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

A Time Bomb We Await - Hillary Clinton was here to urge a dangerous deal — that the US never has to clean up another Bhopal mess!

THE FALLOUT of Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India could be dangerously nuclear, literally. Clinton’s India visit had an important agenda – to urge India to pass a law to ensure that a Bhopallike disaster does not trouble its victims for as long as the 25-year-old tragedy has. There is one twist, though. Bhopalis are not the subject of this proposed legislation. Rather, the ‘victims’ that the two Governments are committed to helping are US multinationals like GE that are champing at the bit to supply nuclear equipment and lure India’s $175 billion nuclear market. India expects to set up 40,000 MW of nuclear power plants over the next 20 years.

The poor little rich American corporations are petulant. State-owned companies like France’s Areva SA and Russia’s Rusatom are already in the race to supply equipment to India. But private sector players like GE and Toshiba Westinghouse say they will not invest until India ratifies the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSCNL) and installs a domestic civilian nuclear liability regime. They want no part of the liabilities arising out of a Bhopal-like disaster. Rather, they say, the entire liability in the event of a catastrophe should be borne solely by the Indian operator of the facility. Like his predecessor, President Obama is pushing India to guarantee that the Union Carbides of the nuclear world suffer no losses regardless of the role that may have been played by their equipment or technology in causing the disaster.

Exclusive liability for operators of facilities and supplier immunity may have been the norm in earlier nuclear liability conventions adopted by some nations. “But then, no other nation has suffered a Bhopal like disaser,” states Kanyakumari-based anti-nuke activist S.P. Udayakumar. Indeed, Union Carbide’s decision to deploy flawed design and untested technology contributed substantially to the magnitude of the disaster.

An unnamed minister quoted in a June 27 Business Standard article says the Government has a draft nuclear liability bill ready. “What this will do is indemnify American companies so that they don’t have to go through another Union Carbide in Bhopal,” he said. Local operators, on the other hand, will have to raise $450 million up-front to cover post-disaster compensation costs. Additional costs will have to be borne by Indian taxpayers. The Price-Andersen Act in the US also imposes a similar burden on the American taxpayer. According to Cato Institute, the free market think-tank, this could translate into a subsidy of 2 to 3 US cents for every unit of electricity generated. Another estimate places the annual subsidy extended by the Price Andersen Act to the industry at about $3 billion.

Ironically, the liability cap — $450 million — is exactly what Union Carbide paid for the Bhopal disaster. Whittled down from the original $3 billion that the Government estimated as the cost of compensation, the final settlement when spread across 6 lakh victims amounted to a paltry $500 per victim – insufficient even to cover a year’s medical bills, leave alone pay for treating sick children born after the disaster.

BHOPAL ACTIVISTS are “disgusted” by the attitudes of the Indian and US Governments. “A nuclear disaster will have far greater impact than Bhopal had. Environmental contamination will spread farther. Bhopal has taught us that $450 million is woefully inadequate to deal with a disaster’s fallouts,” said Rachna Dhingra of The Bhopal Group for Information and Action. In 2006 and 2008, Bhopal survivors, including children, walked 800 km to Delhi to demand for economic, medical and environmental rehabilitation, provision of clean drinking water, and punishment of the guilty corporations from the Prime Minister. On both occassions, the PM conceded the demands, albeit after making them wait for months on the streets of Jantar Mantar, and suffer police torture. Till date, he has not delivered on his promises.

Contrast this with the speed at which the UPA and the US Governments are moving to appease corporate interests. During his visit to Washington in March 2009, India’s special envoy Shyam Saran told the Americans that progress was being made on the liability law. In April, he said the internal processes for India’s accession to the CSCNL were complete and promised that the law would be enacted after the national elections. During Clinton’s visit, this was a significant point on the agenda.

A panel discussion organised on the eve of Clinton’s visit to New Delhi was openly critical of the proposed liability regime. But the organisers – the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace and the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal – clearly stated that they were not opposed to the concept of a liability regime. “But such a law should be informed by the experiences of disaster victims, rather than be influenced by the interests of corporate perpetrators of such disasters,” a statement by the two organisations clarified.

Such progressive legislation is not without precedent. Post-Chernobyl, the trend in civilian nuclear liability law began tilting towards unlimited liability, and non-exclusive liability. Non-exclusive liability would allow victims to recover compensation from operators under dedicated nuclear liability laws, even while keeping their options open to asserting claims from other defendants under other statutes such as product liability laws. Countries like Japan, Austria, Germany and Switzerland have already done away with the cap on liability.

Austria, through a 1999 law, additionally opened up liability to suppliers and service providers. None of these countries have ratified any of the international conventions relating to liability because these laws do not adequately address victims’ needs.

India’s liability bill is likely to be modeled after a draft prepared by FICCI’s nuclear task force, comprising key beneficiaries namely NPCIL, Tata, Reliance, Larsen & Toubro and Gammon India. Strangely, all this talk about disaster liability, and the normal tone in which these discussions are being held hides a sinister possibility: That despite all assurances given by India’s nuclear proponents that a nuclear disaster will not happen, the fact is that the nuclear industry is already negotiating to cut its losses in the event of a such a calamity. Private industries want the business, but don’t want to bear the risks. The Indian nuclear establishment wants the technology, even if it means exposing Indians to the risk of being hurt by a nuclear disaster. Even worse, it is asking future victims to make do with what little compensation may be on offer from their own tax money in order to ensure that private equipment suppliers are not inconvenienced. If these are the costs, is nuclear power even worth it?

-NITYANAND JAYARAMAN

(The Author is a journalist and

activist volunteering with the

International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal)

From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 6, Issue 30, Dated August 01, 2009