IDUSTRIAL POLUTION

Industrial estates of Gujarat are cesspools of filth and

environmental health hazards. Yet the government is
blindly promoting industry

Gujarat has more than 90,000 industrial units, according to

the state government. About 8,000 of these units are
polluting, also says the state government. Major polluting
industries are located in the Vadodara Petrochemic

Industry at any cost

growth, figures fail to hide the
grim realities of environmental
pollution. While, the state
governments are only bothered
about industrial growth, the civil
society is struggling to draw public
attention to the impending danger
to the environmental 2000)

Maharashtra and Gujarat. The

brightest jewels in India’s
industrial crown. But impressive
industrial alue added by to the raw
materials through manufacture in the factory sector of the country comes from
Maharashtra (23.66 per cent) and Gujarat (12.64 per cent). Easily, the two most
industrialised states of In al Complex, Nandesari, Ankleshwar, Vapi, Vatva and
Hazira near Surat. The Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) was
managing 270 industrial estates as on March 1996, and its activity plan for the year
1998-99 included sanctioning of eight new ones. “About 70 per cent of the
investment in Gujarat since the 1970s has been in the chemicals sector,” says R C
Trivedi, former chairperson of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB).

He says that in the 1970s, the state government was encouraging small-scale units in
the chemicals sector through financial incentives. “These industrial units came up in
huge numbers. But the government gave a very low priority to the environment.
This is why environmental problems cropped up in Gujarat,” says Trivedi.

Nowhere more so than in the nearly 400-km stretch between Vapi in southern
Gujarat and Vatva in northern Gujarat, called the golden corridor, an
industrialist’s dream come true. This stretch has become a hot bed of pollution. “In
the golden corridor, we have created a number of potential disasters similar to the
Bhopal gas tragedy. The time-bomb is ticking very
fast,” says Achyutbhai Yagnik, secretary of Setu, an
Ahmedabad-based ngo. Another example of an env

The state government has planned the ‘Infrastructure

Vision 2010’, which hardly lays any focus on
environment. In a meeting organised by gec in Ahmedabad on October 29, 1999, K
V Bhanujan, principal secretary of finance to the state government, had observed:
“The ‘Vision 2010’ is a focused and comprehensive document on infrastructure. But
environmental concerns in general or anticipated as a consequence of the
implementations of the vision have not been even touched upon anywhere.”

Blackened rivers Take the case of the farmers from 11 villages

Gujarat’s rivers are bearing thebetween Lali and Navagam, who irrigate their fields
brunt of industrial pollution, as
with untreated effluents released into the
are the people living on the Kh. Nearly 100 tubewells and borewells
banks of these rivers. All the have been contaminated. “When factories
major rivers and st were prevented from dumping effluents in
the Mini river, they resort ari rivered to
reverse boring, pumping untreated effluents
A tractor unloads hazardous straight into underground aquifers,” says Children from
industrial waste brought from Sahabsinh Darbar, 73, a farmer from villages near
the factories in Nandesari to Sherkhi village in Vadodara district. Nandesari learn
the disposal facility their lessons in
We do not require any study to confirm colour from the
that channels and rivers in Gujarat are polluted. You can see that from the water they drink.
colour of the water,” says Mayur Pandya, a noted lawyer who chaired a In this particular
committee set up to investigate pollution of Khari river near Ahmedabad case, the water is
by the Gujarat High Court in 1995. So, what have the people done e lack of yellow.
p