued the central and state pollution control boards (spcbs), a fact acknowledged by the board heads. The committee also noticed that the scarcity of technical staff was affecting the functioning of the boards.

“The key posts in cpcb and spcbs are being manned by officers of the Indian Administrative Service or bureaucrats who neither possess the necessary capabilities and expertise in properly managing and planning pollution control activities nor have enough time to pay attention to these activities,”

the report said.

In 2004-05, of the total cpcb and spcb staff, only 48 per cent were technical. An earlier report by a Supreme Court monitoring committee had stated that 77 per cent of the chairpersons and 55 per cent of the member secretaries of spcbs were not qualified to hold the post. The parliamentary committee report also criticized having part-time chairpersons by many state boards and said that only a full-time chairperson with adequate knowledge, background and experience in environment management could do justice to the post.

Dilip Biswas, former chairperson of cpcb, said during his tenure he had quite a few members on the board who were unqualified for the post.

“Meetings were more like a ritual than platforms for discussing important issues because many members were illiterate as far as environment was concerned. Many a times they would not even turn up for meetings.”

The law was to be faulted, said Biswas not the people as it did not define the exact qualifications of the board members. “Also, there is drastic shortage of general staff,” he said.

Though cpcb is an autonomous body, it is controlled by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Most of its members are ministry representatives. The acting chairperson of the board is the joint secretary of the ministry. The Water Act, under which the board was formed, allows the Central government to supersede cpcb in certain cases. “Such a provision renders cpcb to act as mere puppet in the hands of the Centre and does not allow any space for independent and autonomous functioning,” the report said. Citing the ministry’s 2002 decision to delegate punitive powers to cpcb with the condition that if need be the Centre may revoke the decision, the report said, “If all the powers and functions were to be concentrated in the hands of the ministry …such an apex body is untenable.”

The report has raised concerns about the cpcb data on air and water monitoring. It said hazardous pollutants like volatile organic compounds, ozone and aromatic hydrocarbons were not being monitored. Of the 332 monitoring stations in the country, several are not working and the data is not updated regularly. There is no central agency to set standards for emissions.
Even if the standards are finalized by a technical body, the ministry takes a long time to notify them, as has happened in the case of the sponge iron industry.

Low salaries to the technical personnel and lack of training also contributed to cpcb’s failure, it stated.