Hello,
India has a dozen laws and regulations to protect the environment, an environment ministry, central and state pollution control boards and a special court for environmental cases. Yet a billion-dollar company has got the nod to expand its iron manufacturing operations despite failing to control pollution for a decade and submitting inaccurate details to snag clearances.
The story on how Vedanta won clearances for pig iron plants in Goa is emblematic of the sheer disregard for environmental laws and regulations in India, which are lines drawn to keep the environment and human health safe from scofflaws. But in India, these lines are so often crossed, with little repercussion: In the last 3 years, only 39 people were convicted under environmental laws in India of the 1,737 cases registered for polluting and breaking norms.
Goa’s twin villages of Amona and Navelim house the billion-dollar company’s pig iron manufacturing industry. Vedanta describes itself as the largest merchant producer of pig iron in India and charted a Rs 701-crore expansion plan for its plants. For that, it needed environmental clearances.
In January this year, the environment ministry granted clearance to the company to amp up its operations in the plants despite an adverse environmental audit and reports by the Goa pollution control board, reveal documents studied by The Reporters’ Collective. The ministry’s own inspection report has confirmed hazardous graphite emissions from the plants, the Goa pollution control board has found that the plants have been consistently polluting the environment beyond permissible limits, and in the past two years, the board and the Ministry had served two show-cause notices to the plants for causing environmental harm.”
After 14 years since it was first reported, the plants continue to spew graphite, a form of carbon dangerous to human health.
Documents show Vedanta, the namesake of the great Hindu philosophical school of thought that teaches nondualism, had repeatedly given incomplete/inaccurate information about its facilities, including whether the two of its plants are a single entity, that is one expanded from the other, or two distinctly separate projects. It did so to ensure the bar is set low to win environmental clearance for its plants, to blindside the public and to spend less money on environmental protection than they would have had to. But Vedanta was let off with a rap on the knuckle for all these that could have got their project proposal rejected or clearances cancelled.
The victims are ordinary Indians, most of them poor, who live closest to plants that snow graphite on them, which can cause pulmonary diseases, organ damage, skin and eye irritation. But for most of us, this is a danger that still feels distant, away from where we, our children, parents live and breathe.
The story by my colleague Tapasya pieces together clearances, inspection reports and court cases, some of which are a decade old, to tell a revealing example of why so many companies escape punishment despite violating environmental laws.
Click here to read the story published in The Wire