Extracted Page: http://www.circleofblue.org/2017/world/indias-toxic-trail-tears/

By Keith Schneider

Circle of Blue – June 6, 2017

KODAIKANAL, India –In the dogged community of eco-activists, journalists, and artists that find common ground defending Tamil Nadu from rapacious development and rampant pollution, Nityanand Jayaraman stands out.

The only son of a central government Revenue Department administrator, Jayaraman spent his middle class boyhood living in three Tamil Nadu cities where he developed an allegiance to justice and the earth. His undergraduate engineering degree from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, and a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University in the United States provided plenty of technical horsepower. The rest comes from within.

Tall and articulate, well-informed and restless, Jayaraman is highly regarded in southern India as an environmental writer and public interest activist. He is as equally adept at conducting penetrating investigations of institutional malfeasance and mismanagement as he is organizing demonstrations that force government and business executives to action.

That reputation has a clear starting date. On March 7, 2001, Jayaraman and several colleagues made public the findings of a three-month investigation of shoddy waste disposal practices at a thermometer manufacturing plant here owned by Unilever, the London-based consumer products multinational that makes Dove soap, Klondike ice cream bars, and other household goods. The calamity was unfolding in the unlikeliest place: a tourist hill town high in the Western Ghats, the forested mountain range that forms the border between Tamil Nadu and neighboring Kerala.

Jayaraman learned about the plant’s unsafe disposal practices from a friend who lived in Kodaikanal and worked for Greenpeace. With the help of another friend who was a photographer, Jayaraman documented in pictures and on video a 7-ton mound of mercury-laced broken thermometers illegally stored under a blue tarp in a scrap yard in the middle of this hill town of 36,500 residents. The two also discovered empty barrels and mercury-contaminated wastes strewn on a steep hillside behind the factory.

Mercury is a proven neurotoxin capable of causing brain damage, liver and kidney injuries, birth defects, and systemic illnesses even at low levels of exposure.

“We knew how dangerous these wastes were, and how big this story could become,” Jayaraman said in an interview. “We let plant workers know what we found. We organized a big demonstration to make sure that it would be on television and the company could not deny it.”

A video shot that day shows hundreds of workers chanting and marching in protest through Kodaikanal to the plant gate on St. Mary’s Road. A young and vocal Jayaraman, then 32-years-old, is already there to confront one of Unilever’s senior Indian plant managers.

“Are you going to be taking responsibility as a responsible organization?” Jayaraman demands.

“I would not like to comment on this now. I’m not authorized to speak to you now,” the manager replies.

Jayaraman persists. The manager, aware that he’s being taped and the crowd surrounding him is growing larger, keeps talking and blurts a statement that is entirely unfounded. “There’s no waste which is going outside this factory,” he says.

A Mercury Poisoning Event of Global Significance

The facts that Jayaraman and his colleagues disclosed that day produced a cascade of notable consequences for Unilever workers, the company, for Jayaraman, and especially for motivating Tamil Nadu’s public interest community. The evidence of unsecured mercury waste elevated environmental and social activism to much greater popular acceptance and prominence in Tamil Nadu.

A southeast India state along the Bay of Bengal, Tamil Nadu is an ancient place long identified by its centuries-old fishing and farming economies. But rapid population growth over the last three decades and India’s focus on a resource-intensive, western-style development strategy lured big industrial plants and projects. With them came mounting levels of water and air pollution, and serious workplace hazards that Indian authorities and industrial executives have been slow to address.

The Indian people, though, are super sensitive to industrial accidents, especially those involving toxic chemicals.

2017-01 India Tamil Nadu DMalhotra_C4A7817-2500

Nityanand Jayaraman, one of Tamil Nadu’s most respected journalists and activists, broke the story about mercury contamination in Tamil Nadu and helped lead the long struggle to compensate Unilever workers and their families. Photograph © Circle of Blue / Dhruv Malhotra

Indians mourned the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people in the years after a 1984 leak of poison gas from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in history.

The actions that Jayaraman exposed in Kodaikanal were a new chapter in a national legacy of corporate indifference. Three weeks after the big demonstration at the Unilever plant, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board revoked the factory’s operating license and the plant shut down. Unilever formally closed the plant the following June.

State investigations and intensive reporting by Jayaraman and other journalists laid bare a haphazard 18-year operating history that began when the plant opened in 1983. Kodaikanal was chosen for the plant site because its cool mountain temperatures were supposed to make mercury much easier and safer to handle. The Kodaikanal factory produced nearly 10 million mercury thermometers annually for markets in North America and Europe. But it did so with scant attention to safety.

Hundreds of workers complained about serious health effects from exposure to mercury. Workers concluded that mercury exposure led to at least 45 premature deaths among their colleagues, most of them in their 20s and 30s. Environmental investigators found mercury at elevated concentrations in land and water across Kodaikanal.

India’s Toxic Trail of Tears

India’s Toxic Trail of Tears

Extracted Page: http://www.circleofblue.org/2017/world/indias-toxic-trail-tears/

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