“Had it not been for the change in wind direction within 10 minutes of the fire, it could have spread to and destroyed all the nearby factories in the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (gidc) and villages”

says Manoj Kotadia, manager, fire and safety, Disaster Prevention and Management Centre, Ankleshwar.

Burning hazardous waste at the BEIL – Drum flying out of the fire

Burning hazardous waste at the BEIL – Part 1

Burning hazardous waste at the BEIL – Part 2

Burning hazardous waste at the BEIL – Part 6

The fire at BEIL was brought under control within 24 hours but people in surrounding villages are still reeling from the effects of toxic gases: a burning sensation in eyes and nose, difficulty in breathing and in some cases, as Down To Earth saw, rashes and fever. The cause of the fire is not known but preliminary investigation by the central and state pollution control boards and the local administration has exposed gross violations of environmental and safety norms at the treatment, storage and disposal facility (tsdf), which has also bid to incinerate the hazardous waste lying at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal—a lucrative contract of over a million dollars. As Down To Earth went to press, it was reported that the Industrial Health and Safety Department had registered a case against beil under the Gujarat Factories Act, 1948, for making seven sheds for storing hazardous waste when it had permission for only two. It was the seventh shed that caught fire. Inquiries into the lapses of the extremely hazardous facility are on.

Dark dusk Black smoke at one of the sheds where the barrels are stored was first noticed at 5.30 p.m. “My office people observed the smoke and informed me,’ said P N Parmeshwaran, vice-president, environment, beil. However, the Disaster Prevention and Management Centre, just 2 km away, was informed only by 6 p.m. People in Jitali village, about a kilometre from beil, saw barrels flying in the air. But the company’s alarm at the panchayat building failed to ring. Later, the villagers found out that wire connections had not been made.

“Soon it was dark, the fumes were noxious and for a long time it was difficult to breathe,’ said Nilesh Kumar Patel of Jitali as he showed Down To Earth the footage of the blaze on his cell phone. Jitali was one of the three villages put on high alert; people were told to evacuate. The other two villages are Sarangpur and Dhadhaal Inam. Huge chunks of ashy waste fell all around. “Stone-like things fell on my roof. In the morning they were still stinking and oozing fumes,’ said Momina Shoib Kazi of Jitali. The impact was worst in Jitali because it was in the wind’s direction.

“High wind velocity and a change in the direction (towards empty fields) of the wind from west to east prevented a big disaster.Wind velocity of over 20 km per hour did not let the smoke settle, otherwise the barrels lying all over the place would have caught fire and it would also have been difficult for us to wade through the smoke,’ said Kotadia.

Children at Dhadhaal Inam, a kilometre west of the facility, had just come out of the madrasa when they heard explosions. They ran in the direction of the blasts and ended up with headache and a burning sensation in the nose and throat. Asif Iqbal Panchbaya, 10, has got rashes and high fever. “I took him to Bharuch for treatment but his condition has worsened,’ said his father Iqbal Panchbaya. The Primary Health Centre sent squads to the villages the same night. It says the fire affected 89 people.

Shocking irregularities
To understand the effects of pollution one needs to know the kind of toxins released in the air. But beil officials could not explain the nature of the waste burnt. “It was a kind of tarry waste or a solvent-based waste of high calorific value. We are trying to ascertain what exactly it was,’ said Parmeshwaran. The Hazardous Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules, 1989, however, lay down that all tsdfs have to keep a record of the kind of waste received and check the waste before accepting it for treatment.

RAVLEEN KAUR

Left in haze: Nature of waste unknown

“Thirty-seven kinds of waste are stored at a landfill site. Under the hazardous wastes rules a tsdf has to provide a monthly report to the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (gpcb) of how much waste it received, its classification, how much was stored and how much incinerated. The gpcb should reveal these reports. The company is at fault, but so is the pollution board for improper monitoring,’ says Yogesh Pandya, managing trustee of Safety, Health and Environment Association, a Bharuch ngo.

On the second day after the fire, gpcb installed machines at Jitali, beil and at Aventis’ factory to monitor the air quality. It also told Down To Earth that parameters were by and large under control. But gpcb did not collect samples for dioxins, furans and volatile organic compounds, which would indicate the toxicity of the air. “No lab in India is equipped to test dioxins and furans, so what can we do?’ said R G Shah, environment engineer, gpcb. Asked about heavy metals, Shah said samples were sent to the Netel India labs in Mumbai on April 4. When Down To Earth checked with the company, samples had not been received till the evening of April 8.

Since nobody knows what was burnt—as happened in the Bhopal gas tragedy—it is difficult to monitor contaminants or check for toxicity. While incinerators burn waste at very high temperatures to eliminate toxins, the fire burnt the hazardous waste at a much lower temperature. This is bound to release high levels of contaminants, which will settle on land and water.

Even the quantity of waste stored at beil raised eyebrows. According to the records it submitted to gpcb, 12,825 tonnes of oil was lying in its compound—though it cannot treat more than 50 tonnes a day. The hazardous wastes rules state an industrial unit cannot store waste in its compound for more than 90 days. In May 2007, M S H Sheikh, director of Surat-based ngo Brackish Water Research Centre, had written to gpcb about the dangers of facilities storing hazardous waste for long. But no action was reportedly taken.

beil charges factories Rs 15 per kg of hazardous waste for incineration and the money is taken in advance. That means it collected over Rs 19 crore for 12,825 tonnes of waste oil but did not treat it. Activists also point out that the fire saved the company Rs 37.50 lakh, the cost of treating 250 tonnes of waste.

What caused fire?
BEIL officials, police, district administration and even gpcb are tight-lipped about the cause.

“One of the barrels might have gone in unchecked and some reaction could have caused the explosion. However, we cannot say anything till proper investigation is done,’ said Ashok Panjwani, director, beil.

The three-member committee constituted by the district collector, who is also the head of the District Crisis Group, submitted its report on April 9. “We have been unable to find out the cause of the fire but most probably it was due to a pyrophoric reaction between steel drums and stored waste,’ Harshad Patel, sub-divisional magistrate, Ankleshwar, told Down To Earth. The report noted many safety lapses at beil: no sensor to detect gas leakage; dangerous chemicals not identified and not kept in a separate area; very few fire-fighting equipment, Patel said. “We have proposed strong action against beil under the Indian Factories Act and under environmental laws. The collector has to give directions,’ he added.

“It is beyond our power to lodge an fir against them. But we will take action under environment laws. It is obviously a case of negligence and the fire is human-induced. We will act when the actual reason is ascertained,’ said Sanjiv Tyagi, member secretary, gpcb.

Safety, what’s that?

A visit to the accident site brought more shocks. Not a single fire hydrant of the company was visible. “It took long to douse the fire because the approach road was congested and the smoke dense,’ said Kotadia. A wall in the rear of the compound had to be broken to make way for fire tenders. According to Ibrahim Patel, a medical practitioner in Jitali, the situation could have been tragic had workers been trapped inside. About 40 labourers work at the site. “There is no emergency exit in the high compound wall,’ he said.

“I came here early morning after the fire and saw people covering the oil with mud. All that will seep into the groundwater. How can they run their business in the name of safe disposal?’ asks Sheikh. Workers also complain they do not get safety masks and often feel dizzy.

At this facility where extremely toxic waste is stockpiled, instead of increased monitoring and increased safety conditions, the reverse seems to be the case. Clearly, the lessons of the Bhopal tragedy have not been learnt.

Jidemadamma is among the few Soligas, an indigenous community, left in the hamlet. Soligas, literally meaning the bamboo children, are known for their environment-friendly practices and sustainable collection of minor forest produce. But most have migrated in search of livelihood since the government banned collection of non-timber forest produce ‘honey, lichen, amla, soapberry and soapnut’ their main source of income, about two years ago. Same is the story in other hamlets inside the sanctuary in the Western Ghats.

Migration is happening at a time the Soligas should be returning home, for good. The Scheduled Tribes and other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, recognizing tribals rights over forests, was notified on January 1, 2007. We thought once the act is in place our troubles will cease and people will come back, but there has been no change, says C Madhegowda, who works with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE) and is the first post-graduate among Soligas.

The ban on commercial use of non-timber forest produce was introduced in 2004 under the Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2002, but the Soligas continued collecting minor forest produce under Large Adivasi Multi-Purpose Societies until April 2006 because there was confusion whether the activity fell within the definition of commercial (see Stop trade, Down To Earth, September 30, 2004).

The produce collected by tribals was sold through multi-purpose societies in brt, Chamarajanagar and Hanur to the highest bidder. There are some 16,000 people in the sanctuarys core area who depended on selling forest produce and subsistence agriculture. They are migrating on a large scale.

Uprooted In Puranipur hamlet, 80 of 110 families have migrated. Most of them either work in coffee and pepper plantations or as contract labourers in farms and at construction sites in Kodagu, Wayanad in Kerala and as far as 150 km away in Tirupur and

Once self-sufficient, tribals are migrating to cities in search of livelihood

AGNIMIRH BASU

Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. In Kuntguri village on the foothills, tribals have permanently shifted to contract labour in the farms, says Sidappa Shetty of ATREE who has been working in the area for 12 years.

“Twice a week both my sons pluck weeds on the roadside for the forest department. Other days, they go to Chamarajanagar to work as coolies or construction labourers. Half the wages go in travelling expense. It is only because we have a coffee plantation, which buttresses our earning by Rs 4,000 a year, that we are able to survive, says Bummana Madhegowda of Muthugade Gadde.

Sale of forest produce used to constitute about 60 per cent of our income and a person could earn up to Rs 12,000 a year from it. Agriculture here is only for subsistence, adds C Madhegowda of atree.

Soligas shrugged The Soligas have for years monitored forest resources to determine what, how and when to harvest. They are not interested in it anymore. The adivasi societies and the Vivekananda Girijana Kalyan Kendra (vgkk), an ngo that has been working with the Soligas for 30 years, had evolved a system of participatory resource mapping. The purpose of the participatory system is to keep track of resources over time and space, and to monitor not only available stocks, but also regenerative capacity of trees and potential threats to resources, says Shetty in his study of the region. So during extraction of amla the tribals would remove hemiparasites, plants that partly obtain nourishment from their hosts, from trees. But since it did not happen this year, there were a lot of dead trees.

I cannot move around much. Earlier, all of us stayed together here. Now there is nobody Jidemadamma, Kaneri colony

The tribals have also stopped helping the forest department in checking forest fires and in March 2007 there was a big fire in the sanctuary that took the department about 10 days to douse. The fire was blamed on tribals who wanted to revoke the ban on commercial extraction of forest produce. A case was registered against 28 tribals, says C Madhegowda. According to H Sudarshan, honorary secretary of vgkk, the fire was partly due to lack of vigilance by tribals. The tribals played an important role in controlling big fires. The forest department employs 20-25 of them as fire watchers every year. This year the Soligas did not bother to check fires. Besides, very few people were employed for fire-prevention, he says.

Lack of tribals cooperation is also telling on trees and wildlife. Unchecked lantana has inhibited the growth of kidiya trees, on which elephants feed, and there have been instances of elephants rampaging and destroying whatever small crops people have. My husband Ramegowda has gone to Kodagu for coffee harvest. Here, too, we grow coffee, ragi and bananas. But three days ago, an elephant trampled the crops. Had it not been for our neighbours who alerted us that night, it would have destroyed our hut, says Nanjamma of Kaneri Colony.

Long wait vgkks honey and pickle processing units in the region are not getting enough honey and amla. There have also been instances of villagers selling honey to tourists illegally and we will not be able to control them for long if the ban continues, warns C Madhegowda.

On January 24, about 700 tribals held a protest meeting in Bangalore. The governor assured us that a committee would be formed with forest officers and tribal leaders to set conditions for implementation of the forest rights act, but gave no date, says C Madhegowda. The forest department says it will take some time to implement the act. After notification, it takes time to constitute various committees and decide upon the modalities, says R Raju, deputy conservator of forests, Wildlife Division, Chamarajanagar.

Till then, Jidemadamma will have to stay alone.

“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.