DMK’s real 'scam of the decade’, which puts the 2G scam to shame !

At play in the fields of the lord

DMK’s stint at the Environment Ministry straddled two coalitions and three terms: within it lie clues to the unraveling the real 'scam of the decade’, which puts the 2G scam to shame

BY Shantanu Guha Ray
Delhi

It is ironic that the same headline-grabbing story of the 2G or second-generation spectrum scam that alerted people to the curious fact of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s (DMK) 12-year uninterrupted stint in Delhi, straddling two coalitions and three terms, has managed to hide the fallout of this fact despite the 24-hour media glare. There is an unacknowledged and irreparable loss to India’s ecological and natural resources due to decisions taken by DMK ministers TR Baalu and Andimuthu Raja during their terms as environment ministers. If a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) is ever formed, which looks unlikely as of now, it should probably be examining the environmental and pollution crimes committed by the two with as much vigour as it investigates the spectrum scam.

It may be recalled that Baalu was the Union Minister for Environment and Forests from October 13, 1999, to December 21, 2003, during the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance government. He was succeeded by Raja, who was in charge of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) from May 23, 2004 to May 17, 2007. It was during his tenure as MoEF minister that the Raja-Niira Radia relationship blossomed in January 2006, which made environmental clearances for various projects of Radia’s clients easier. Radia's influence in the ministry was an open secret. Actually, the roots of the present scam can be traced back to Raja’s incarnation as environment minister when environmental clearances for various projects brought companies across sectors closer to him. With the assistance of RK Chandolia, then a director, planning and coordination, in the ministry, and Radia, clearances were granted at a supersonic speed.

During the terms of the DMK ministers, the MoEF had almost decided to grant a self-certification option which would have exempted project expansion and modernisation proposals from seeking environment clearances, through one of the major amendments proposed to the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification, 2006, which delineates a legal process for the grant of environment clearances to industrial and infrastructure projects.

Raja’s tenure as environment minister has been termed by environmental groups as the “death certificate” of the MoEF. EIA notifications were first issued in 1994 under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986. In the 20 years from 1986 to 2006, the MoEF cleared 4,016 projects. According to the 2009 report by the environmental group Kalpavriksh, entitled ‘Calling the Bluff: Revealing the state of Monitoring and Compliance of Environmental Clearance Conditions’, the MoEF cleared 80 to 100 projects every month with a range of environment and social impacts. Under the new EIA 2006 Notification, 2,016 projects were cleared between 2006 and 2008 in just two years. The MoEF chose to have no database on the extent of compliance of the projects it cleared. Those projects which were cleared under his regime now merit rigorous scrutiny.

Besides, the appointments for the Expert Appraisal Committees (EACs) and their conflicts of interests also need to be examined and their decisions reviewed. Under the EIA notification of 2006, the EACs’ role at the fourth stage of environment clearance (after the EIA report and the public hearing) is of enormous significance on sectors such as river valley and hydel/thermal power projects, industries, mining, infrastructure, etc. By 2005, out of 64 members in the various EACs, almost two-thirds of the members were from the National Capital Region and Tamil Nadu. It is as if most of the expertise on environment must come from DMK’s legislative constituencies so long it is in power.

The story of P Abraham, the former secretary, Ministry of Power, who was appointed in April 2007 by Raja, reveals the rot that set in during the DMK (mis)rule. Even though he was a proponent of hydropower projects, he was appointed to chair the EAC on River Valley and Hydroelectric Projects. After this was exposed by environmental groups, he was made to resign by the present environment minister. But no investigation has happened into all the clearances granted under Abhraham’s tenure.

If Raja’s tenure at the MoEF was a disaster for the environment, under his predecessor, Baalu, it had assumed a surreal garb. Instead of making every firm liable for their environmental crimes, Baalu launched the (mouthful) “Government's Charter on Corporate Responsibility for Environmental Protection” (CREP) on March 13, 2003, while arbitrarily choosing 17 out of the 64 heavily polluting industries under the highly polluting “red” category. A MoEF official, on condition of anonymity, had then commented that this done to attract funds for fighting elections which were then around the corner.

A Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) official revealed anonymously that in order to prepare this charter, some 17 meetings were held almost between 5 December 5, 2002, and January 10, 2003. In fact as many as four meetings took place in a day on some occasions. The “negotiations” for even this effete charter continued till March 12, 2003.

Even though the issue of monitoring and implementation was left unaddressed, Baalu had told the media, “We will not punish any industry if it fails to implement the charter, as such an act would be against the spirit of voluntary compliance.”

Both A Raja (left) and TR Baalu had headed the Environment Ministry earlier

Showing remarkable innocence, Baalu had the said that the pollution control boards and the industry would work together to check pollution. The (voluntary) CREP is applicable to 2,098 units in 17 categories of major polluting industries, including sugar (525 units), pharmaceuticals (397 units), distilleries (232 units), leather (150 units), pesticide (150 units), cement (126 units), fertilizer (111 units), dyes and dye intermediates (100 units), pulp and paper (96 units), thermal power plants (83 units), petrochemicals (51 units), caustic soda (35 units), refineries (17 units), iron and steel (8 units), aluminium (14 units), copper (6 units) and zinc (4 units). It recommended toxic technologies like incinerators, which emit harmful dioxins, to deal with hazardous waste of all kinds. In fact, to facilitate this move, there was at that time a proposal to make import of incinerators duty-free.

Meanwhile, the 150 units belonging to the pesticide industry suggested segregation, detoxication and treatment of highly toxic waste streams by standards set up by the industry itself.

Unlike the pesticide industry, the cement industry was unable to come to a consensus on the exact radius of the area around a cement plant that is vulnerable to pollution. When they were unable to decide whether the belt under threat of pollution around the project should be fixed at 3 or 7 km, the then special secretary, MoEF, VK Duggal, using remarkable mathematical genius, fixed a 5 km limit, it being the average of the two contending limits.

For other disagreements that any industry body had with the charter, the ministry had a simple solution – it simply deleted the problematic clauses. One clause in the charter required “all the major tannery units to obtain ISO 14000 certification by December 2004”. This was deleted. The section on tanneries exploring the possibility of “sulphur recovery (for reuse) from sulphide-bearing effluents, by December 2005,” was also removed from the charter.

The chlor-alkali industry benefited the most from such omissions. The draft charter had proposed shutting down all chlor-alkali plants based on mercury cell technology by December 2005 and had directed them to adopt membrane technology. The deadline was removed from the charter. Had the timeframe for compliance been retained, it would have seemed consistent with the incentive given in that year’s Union budget to encourage the shift to membrane cell technology. The incentive related to a 10 per cent reduction in customs duty on components of membrane cell technology. This was to make their import cheaper.

The charter requires the industry to reduce mercury consumption to below 50 gm for every of product manufactured, which is still very high. As of now, mercury-based chlor-alkali units are being allowed to release approximately 25-30 tonnes of mercury annually to produce 500,000 to 600,000 tonnes of caustic soda, in comparison to best-practices of Western Europe, where only 9 tonnes of mercury is consumed to produce 6 million tonnes of caustic soda.

Although the petrochemical sector and refineries is included in the list of highly polluting industry, it was treated with notable softness. When asked about punishing the industries which do not comply, Baalu had once said that the charter incorporates voluntary initiatives and the industry would self regulate.

Needless to say, there was no civil society consultation in drafting CREP. The two-day seminar at Ashoka Hotel, Delhi, where the charter was released, resembled a corporate launch.

Not surprisingly, less than 50 per cent of the projects cleared in 2003 had monitoring reports generated by the MoEF, and only 150 of the 223 projects cleared in 2003 had at least one compliance report submitted by project authorities.

Clearances by the DMK environment ministers ignored issues like soil erosion and land degradation for projects impacting about 146.82 million hectares of the country’s total geographical area of 328.60 million hectares, besides generation of 4.4 million tonnes of hazardous waste across the country during this period, and poisoning of the food chain as evidenced in Punjab where 287 toxic chemicals were detected in the umbilical cord blood in a mother’s womb. The resulting human costs due to callous and corrupt decision-making put the financial loss in the spectrum scam to shame.

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp?filename=Ws241110ENVIRONMENT.asp

Deschooling Farmers

A new bill in Tamil Nadu puts farmers at the thrall of agriculture university graduates On the last day of its budget session the Tamil Nadu assembly passed 30 bills without any discussion. One of them was without parallel. If the governer signs the bill, writings of Thiruvalluavar, Oovaiyar and many more poets would become unlawful as they have several things to say about farming. Let us forget the people long dead. Even prominent personalities associated with agriculture like Norman Borlaug, the doyen of the modern agriculture system, cannot give suggestions to farmers in Tamil Nadu.
A first suggestion will attract a fine of Rs 5,000; they will be fined Rs 10,000 if they repeat their crime. They might even be imprisoned for six months. The Tamil Nadu State Agriculture Council 2009 says only those with a degree from three universities in Tamil Nadu can counsel farmers. Such esteemed advisors will be called agricultural practitioners—like medical or legal practitioners. All farmers of Tamil Nadu will have to abjectly follow the agricultural graduates. Many of these graduates would have seen a paddy plant for the first time during their college life. What the agricultural universities all over the world have done so far is to pick up farmers’ innovation, work on it, improve it and give back the farmers their knowledge—packaged very often as a new product. Has an agricultural university ever discovered a food crop or pioneered the domestication of any animal species? During colonial rule, agriculture universities were geared towards the export market and towards mills in Manchester. But many British scholars did acknowledge farmers’ knowledge. One of them, Albert Howard, declared “Indian farmers will be my professors for next five years”. In every village community the knowledge of farming is embedded in folk songs, stories, and riddles. A Tamil riddle asks: “ Adi kattula, nadu mattula, nuni veetula. athu yenna? (What is the item at whose base lies the field, cattle is at its middle and the house on the tip?) This answer is paddy. The riddle can give a lesson or two to our agriculture economists. When paddy is harvested we leave the basal portion in the land as it is of no use to the farmer or the cattle. The straw goes to cattle, which give the farmer milk and supplies draught power and provides manure. The land and the cattle were nourished from what the farmer cannot use. The result was the tip, the grain, kept inside the house. The green revolution taught the farmer to feed the soil with fertilizer, a work he earlier left to nature. It brought in new types of seeds, which left his cattle without fodder. He was forced to sell the cattle and lost the manure. He could not keep the grain inside the house; he had to sell it to repay loans. He also had to part with his wife’s jewels and the land documents. If the government was seriously interested in helping the farmer then it should have directed the scientist to go to the villages and learn from them. Let’s take the technology that officials and those used to jargon refer to as the system of rice intensification. The farmers had begun using the method since the late 1990s but the government programme began in 2002. That farmers are way ahead of government thinking is a challenge to the managers of agriculture science, who have sold themselves to Monsanto and other multinationals. In fact, the vice chancellor of the Tamil Nadu Agriclutural University had, sometime ago, said, “The university will promote Bt brinjal seeds.” Laws will not stop farmers from sharing experiences. But this bill, if enacted, will rob the farmers the choice of to whom he/she should listen. This is a violation of one’s fundamental right. (R Selvam was a government official till 1994 when he began organic farming) Courtesy: Down to Earth, Sep 15, 2009