A Polluting Industry is a hazardous “Normal”. Keep them locked! - Day #19 (12 April 2020) 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #19 (12 April 2020)

A Polluting Industry is a hazardous “Normal”. Keep them locked!

What has the COVID19 crisis to do with Industry? A CII report from India says most firms would face 10% revenue loss due to the lock down, and there will be many layoffs. The CII has asked for a fiscal stimulus package for the industry. The tourism industry body predicts a loss of Rs 5 lakh cr and job cuts for 4-5 cr people. They have asked for a salary corpus fund from the Government. The World Economic Forum(WEF) has said that 50 millions jobs are at risk in the travel and tourism sector, with 30 million from Asia alone. The auto industry in India stares at a $2 billion loss, as factories and dealers shut shop due to the lock down. The impact of the crisis on industry is huge, and is mounting by the day. We surely do not know when this will end, and when things will be back to “normal”.

But we also have to realise that in a totally different sense, “normal” was itself a crisis, and a noxious and costly one at that. After the lock down, city after city – Delhi, Bangkok, Beijing, Sao Paulo and most industrial towns in most of the Covid19 hit nations reported a surprisingly positive change in the air quality and in their water bodies. It was so clean, that people in these places celebrated the welcome change by sharing thousands of pictures of their surroundings - scenes some have never seen in their lives. Pictures comparing the “then” and “now” from Yamuna river and the Rajpath in New Delhi, the cityscape from Bangkok, clean looking photos of empty streets, the Himachal mountains visible from Jalandhar filled the social media space. (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/11/positively-alpine-disbelief-air-pollution-falls-lockdown-coronavirus) There is a wide realisation across nations that human activities – transportation, construction of buildings, burning of waste and above all the polluting industries were cause for the “normal”. This “normal” changed with the lock down.

The industry lobby has already started their assessment of the losses and have submitted demands for “relief” packages as fiscal stimulus to start functioning. For instance, the industry lobby in the United States has already cornered hundreds of billions of dollars, a lion’s share, from the ‘relief’ bill of $2.2 trillion, while there is wide criticism that the average American has got only pittance. But quite intriguing was the action from the Environmental Protection Agency, whose mandate is to ensure compliance to air and water pollution and hazardous materials norms. They ordered the suspension of all environmental enforcement for industrial polluters, thus leaving the nation’s environment open to worse pollution than ever before. The industry which has always been unhappy about complying with environmental norms, and who found an ally in Trump seems to have used the crisis as an opportunity to further deregulate polluting industries. This has direct impact on human health and long-term environmental damages, the cost of which they are least interested in calculating.

To reiterate, Harvard University conducted a study to determine the link between exposure to air pollution and the Covid19 mortality in the United States. They found that “A small increase in long-term exposure to PM2.5 leads to a large increase in COVID-19 death rate, with the magnitude of increase 20 times than observed for PM2.5 and all-cause mortality. The study results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 crisis.” ( https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/covid-pm ). Francesca Dominici, the study’s senior author quipped that “If you’re getting COVID, and you have been breathing polluted air, it’s really putting gasoline on a fire,”. They explain that fine particles penetrate deep into the body, promoting hypertension, heart disease, breathing trouble, and diabetes, all of which increase complications in corona virus patients. The particles also weaken the immune system and fuel inflammation in the lungs and respiratory tract, adding to the risk both of getting COVID-19 and of having severe symptoms.

The evidence that pollution adds fuel to mortality in an already mortal attack by a virus such as Covid19 is indisputable. Since most of the Covid19 cases and deaths were from urban centres, one needs to assess how many of these cases and deaths we could have avoided with a zero pollution policy. Industries have been primary sources of air and water pollution across the world. In India, where industries run with such laxity, and where regulation is archaic and monitoring steeped in corruption and a systemic lack of capacity, one can imagine the situation. There is mounting evidence that industries are being allowed to violate environmental norms so that they can operate in these adverse conditions. I wish to bring two cases that happened during the Covid19 crisis.

The media reported the breakage of an ash dump yard wall at the Reliance Power owned Sasan Ultra Mega Power Project in Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh, last friday. Of the six people reported missing, two died and four were still missing. The spillage has inundated several acres of agriculture fields and a reservoir. This is the third time its happening in just one year.

In repeating incidents reported from our own Kerala, highly polluting chemical factories in Eloor-Edayar in Kochi has reportedly dumped kilolitres of effluents and tonnes of hazardous waste into the River Periyar, during the lock down period, in connivance with the Kerala State Pollution Control Board, who even after repeated complaints from the local people, refuse to take any stringent action.

Covid times are also polluting times for some unscrupulous industries. The culprits in most cases are not just the corporate concerned. Purushan Eloor, an activist living in Eloor-Edayar, and leading a number of corrective actions against polluting industries say, “I would accuse four people here, in this order. The No.1 culprit is the Pollution Control agency, for they have all the people, expertise, resources, equipments and the mandate to regulate pollution, but have never done so. The second in line is the management of the company, the third is their workers and trade unions, who have no issues striking against the management for all sorts of reasons, but will never question them on a pollution issue. Finally, its the people, all of us. We seem to be criminally complacent.”

Post-Covid, the polluting human activity – Industry, vehicles, construction, waste burning – can all be regulated, provided we have a pollution control agency that acts, and acts strongly. Covid demands such a change from them.

But, I do feel that post-Covid, we should simply not allow any industry that has closed shop, to reopen without clear commitments to guaranteeing a clean production system. Those factories that cannot guarantee this, and has an inherent behaviour of polluting, for technical or economical reasons, should not be allowed to function. The fiscal stimulus package that Governments will have to give to revive the industrial sector, should be to move them out of the “normal” and change them towards the growing aspiration of the post-Covid world - clean air, clean water and healthy world. If a Virus can force us to move out of the toxic “normal”, I don’t see why we should not be able to do this ourselves.