Sitting atop the Palni hills, Kodaikanal, the premier tourist destination of Tamil Nadu, does not evoke images of pollution. A winding road through the hills lifts you from the stifling heat of Madurai, 121 km away, to the mist-covered town. Along the upper reaches, a trained eye can glimpse thickets of dark green in the folds of the hills, bordered by carpets of grasslands. These are the shola forests of the Western Ghats SITTING ATOP the Palni hills, Kodaikanal, the premier tourist destination of Tamil Nadu, does not evoke images of pollution. A winding road through the hills lifts you from the stifling heat of Madurai, 121 km away, to the mist-covered town. Along the upper reaches, a trained eye can glimpse thickets of dark green in the folds of the hills, bordered by carpets of grasslands. These are the shola forests of the Western Ghats. Renowned for their ability to retain water and release it slowly, the shola grassland ecosystem forms an important catchment for many rivers, and are home to many endemic and highly endangered plant species, and to animals like the Nilgiri tahr, giant squirrel, jungle fowl and gaur. There are three shola forests in Kodaikanal town alone. Unilever’s thermometer factory premises, now closed down, sits atop one. Every drop of water that falls on the factory site drains into the Pambar Shola. Chesebrough Pond’s, which Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) acquired in 1986, had relocated its thermometer factory from Watertown, New York, to this site in 1983. To get permission to construct the factory in a residential locality abutting an ecosensitive area, the company assured regulators that the factory was non-polluting. n 2001, environmental groups and villagers exposed the thermometer factory’s dumping of several tonnes of toxic mercury-bearing waste in a scrapyard in a densely populated part of town. Faced with the evidence, and HUL’s admission of breach of law, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) shut the factory. But in that waste lay the seeds of a long-term disaster. The factory site and the immediate surroundings are heavily contaminated, later reports assert. Nearly 10 years after, HUL’s deadly stain has spread beyond the hills, marking several government agencies who have helped HUL shut out public supervision and downgrade the clean-up. “Kodaikanal is Tamil Nadu’s Bhopal. We have our own toxic legacy; our own story of betrayal at the hands of the government and the company,” says Mahindra Babu, a former worker at the factory. Babu now leads a campaign that wants the Anglo- Dutch multinational to rehabilitate mercury-exposed workers and clean up Kodaikanal’s tainted environment. Babu blames his frequent nasal bleeding and childlessness, on the five years he spent working with mercury in the factory. In the last 10 years of fighting HUL, he says he has seen 28 of his colleagues die, most of them in their 20s and 30s. The TNPCB is presenting HUL with a roadmap to sidestep its responsibilities,” says Babu. “Just like in Bhopal, the government wants to shut people out so it can make things easy for the MNC,” he says. Babu’s allegations are confirmed by a 20 March 2010 letter to the Union environment ministry justifying the lack of public involvement in site remediation. In this letter, TNPCB claims a Supreme Court (SC)Monitoring Committee ordered it to wind up a key local oversight committee. In its place, a Scientific Experts Committee (SEC) was formed, TNPCB claims. TNPCB’s responses to RTI queries are revealing. The SC committee had never asked for winding up of the local supervision committee. And the SEC was never authorised to oversee site remediation. In December 2004, instructed by the SC committee, TNPCB had formed a Local Area Environment Committee (LAEC), with representation of ex-workers — to supervise all aspects of remediation. Simultaneously, a working committee with local residents’ representation was also formed with a similar mandate. Both committees functioned for less than six months, after which, TNPCB ignored the two and took all further decisions using the SEC. Earlier, decisions were vetted by the two local committees and conveyed to HUL. But, beginning August 2005, the public was shut out, and HUL and its consultants enjoyed full access to all meetings, according to K Gopalakrishnan, a former worker and a member of the LAEC. Documents obtained through an RTI also confirm Gopalakrishnan’s allegations. CONTRARY TO HUL’s claims that the factory was non-polluting, a 2002 report by the company’s consultant, assessing the extent of contamination, admits that more than 1.3 tonnes of mercury was discharged into the Pambar Shola, through which flows the Pambar River and eventually into the Vaigai River — a major source of fish, drinking water and irrigation. Moreover, at least 98 tonnes of mostly mercury-tainted scrap was sold illegally. “The Board was serious until 2003, and did everything transparently, when Sheela Rani Chunkath was chairperson,” recalls Babu. During this time, HUL had to export 290 tonnes of wastes. It was after the visit of the SC Committee in 2004 that things began to go wrong. The Committee directed the Board to “make an assessment of extent of contamination”. It also said, “A suitable agency may be appointed by the Board as project management consultant for site remediation”. Ignoring this call for independent data and oversight, the Board allowed HUL to hire Nagpur-based National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) as its consultant, to assess contamination and supervise remediation. Dr Tapan Chakrabarti, who had been part of the SC team that castigated the factory in September 2004, had now become NEERI’s Director, and, by mid-2005, landed key contracts for NEERI with HUL, arising out of the team’s orders. ON 16 AUGUST 2005, a two-member Tamil Nadu sub-committee of the SCMonitoring Committee, comprising Dr DB Boralkar and Dr Claude Alvares, wrote to the TNPCB, highlighting the irregularity. “The decontamination is being conducted by NEERI in association with HUL, and HUL is directly financing the consultant. This is not in keeping with the SCMC’s directions which require the work of remediation and rehabilitation be done through the Board.” Strangely, within a month, this sub-committee was replaced by another one with three new members, which overlooked the violation and NEERI’s conflict of interest. NEERI was against imposing stringent clean-up norms on its clients, arguing in its report that “the benefits likely to accrue out of stricter norms are to be compared against the additional cost to HUL that maybe incurred while undertaking such projects.” And so, where HUL had originally stated it will remove 7,358 tonnes of contaminated soil, the Experts Committee endorsed NEERI’s recommendation that only 3,477 tonnes (48 percent) needed to be removed. On 19 June 2008, the Board granted “permission to HUL to commence soil remediation”, taking 25 mg per kg of mercury in the soil to be safe, which is 25 times less stringent than what is allowed in the UK, where Unilever has one of its headquarters. To put it in perspective: one gram of mercury is sufficient to poison a 25-acre lake. A potent neurotoxin, mercury and its deadlier cousin methyl mercury can affect the aquatic food chain ending up in the fish we consume. This means that even after clean-up, the possibility that there will be enough mercury onsite to leach into and damage the adjacent forest areas remains.