Cracking a quicksilver crime

Corporate claims are often beyond public scrutiny as the regulatory regime is known to give them the convenience of safe passage.

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.    

Heavy Metal 
by Ameer Shahul
Pan MacMillan, New Delhi 
Extent: 396, Price: Rs. 799.

First published in the Hindustan Times on Oct 7, 2023. 

The enigmatic cultural icon

Can a river which has watered and nurtured an entire civilization from time immemorial be left contaminated, carrying an unbearable burden of silt and detritus?

Ganga strangely represents the physical manifestation of an accepted mythological duality – to be divine and vulnerable at any given time. Revered as a goddess, the river is endowed with two contrasting characters: one as an eternal deity of the flowing waters, the other as a carrier of the accumulated human misdeeds. This beguiling duality has allowed the river to be worshiped and neglected at the same time, regardless of its worth as a finite and tangible resource. Flowing through the heart of an ancient civilization, the unholy alliance between purity and pollution has kept this enigmatic cultural icon on the very edge of survival. It continues to survive nonetheless!  

In an insightful account of the myth, religion, history and development of the sacred river, the University of California historian Sudipta Sen delves into the duality manifest in the approaches adopted to ease the Ganga of the vexing problems afflicting its purity and flow. While attempts to clean the river of its pollution load have been victims of their own top-down ambitious scope, the mythological history of the river makes it difficult for multitudes of Indians to accept that the river may be in imminent danger. Despite the evidence of an unprecedented ecological decline, the unstinted faith in the divine powers of the river makes it easy for a vast majority to espouse confidence that the Ganga will never go dry like the great Yellow river of China. 

But can the river’s miraculous powers heal its own scars? Sen let’s mythology speak for itself to serve a possible clue. During her descent to the world, an anxious Ganga had asked King Bhagiratha: where shall she cleanse herself after people wash off all their sins in her waters? In his unexpected reply, the King had expressed confidence in the moral obligation of all upright mortals to carry out the unenviable task of expiating the sins of the world. Such is the power of mythology that it continues to inspire faith that the collective power of the sinners will rise one day to restore the river into its pristine state. Will it?

Within the study of the significant historical moments that shaped the river, the book offers two parallel but inter-related threads that connect the mythical and historic with the climate and ecology in getting a sense of the cumulative consequences of human activity from the past to the present. Far from learning any lessons from its rich history, argues the author, the uneven contours of the past are very much at work today. The purest of all rivers continues to remain the most polluted. And, there is no getting away from the fact that the great cultural icon is in trouble, suffocated by dams, encroached by overcrowding, and desecrated by discharge.  

Ganga is for anyone interested in how a river shapes human culture and its history, stimulating multilayered interpretations on its metaphysical threshold. It is an ambitious undertaking that blends geography, ecology, mythology and religion in presenting an intimate biography of the most sacred and beloved river. It is as much a celebration of its glorious past as a mourning of its pathetic present. It is scholarly treatise which, by author’s own admission, took twelve years in the making, and is an essential reading for those interested in understanding a river from its diverse social, cultural and spiritual perspectives.  

The book offers no quick fixes on redeeming the river from the civilizational onslaught. It instead asks why the Ganga, held in such reverence across a multitude of religious traditions, remains hostage to the promise of development and risks of degradation? It provokes the discerning reader to grapple with the river’s rich past and its most uncertain future. At this time when the cleansing and the purification of the Ganga has been an urgent and much-vaunted national priority, the book offers a nuanced understanding on the river from a cultural and civilizational perspective. 

A river which has watered and nurtured an entire civilization from time immemorial cannot be left contaminated, carrying an unbearable burden of silt and detritus. Sen argues that it is time we identify what stands in the way of tangible progress toward a cleaner and healthier river. The time to act has never been as urgent!      

Ganga: The Many Pasts of A River
by Sudipta Sen
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 445, Price: Rs 799.

First published in Civil Society magazine, issue dated March 2019.

Requiem for an urban drain!

What was river Thames to London in 1858 is the river Yamuna to Delhi now. The only difference being that the Indian Parliament is not close enough for its curtains to be soaked in lime to stop the stink emanating from the waste-laden river from disrupting the proceedings, as had happened in London then. Could its distance from the seat of power be the reason for gross neglect of the river which, for most part of the year, qualifies to be no more than an open drain? 

Neither is there a policy in India to ensure continuous freshwater flow in perennial rivers nor a law to protect a flowing river from being used as an open drain. Net result is that far from harnessing its ecological munificence, the glacier-fed river of immense cultural significance is being allowed to be wasted away in the capital. Official apathy notwithstanding, a motley group of ecologists have drawn together a ‘manifesto’, a declaration on plight of the river and views on its preservation. Published to commemorate an Indo-German outreach project on river Yamuna in India and Elbe in Germany, the bilingual manifesto offers a multi-disciplinary perspective on everything one would have liked to know about the river.  

It is quite unlikely; however, if the veritable decline of the river will be reversed anytime soon. Neither has there been a public outcry against its continuous deterioration nor a political resolve to bring the river back to life. Even a child knows that for a river to flow it should have an adequate amount of freshwater all the year round. And unless the city stops pouring untreated sewage into it, the river will continue to remain an open drain. Penned down by two river experts, Himanshu Thakkar and Manoj Mishra, the manifesto offers suggestions that can be worked to create a way forward.  It stops short of recommending ‘tough’ measures, though. 

Had Charles Dickens been alive, he wouldn't have been shy in describing Yamuna as ‘a dark, stinking sludge, and the scene of petty crimes.’....Link 

Yamuna Manifesto
by Ravi Agarwal and Till Krause (Eds)
Toxics Link/SANDRP, New Delhi
Extent: 122, Price: Not Indicated