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Book excerpt: The poisoning of Kodai

Former AFP journalist Ameer Shahul's new book, ‘Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kodaikanal’ is based on his reportage of the Kodaikanal case and later involvement with Greenpeace as a campaigner

 
By Ameer Shahul
Published: Tuesday 07 March 2023

Illustration: Yogendra Anand

In 1984, global consumer goods conglomerate Unilever established a mercury thermometer factory in the idyllic south Indian hill town of Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu. After the company had run its operations for 17 years, local community members and activists, aided by global non-profit Greenpeace, discovered a massive mercury dump in a nearby scrapyard in 2001. A year later, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board ordered a shutdown of the factory and the matter reached Madras High Court. The multinational company initially denied wrongdoing. But as evidence of mercury contamination became hard to refute, Unilever settled the issue out of court, providing an undisclosed amount to about 600 of its employees in 2016.

The excerpt below is from ‘Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kodaikanal’. It has been published with due permission from Pan Macmillan India

Based on a few visits to Kodaikanal from my new base in Bangalore and multiple meetings with the local community and campaign leaders, including Mody, Selvi Meenakshi and leaders of the ex-workers’ front, Raja Mohamed, K Gopala Krishnan and Mahendra Babu, it became clear HLL [Hindustan Lever Limited] had been handed an undue advantage because of the lack of scientific evidence. The community required scientific evidence demonstrating that the atmosphere had been contaminated with high levels of mercury, as well as medical evidence indicating that workers’ health had been harmed as a result of continuous exposure to mercury.

Some work had started, documenting and studying the epidemiology of the workers through the Community Health Cell (CHC) initiative by Dr Mohan Isaac. But there hadn’t been any serious efforts on two counts: there were no scientific studies to understand the extent of environmental pollution; and no progress had been made to retire the mercury waste lying at the factory. I focused my energies on these two areas alongside Mody, Meenakshi and the ex-workers, in addition to the pursuit to strengthen the medical evidence.

After studying more about how Greenpeace used science to verify the claims made by corporations, my first touchpoint was the Greenpeace Research Laboratory at the University of Exeter in southwestern England. I exchanged a few emails with David Santillo, the head of the laboratory, and with Kevin Bridgen, who was studying the environmental impact of toxic heavy metals. It was apparent a strong case could be built on science in this case.

David Santillo had already assigned senior scientist Ruth Stringer, who had previously surveyed waste stockpiles at the Union Carbide site in Bhopal and designed the clean-up strategies. Having worked on the Basel Convention and the Barcelona Convention, and ably supplemented by her biochemistry and chemistry education from the University of London, Stringer was on top of issues related to heavy metal contamination. By the time I joined Greenpeace, Stringer had visited Kodaikanal and collected a dozen samples of Lobaria discolor and Parmotrema reticulatum, two different lichen species commonly found in and around the location.

Our efforts were finally on track, though they were taking place at a snail’s pace. While carrying out literature review for her analysis and study towards the end of 2003, Stringer stumbled upon an interesting paper that had just been published in Environmental Pollution. It was noteworthy because it had conducted a similar lichen sampling as her study, in addition to collecting samples of another possible biomonitor candidate, a ‘moss’ from around the Kodaikanal factory. Even more interestingly, the study involved charcoal trapping, which had been used to find out the mercury levels in the surrounding air.

Stringer alerted Bridgen and Santillo at once. On a winter evening in 2003, I received an email from Santillo, with an attachment of a study on the pollution in Kodaikanal. Going through the article, aware that it had been published in a respected science journal, I was thunderstruck upon learning the extent of environmental devastation from its quantitative results. What simultaneously intrigued me was that this crucial evidence had caught the attention of a reputed Indian governmental agency like the Department of Atomic Energy [DAE]. Having seen the draft results of the study conducted by Greenpeace and discussed it in detail, the DAE study intrigued me.

While the Greenpeace samples were limited to two species of lichen, the DAE had used both lichen and moss samples—two different bio-monitors. While our sampling area was limited to a distance of one and a half kilometres around the factory site, the DAE sampling had covered up to twenty kilometres away from the factory. In yet another stark difference, the Greenpeace study was restricted to bio-monitoring, while the DAE study had additionally carried out air monitoring by using a charcoal trapping method.

And, finally, their study report had just been published in the most respected European environmental journal. It checked every single box required to refute the claims and defences of HLL, and outpaced Greenpeace’s study in every respect.

It was more than we could have hoped for. The first step was to establish a relationship with the DAE team, confirm the veracity of the study and explore all information beyond what had been reported in the journal. This was done within forty-eight hours through a few phone calls. My next move was to leverage this information for the next step. It was an easy task from here on, following the Greenpeace media strategy to instrumentalize the evidence.”

This was first published in the March 1-15, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth

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