Poisoned villages

The villages in and around the six kilometers radius of an industrial plant are dying a slow and painful death due to the poisoned ground water

               

The fields look barren and few crops that dot the rural landscape are dying slowly. Some have withered and few like the ladies-finger crop have taken a strange shape----leafless with the vegetable twisted into a snake-like shape.

“The village is dying a slow and a poisonous death due to callous industrialisation,” says bed-ridden Mayandi of Panakulam village, some 25 km from Madurai.

And before he completes his sentence, he coughs, and with all his bitterness says, “There is no hope for us. We poor people don’t have any voice and it could hardly be heard in the centres of power.”

As he groans in pain unable to move his feet. He blames the disease on the nearby factory whose toxic waste has poisoned the ground water table. “ I lost my wife Kaliammal due to strange illness as he shows the medical report.”

Kaliammal was suffering from intestinal obstruction. And the couple are not the only ones to have been suffering from diseases. There are many more villagers who are suffering from kidney, liver and uterus problems. Many have died of kidney and intestine problems.

The problem is not related to one village but several villages located in the proximity of five to six kilometres from the plant which manufactures hexagonal bolts, hexagonal nuts and socket head screws.

The farmers in the six villages surrounding the plant --- Aviyoor, Kadmumkulam, Arasakulam, Meenakshipuram, Tharaganenthal and Panakulam --- are solely dependent on the monsoons for a hand to mouth existence.

“Our water has been poisoned. It is hardly potable. Even the crops are slowly dying,” says Ramasamy.

He pulls out an onion crop and says, “Usually the yield from this soil was large but now the yield is too small. And if we use the well water, the crop instantly dies. You can imagine the level of toxicity of the water and the soil.”

Pointing towards the thick sheet of oil like substance in the well, he says this is the root cause of the problem. “Just taste the well water and you could get a feel of it,” he adds.

The study conducted jointly by Anna University and The New Indian Express on a sample collected from the village well has found out that the ground water at the site has high conductivity and TDS.

Even an Environmental Quality Assessment study done by NEERI earlier says the results of water environment survey indicate the ground water at the site has high conductivity, TDS, chloride, sodium, lead and boron.

There is also no trace of cattle in the villages. When asked, the villagers say most of them died due to the toxicity of water. And which survived, were hardly of any use to the villagers as the milk was not good enough to drink. As a proof, a villager takes out a letter from a local dairy farm, which says that there have been a lot of complaints over the quality of the milk. So they have stopped procuring milk from the villagers.

As the water is not potable in the five kilometers radius, most of the villagers are solely dependent on water from a nearby village, Barapathy. Even the company is procuring water from Kambikudi, a village nearly 5km from Aviyoor, says a villager.

“Earlier, we used to provide water for them. They even bought a land near Panakulam for drinking water. But after the water got polluted, they are procuring it from far off villagers,” he says.

“If we even bathe in the well water, we develop itching all over the body,” says Sethuraj, another farmer.

There is no disputing the fact that the water is not potable. A Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board has stated that the water sample is not potable and the TDS exceed the maximum permissible limit.

NEERI has advised the industry to recharge the borewell with reverse osmosis (RO) permeate water for effective dilution with proper monitoring of borewells.

One of the key recommendations of NEERI was that the test bore-wells provided near the sludge disposal pit should be monitored once in a month to ensure that no contamination is occurring in the ground water with respect to TDS, chlorides, chromium, zinc and iron, besides other parameters.

NEERI has also advised the company management to provide potable water to the villagers and also to conduct minimum of one medical camp each year. But the villagers claim, the company has hardly carried out any of recommendations.

“More than 200 to 300 wells in the area have been affected. And when we try to approach the government officials to take action against the company, they take action against us,” says Aviyoor panchayat president, who has involved in a bitter legal battle against the company.

“The irony is that the company is using our land and resources but instead of paying us the royalty, they are paying it to Kambikudi panchayat,” he alleges, adding, “the recently announced pro-farmer schemes by the United Progressive Alliance government for the farmers are just a lip service. Nobody is bothered about us.”

Talk about the legal battle, he loses his temper. “Everyone is giving a certificate that the water is polluted but nobody is saying what causes the pollution.”

“The company is successful in divide and rule policy. They just have to bribe a few villagers and they will turn against one another,” he alleges.

The legal tussle against the company ended in 2004 when the court ordered the villagers to deposit an amount of Rs 25,000 so that NEERI could do an independent study. Ironically, the villagers didn’t have that much financial expertise and the case couldn’t progress. Lajapati Rai, the counsel for the villagers, had sought legal aid in the Supreme Court for the villagers but that too was of no avail.

Now the villagers have lost hope. Many have turned woodcutters like 55-year-old Ammasi. “I did have four acres of land. But hardly anything grows. Now I am reduced to penury,” says the farmer with tears in his eyes.

“I have one boy and three girls. It is hand to mouth existence for us,” he says.

Some of the farmers have left their lands and migrated to the urban areas to work as construction labourers while some are banking on monsoons, so that at least they can grow something. “But it is a lost cause. We hardly get anything,” says Ramasamy.