Back in 1888, the Glass Thermometer Company was set up in Watertown - a US town which owes both its birth and its name to the Black River. Its proximity to the cities of New York and Washington, and with the emerging Canadian market just across Lake Ontario, there was no better choice than Watertown for the factory. Easy availability of water to run its operations, and the convenience of discharging mercury waste in the Black River offered a win-win situation. Following the tightening of environmental regulations in the US, however, the company relocated its operations to Kodaikanal in 1983, and by 1988 it had become part of Unilever.
Pollution control laws were in its infancy during the 80’s in India which had helped Hindustan Lever register itself as a ‘glass manufacturing unit’ rather than one dealing in hazardous metal like mercury. Two decades later, the procedural omissions proved fatal for the workers and costly for the company. An independent public hearing conducted a year after the closure of the factory in 2002 had documented at least two dozen cases of acute illnesses and deaths among the ex-workers of the factory. Corporate crime was indeed committed, resulting in an out-of-court settlement of undisclosed amount for some 600 of its ex-workers.
Heavy Metal is an in-depth account of how a multinational company disregarded human and natural welfare at the cost of making profit which led to fatalities of its workers and irreversible poisoning of the pristine ecosystem. The Minamata Bay episode of mercury poisoning of the 50’s in Japan had indeed repeated itself. No lessons seemed to have been learnt as the horrible dangers of mercury remained systematically underestimated and ignored in the developing world. On top, the company had claimed its ‘highest standards of corporate behavior towards employees, consumers and the societies'.
Corporate claims are often beyond public scrutiny as the regulatory regime is known to give them the convenience of safe passage. It continues to perpetuate itself in the name of progress and growth, eco-disasters of the kind being one-off aberration in the scheme of things. With public memory short-lived and the court proceedings ever-lasting, corporate crimes end-up being a tiny blotch in the environmental history as curious cases of avoidable tragedies.
The Kodaikanal tragedy could have been avoided had due diligence been in vogue at all stages – from citing the industry to administering workers safety, and from adhering to waste-disposal guidelines to adoption of environmental norms. Instead, the company had violated all acceptable guidelines for toxic waste disposal measures, causing grievous harm to all life forms. Ameer Shahul, a journalist turned public policy crusader, has weaved a tragic story of greed, deceit and deception for which a heavy price has been paid by nature and local communities. Had there not been environment watchdogs, both alert individuals and committed organizations, the disaster would have gone unreported. Heavy Metal is an absorbing narrative on how collective endeavor by civil society actors had forced the corporate bull to bite the dust.
It was indeed more than just the story of a company closing its shop for violating all acceptable norms. Never before a developing country had sent back a consignment of waste material to a developed country. The case of ‘reverse dumping’, a term coined to express the new phenomenon, was not easy to execute. Greenpeace, a global environment watchdog, had facilitated shipping of 1416 drums filled with 290 tons of hazardous mercury waste from the Kodaikanal thermometer factory to its final destination in Pennsylvania. As a Greenpeace campaigner, Shahul was in the thick of all the actions that had made lighter the task of dealing with a heavy metal. Unprecedented victory notwithstanding, the turn of events in recent times have forced leading environment watchdog(s) to close shop.
Heavy Metal reads like a biography of mercury, the only liquid metal that exists at room temperature. It is extensively used in electronic and medical applications, but safe disposal of mercury waste has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. As a result, in recent times the US and many European countries have phased out the use of mercury. As non-mercury alternatives are expensive, dependence on devices using mercury continue to be produced and marketed in many Asian countries. Though mercury has a short half-life (the time required for one-half of the substance to decay), its exposure and impact on the flora and fauna has not be extensively studied. In the absence of scientific evidence, the full impact of Kodaikanal disaster on the entire ecological system may remain speculative.
Written with passion and clarity, the book raises many compelling questions. Has the disaster made environmental regulatory process more potent and effective? Has corporate negligence been made accountable under law? Have enough measures adopted to help avoid such future disasters? Have protocols for research to gather scientific evidence been any better today? Have remediation measures been developed to detoxify the contaminated sites? Each of these and related questions are begging for credible answers.
Heavy Metal recounts the struggle for environmental justice in India and how elusive it is despite decades of social activism. With activism having been throttled in recent times, corporate negligence of environmental regulations may remain lax. Through compelling storytelling of an environmental disaster, Shahul invokes the reader to be vigilant in capturing corporate maneuvering of the system to escape from its environmental obligations.
Without doubt, this terrifying cautionary tale of corporate negligence is essential reading. However, deft editing could have sustained readers uninterrupted engagement no less.
by Ameer Shahul
Pan MacMillan, New Delhi
Extent: 396, Price: Rs. 799.
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