Villagers in Jitali and surrounding villages located near Ankleshwar’s BEIL (Bharuch Enviro Infra Ltd) plant have decided to launch an agitation opposing the Madhya Pradesh High Court order allowing the disposal of 346 tonnes of toxic waste of the Union Carbide(now Dow Chemicals) at BEIL unit by the end of January 2009.

The 350-odd tones of highly toxic waste is as of now lying at Bhopal’s defunct Union Carbide plant. The waste is causing air, soil and water pollution.

In an order, a bench of chief justice A K Patnaik and justice Ajit Singh set aside objections raised by the Gujarat government and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) for disposal of the Bhopal plant’s toxic wastes at Ankleshwar.

The court also threatened to initiate contempt proceedings against those who objected to incineration of toxic at Ankleshwar .

Jitali gram panchayat’s sarpanch’ Mehboob Bhai and other office barers of the panchayat said this would risk the lives of the people staying just 500 meters away from BEIL.

They said the facilities here are not enough to take care of toxic waste and high court judges should visit Ankleshwar for the verification of it.

Meanwhile, Rohit Prajapati of Vadoara based Paryavaran Suraksha Samiti opposing the order of Madhya Pradesh High Court, questioned that how the high court could direct the government of Gujarat which is not a party in the case.

“The Gujarat government must challenge this order in the Supreme Court if they are so conscious about environment issues,” Prajapati said.

Gujarat has yet to clear it’s own backlog

Sources in Gujarat Pollution Control Board said that it has its own backlog of 7,000 tonnes of toxic waste waiting to be incinerated at BEIL and how they can allow the solid waste from another state for disposal.

The court had earlier ordered disposal of the waste at Ankleshwar, but the Gujarat government had opposed it; first by citing opposition from local NGOs and later a fire in the incineration facility.

Gujarat government had already filed a petition and even obtained a stay against the threat held earlier by the Madhya Pradesh HC to initiate contempt proceedings against it and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB).

Madhya Pradesh has it’s own toxic dumping site

Gujarat argued that the toxic waste be moved to Pithampura, about 180 kms from Bhopal, where the Madhya Pradesh government has already developed a dumping site. About 40 tonnes of hazardous waste from the site was recently disposed of in Pithampura. The Madhya Pradesh state government had carried out the operation in the dead of the night to pre-empt the NGOs who had warned they would not let the waste to be removed.

Gujarat also relied on the observations of Supreme Court Monitoring Committee, which in their April 2004 report, had stated that groundwater of the area is so polluted that it is not fit to drink, to argue its course.

It was following that report that an order was passed directing Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh Governments to supply fresh drinking water through tanks or pipes.

Questions on BEIL’s capacity to handle the waste

A report filed by a German company, GTZ GmBH, in 2007, came up with some startling findings on BEIL’s capacity to deal with the Bhopal waste. According to GTZ GmBH, international cooperation enterprise for sustainable development with worldwide operations, there are no fire detectors in storage areas and no on-site fire brigade. Also, drums larger than 60 litres must be manually emptied and repacked in plastic bags, which could harm the employees in Ankleshwar, stated the report. It further found that BEIL’s facility was not equipped to handle highly toxic waste and that its emission standards were not what they were meant to be. This was quite evident from the massive fire in BEIL warehouse when the toxic waste was being disposed in incinerator on April 3, 2008.

A report comparing the Treatment Storage Disposal Facility (tsdf) in biel and with the one in Biebesheim, Germany prepared by Eckart Schultes, hazardous waste management expert in Karnataka says the small facility at Ankleshwar can cause fluctuations in temperature, causing mercury emissions. Emissions of chemical pollutants and acidic gases at the facility are likely to be several times higher than what many internationally available incineration technologies generate; and land filling of dust and ashes from the incinerator without stabilisation can contaminate local environment with toxic heavy metals, salts and inorganic compounds. All these can cause long lasting health and environmental problems to 100,000 people in the area.

The waste, says the report, will be manually emptied and re-packaged in plastic bags. This involves high health and safety risks and the facility is inexperienced to handle this since it has been operational for only two years.

According to the report, the landfill at Madhya Pradesh’s Pithampur too is unsafely located on a hill and rainwater can get into it. It has inadequate monitoring of leachates. According to Satinath Sarangi of Sambhavna Trust, an advocacy group, a small amount of toxic material disposed inefficiently can cause environmental problems at both the sites.

This is just a 7% part of the problem

Of the 5,000 tonnes waste stored at a warehouse in the DOW’s Bhopal factory, 345 metric tonnes will reach Ankleshwar-based Bharuch Environ Infrastructure Limited (biel) in Gujarat for incineration.

Another 40 tonnes will be disposed in a landfill in Pithampur in Indore. These are 6.9 and 0.8 per cent of the total waste.

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation Department (bgtrrd) is awaiting clearance of the complete schedule of the disposal procedure from the high court.

Environmentalists in Gujarat are worried that once Gujarat starts dumping this much of waste, more waste would be brought then after. Gujarat should not become a dumping ground for toxic waste.