Toxic waste lands in states’ bin

State governments, and not the Centre, will be responsible for tracking hazardous waste that crosses their borders, according to a circular issued by the Union environment ministry.

Updated on: Apr 21, 2010, 23:26:48 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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State governments, and not the Centre, will be responsible for tracking hazardous waste that crosses their borders, according to a circular issued by the Union environment ministry.

According to the Hazardous Wastes (Handling and Transboundary movement) Rules, the states will be solely responsible for tracking more than 100 metals, including lanthanum and yttrium, many of which can become radioactive.

The Centre issued the circular six days before eight persons from Mayapuri were hospitalised after being exposed to toxic material that the authorities had failed to detect.

States, however, said they did not have resources to perform such checks. “We can only give advisories to traders for ensuring safety,” said Siddhanth Das, member secretary of the Orissa Pollution Control Board, which receives imported hazardous waste for industries in Sukinda from West Bengal. “We don’t have the capacity to check every piece of scrap coming in and regulate the trade.”

A scientist with the Central Pollution Control Board, India’s main pollution watchdog, admitted that most state pollution boards did not have enough specialists to enforce the new rules.

Other states said the responsibility belonged to the Centre, specifically customs.

“It is the job of customs to ensure nothing dangerous enters India,” said N.K. Singh, nodal officer for hazardous waste with the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board, which the new rules hold responsible for regulating metal scrap. “We have to register a trader for allowing imports. We can’t check scrap.”

Cobalt-60, the radioactive material in Mayapuri, was found in a scrap dealer’s godown.

Customs officials said they lacked the manpower to check every container of scrap, nor was it their job. “If all papers are in order, the import is allowed,” an official said.

Around 3,000-4,000 tonnes of metal scrap enter India every day through six major ports. The scrap is distributed to dealers across the country.

According to the new rules, a trader registered with the state pollution board can import metal scrap without prior consent. Before granting registration, the state must check if the trader has proper facilities to safely store hazardous
waste.

Ministry sources insisted the new rules were meant for public safety. “It was done to make hazardous waste rules more effective as the ministry sitting in Delhi cannot find what a trader in Gujarat or Tamil Nadu is importing,” an official explained.

“Decentralisation is good,” said Ravi Aggarwal of NGO Toxic Link, though he doubted whether state pollution boards could take on the task.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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