Communities in Kerala Demand DDT Clean-Up

“People in Eloor-Edayar crave for justice,” declared their Local Area Environment Committee. “They want air to breathe. They want water to sustain life. They want land for agricultural operations to make a living. They were there even before the industries. The industries flourished and the people perished. People lost not only their property, but also even their health, future and even the future of their offspring, thanks to the system that systematically failed the law.”

Eloor is an island on the River Periyar in the state of Kerala, India—situated about 17 kms from where the river flows into the Arabian Sea. Eloor and the adjacent community of Edayar support the largest industrial belt in Kerala, with over 247 chemical companies. For more than fifty years the communities of Eloor and Edayar have suffered pollution from these industries producing petrochemical products, pesticides, rare-earth elements, rubber processing chemicals, fertilizers, zinc/chrome products and leather products. Most of these facilities employ decades-old polluting technologies, taking large amounts of fresh-water from the River Periyar—the lifeline of Kerala—and in turn discharging concentrated effluent with very little treatment.

Among the polluters is Hindustan Insecticides Limited (HIL), India’s last DDT factory and its major producer of endosulfan, the insecticide recently banned for use in Kerala due to the damages done in villages surrounding cashew plantations. HIL was established in 1957 with support of the Indian government and the World Health Organization (WHO). The production of insecticides at HIL has generated huge quantities of hazardous waste as well as semi-processed and unused chemical stockpiles, dangerously contaminating the HIL compound and its surrounding areas and streams.

The struggle of the Eloor-Edayar community against pollution is also decades old. In 1999, a Greenpeace study declared this industrial area one of thirty-five “Global Toxic Hotspots”. The study found more than a hundred chlorinated chemicals including DDT and its derivatives in a stream draining the effluents from three factories, including HIL, that drains into the River Periyar eventually out to sea. Greenpeace also found Eloor residents far more likely to suffer from and succumb to a range of serious ailments than residents of a less-polluted riverside village upstream of the industrial estate.

In 2004, propelled by an order from the Indian Supreme Court that state Pollution Control Boards must show cause as to why industries without requisite environmental and other authorizations should not be closed down, the KSPCB ordered over a hundred industrial units to tighten up hazardous waste disposal and served closure orders on thirty-two of them—including on HIL.

However, no attempt was made either to clean up already-accumulated wastes, or to plan for the future by requiring companies to reduce toxic substance use and toxic chemicals release from their factories in a time-bound manner.

Responding to complaints by community members and environmental groups, a Supreme Court Monitoring Committee visited the Eloor-Edayar area in October 2004. Upon discovering attempts to sabotage the Local Area Environment Committee—set up by KSPCB to supervise implementation of environmental clean up—the court granted the Eloor-Edayar Committee powers to conduct an environmental audit of all the 247 industries in the area and to report to court on industry’s compliance with all environmental laws.

The Local Area Environment Committee functioned smoothly for a while and gathered data from more than one hundred companies. But it ground to a halt when KSPCB added trade union representatives and more officers of the PCB to the Committee.

Disheartened by all the foot dragging, on September 17, 2006, over 500 residents from Eloor-Edayar convened a “People’s Rights Declaration Convention.” They presented nine demands to the government and WHO, including provision of medical facilities for the victims of industrial pollution; cleaning up the forty-one organochlorine compounds found in local waterways; monitoring air pollution; and establishing an “Environment Protection Brigade.”

Members of political parties, labor organizations and environmental experts emphasized the urgent need for mitigations to protect the residents’ fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian constitution to “clean air, clean water, good health and safe food.”

Local organization Periyar Anti Pollution Committee is collaborating with the residents to demand safety from persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and other waste discharged by HIL and other industries. The Periyar committee recently surveyed more than 300 local residents and documented chronic health problems, including urinary tract infections, nausea/vomiting, allergies, skin diseases, menstrual and uterus problems, hearing and visual defects, asthma, learning disabilities in children, physical weakness, headache, muscular ailments and rheumatic diseases, birth defects, kidney and liver diseases, cancer, heart problems and neurological afflictions.

Periyar Anti Pollution Committee, Thanal (a major activist group based in Kerala) and other members of the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN) conducted an analysis of eggs collected from households in the vicinity of a hazardous waste incinerator and HIL in Eloor, as part of IPEN’s 2005 global Contamination of chicken eggs study. Eggs examined in Eloor were found to contain four times the level of DDT, and three times the level of dioxins, as limits set by the European Union, as well as levels of hexachlorobenzene.

These studies, combined with results of an Environmental Impact Assessment conducted in 2004–2006 by the Local Area Environment Committee, convinced residents that their food, soils, water and air are laden with intolerable levels of toxic chemicals.

At the time of writing, The Hindu reported that a high level Kerala State Legislative committee was planning to visit the Eloor–Edayar region to assess the environmental situation and to consider the demands in the People’s Declaration.

As the Declaration states: “There is a growing political understanding that a paradigm where the present and future generations are denied clean air and water cannot be seen as development. Scientists…all over the world are working towards a dream of a hazardous pesticides- and chemical-free world.... This vision statement is being put forward with a lot of hope by the people of Eloor and Edayar villages with the intention of achieving this dream.”