Cashews for human life?

For over 20 years, the villages near the cashew plantations in Kasargod district, Kerala, have been devastated by an unusually large number of cancer deaths, neurological disorders and different kinds of physical and mental impairment. Recent reports in the media and studies done in the area indicate a strong link between the spraying of a pesticide called endosulfan and the deteriorating health of the local people. The State administration appears to be oblivious to the situation. While the people have now turned to the courts for a solution, the tragedy of slow poisoning in Kasargod underlines the despotism of a certain kind of progress that is at the cost of human health and life, writes NIRMALA LAKSHMAN who travelled there recently.

THE steep hillsides and the leafy gorges of the South Kanara- Kerala border glisten with a muddy beauty in the monsoon. Deep potholes punctuate the rain-washed roads and the uneven terrain is sometimes masked by sudden sheets of water that flow from the culverts onto the open highway. This is a land that is green and beautiful and yet its undulating topography harbours a deadly peril. In the small hamlets and villages scattered across Kasargod, death lurks in the air and water. For over 20 years, these villages have been devastated by an unusually large number of people dying from various forms of cancer, young adults with congenital neurological disorders, children with cerebral palsy and mental retardation, and lately an increase in the number of suicides in the area.

Most of the families who live here are small farmers or farm labourers. There is no large industry fuelling the local economy except the areca plantations. Families also grow other minor forest produce and garden vegetables for their own consumption. The Plantation Corporation of Kerala (PCK) has been cultivating cashew in 4500 hectares spread across this district. Since the early 1980s the PCK has been aerially spraying an organochlorine pesticide called endosulfan that has been banned in many countries including Singapore, Denmark, Germany, Holland and Sweden. Over the last several months, various reports in the media as well as studies done by institutions like the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi have indicated a strong link between the aerial spraying of endosulfan and the number of deaths and illnesses in the area. There has been no response from either the Government of Kerala or the Central Government to the continuing tragedy in this region.

In the small government primary school at Vaninagar, nearly 40 per cent of the children who come from the "plantation side" show definite symptoms of illness ranging from cerebral palsy and physical abnormalities to mental retardation. Udaya, 12-year-old son of a small farmer, Sundara Shetty, has cerebral palsy. He walks with difficulty and the teacher explains that he frequently falls down with convulsions. Mahesh, Satish and Jayakumari are siblings. Mahesh and Satish are mentally retarded and Jayakumari is a slow learner. She has extra toes on her feet and fingers on each hand. We meet eight-year-old Shruti. She is bright and beautiful and loves coming to school. Her legs are twisted and muscular development is very poor. Her mother died of cancer a few years ago. Her stepmother carries her to school whenever she has time. On other days, it is a long and painful journey to the classroom.

Shree Padre, a progressive farmer, activist and journalist who lives in Padre village, first noticed that something was very wrong in the area in 1981. He wrote a report for a weekly in Andhra Pradesh on the births of mutant and deformed calves in Enmakaje panchayat in the Kasargod taluk within six months of the spraying of endosulfan in the area.

Dr. Y.S. Mohana Kumar, the local physician who has been practising here for about 20 years, wrote to the Kerala Medical Journal in 1997 recording the unusually large number of people suffering from diseases of the central nervous system and soliciting the intervention of medical researchers in the baffling problem. "There was no response at all," he says. Acutely distressed by the situation, Dr. Mohana Kumar has been painstakingly documenting all the cases that have been coming to his notice. In a random survey, he conducted (updated until February 16 this year), he records 202 cases of people from about 400 houses in an area of four square kilometres with psychiatric problems, mental retardation, epilepsy, congenital anomalies, cancer deaths, suicides as well as those currently suffering from cancer. According to Dr. Mohana Kumar, these 202 cases are from 126 houses and 48 families have two or more family members who are ill. In two families, there are five people who are ill and in three families there are four members who have impaired health.

Shree Padre and Dr. Mohana Kumar both feel that they have evidence enough to suggest a strong link between the pesticide usage and the afflictions and also feel angered and saddened by the lack of response from the Kerala Government and from the central government. "We are always being asked to prove the link," says Mr. Padre. "What kind of arrogance is this? We cannot prove it, let them disprove it." The Endosulfan Spray Protest Action Committee which they and other local people have set up with school teacher Aravinda Yedamale as chairman, are receiving more and more information on similar illnesses from other villages in Kasargod district such as Enmakaje, Kumbdaje, Adhoor, Mulleria and Periye. More than 200 houses come within a few kilometres radius of the spraying area. In the village of Padre alone, there are 19 cases of mental retardation. Ramana Naik, a resident of the village who joins us for a discussion, points out that in the nearby village of Belur in the Nettanigai panchayat, more and more cases of strange illnesses and early deaths are emerging.

While the Padre panchayat has passed a resolution saying that the spraying has to be immediately stopped, most people we met did not seem to think that things would change. The sense of powerlessness among the village people is palpable. Worse, the knowledge that life has to be lived without hope. Hope for themselves that their days could be trouble free and that the lives and futures of their children would not be blighted. Although some people still do not specifically correlate the spraying with their predicament, almost everyone is aware that during spraying, (three times a year until recently) and in the immediate aftermath there is an alarming increase in allergic reactions for people living close to the plantations. Breathing difficulties, skin allergies, vomiting, giddiness and headaches are common. Allegedly, the PCK workers are also affected. Although no detailed documentation has been made of their health status, cases of workers and family members with the same kind of illnesses are emerging. Mr. Padre speaks of the case of a worker whose 18-year-old son was recently operated upon for a tumour. Forty-year-old Derakka, a PCK worker from Belur village, died of cancer recently.

Leelavathy of Periye village, who is employed by the PCK as an assistant agricultural officer, has been waging a battle in court against the PCK. Her brother, who moved close to the plantation to supervise the construction of her house, fell ill before the house was finished. He developed a persistent fever, his vision grew blurred and he had joint pain and other troublesome symptoms. After a month of hospitalisation, he died suddenly. When Leelavathy and her family finally moved into the house, they too were not spared. Her son and daughter fell ill with similar symptoms and all the family members experienced breathing difficulties and skin problems that became aggravated during the spraying periods. Apart from costs of medicines and endless visits to hospitals and doctors she has spent close to Rs. 1,00,000 fighting her case. Because of her efforts the munsif court ordered a stay in aerial spraying in Periye although ground spraying still continues, says Leelavathy who also feels that health problems have decreased in intensity in the area after aerial spraying was stopped.

Mr. Padre emphasises that these cases of illness are not confined to a small area such as Padre and surroundings alone. In Rajapuram village in Hosdur taluk, there have been 10 cancer deaths within a two kilometre radius. Those who live closest to the area of spraying as well as those who live close to the Kodenkiri steam flowing through forested tracks seem to be the worst affected. Obviously, the residue of the chemical in the flowing water has caused the maximum damage to those living closest to it.

We meet Narayan Bhatt and his wife Sumathi who take care of Bhatt's two nephews and niece. The boys, 16-and 20- years-old, are mentally and physically handicapped and their 14-year-old sister is epileptic. The Bhatt family has lived here for generations and they say that there has been no history of ill health in their family until now. Narayan Bhatt's sister, who grew up in the area and also spent her pregnancies with her family, left her children behind with her brother as her husband did not want to be burdened with them. While the Bhatts care for these children like their own, it is obvious that they are very worried about their future. "The cost of medicine for epilepsy is also increasingly expensive as she is slowly getting worse," says Sumathi.

We visit another house further upstream. Here, Sheenappa Shetty, a farm labourer turned small farmer and his wife Muthakka care for their adult sons, both of whom are physically and mentally disabled. Their young teenage daughter committed suicide in a fit of depression a few years ago. Everyday existence is a huge struggle for this aging couple. They get no assistance from the State and no inputs in the care of their boys either. Muthakka recalls picking cashews from the plantation regularly when she was a young woman and eating them as well. Most children and teenagers have been doing this over the years, particularly as it is a good supplemental income for their families. Sheenappa Shetty speaks to us sorrowfully and yet with an unusual grace. He hesitates to name the culprit but his anguish is obvious; how will he and his frail and aging wife care for two grown young men who are heavily built and unable to do anything for themselves? As if echoing these questions, Kitanna, the 22-year-old, looks at us wordlessly. One of the most painful aspects of this tragedy is the fact that in many instances it is the younger generation, now in its early twenties, that is ill and dying. The assistance of Rs.100 a month from the state for the handicapped has also not come for the past year and a half, says Sheenappa Shetty. His income from his land is insufficient to meet their family's need, he says.

Medically, there is no solution available for the people who are already affected, says Dr. Sripati Kajampady, a local medical practitioner and another active campaigner against the pesticide spraying. "What is unusual is not the illnesses, but the number of people who have it," says Dr. Sripati. " Despite so many direct interventions and appeals, there has been no response," says Dr. Sripati. "The courts are our best hope." The despair is obvious. The initial shock at the lack of concern of the district administration and the local politicians and those who claim to represent the people's interest in various quarters, including in the Kerala assembly, has given way to a sadness and loss of hope that adds to the poignancy of the situation. Even though the local people have obtained a stay order on aerial spraying they feel that it is likely to get vacated when the case comes up for hearing in late July.

While aerial spraying has been stopped temporarily, there are reports that manual spraying still continues in some parts of the plantation. During the aerial spraying operations which went on until late last year, none of the precautionary measures such as covering water bodies during spraying, notifying the public of the operations well in advance, notification and compensation if domestic cattle died because of spraying, all set out in the Pesticide Act of 1971, were followed.

S. Usha, a research associate with INTACH who conducted a survey along with her colleagues among 250 families in the area, and another survey by theSociety for Environmental Education in Keralam (SEEK) found that local people experienced certain acute symptoms after spraying as well as more long-term health problems such as stomach, throat and intestinal cancers, gynaecological problems including infertility and regular miscarriages, brain damage, hormonal problems and an increased tiredness.

About 50 families live inside the plantation according to the survey and the surrounding area has a population of about 5000. Between 60 and 80 per cent of the people in the area have been affected by the spraying. The workers in the plantation are not given any protective clothing such as masks and gloves and stand for long hours in the cashew groves inhaling the pesticide. According to Usha's survey, there is an increase in the number of dead birds and small wildlife, frogs and fish in the small streams and rivulets after the spraying. Cattle have also been seriously affected.

A Thiruvananthapuram based group, the Thanal Conservation Action and Information Network, which has done extensive investigation on organic pollutants and studied the effects of endosulfan in Kasargod, said that endosulfan has been classified as a Restricted Use Pesticide. "The chemical has been proven to be an endocrine disrupter and genotoxic. The main target organs are the central nervous system, kidneys, skin and reproductive system." They also say that accidental ingestion and breathing of high levels of endosulfan results in convulsions and death. Is the menace of the tea tree mosquito and other fungus found affecting the cashew plantations periodically really reason enough to spray a pesticide that endangers public health, asks the Thanal report. C. Jayakumar, co-ordinator of Thanal also points out that with the acceptance of non-chemical management practices among farmers, and the availability of organic production methods of cashew as opposed to chemically intensive cashew production, there is no reason why the PCK cannot adopt these practices.

Classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as highly hazardous, endosulfan was at the centre of controversy in the Philippines in the 1990s when Hoechst contested its restriction and the ban of higher formulation by the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority. Professor Romeo Quijano of the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the College of Medicine, Manila, said in a paper that the claim of Hoechst that "consumer safety was proven is utterly false and grossly dishonest. Several studies ... consistently show that endosulfan is highly poisonous and easily causes death and severe acute and chronic toxicity to various organ systems including mental impairment, neurologic disturbances, immunotoxicity, reproductive toxicity ..." In India, as C. Jayakumar says, the recommendations of the Banerjee report as early as in 1991 said that endosulfan should not be used near water sources, but strangely the R.B. Singh review report of 1999 does not say anything more about this and other recommendations but only that the "recommendation to continue the use was implemented".

When the PCK came to several villagers to draw blood for their own testing, many of them refused to co-operate. Jayanthi, whose son Harshitha is eight years old and severely brain-damaged, did not allow the PCK to conduct tests on her son. She is in tears as she speaks to us. She knows that for Harshitha the future is bleak and has little doubt that the pesticide is to blame for their blighted lives. She and her husband, Shankara Moolya, who works in a nearby soap factory, actually lived inside the plantation until a few years ago and even now the cashew groves are a stone's throw from their modest house.

There are many other people in small dwellings, in interior forest tracks and in the villages engulfed by the vast acres of cashew trees whose lives have been permanently altered by such unexpected tragedies. Dr. Mohana Kumar introduces us to a young family where both the children have been born blind. The young mother grew up in the plantation and there is no history of blindness in the family. In another house 30-year-old Geeta, who lies in a heap of contorted limbs on the floor, smiles at us in welcome. She is tiny, less than four feet in length, and can barely move; her development has been arrested in early childhood and yet she is not fully mentally disabled and can speak and communicate fairly well. As we leave, we carry with us the memory of her haunting smile. Seventeen-year-old Mamata lives across the hill. She is a victim of epilepsy and is also handicapped physically. Her mental development is not normal.

Mr. Padre points out that her lorry driver father has spent enormous amounts of money on her treatment and yet there is little hope of improvement. According to her mother, her bad spells are increasing and the family is finding itself overwhelmed by her illness.

Although there continues to be a shocking lack of response from official quarters, widespread reports in the media and lobbying from local groups led the Director of the National Research Centre for Cashew (NRCC) to write to Cashew Research Stations all over the country asking them to "refrain from recommending endosulfan forthwith". The reasons he cited in the communication dated March 8 this year included the fact that long term exposure to a single pesticide is an unjustifiable practice and that endosulfan has been in use continuously for more than 25 years in spite of the availability of other equally effective pesticides. Dr. E.V.V. Bhaskara Rao further stated that as endosulfan has already been in use in a number of crops, at least by withdrawing from cashew, to that extent exposure to endosulfan could be limited. However, Dr. Bhaskara Rao clearly qualified the communication by firmly stating, "This decision to withdraw endosulfan neither supports nor contradicts its suspected role in the abnormalities reported from Padre village."

Mr. Padre points out the paradoxes in the NRCC letter. While Dr. Rao says that "environmental protection and human safety should also receive equal if not more attention over simple economics", he also suggests "equally effective chemicals" like monocrotophos, carbaryl, quinalfos, phosalone and dimethoate. "Have the long term effects of these chemicals on human beings been tested?" asks Mr. Padre. " It took 30 years for us to understand the irreparable hazards believed to have been caused by endosulfan. When some poor men raise an apprehension about the hazards of pesticides, instead of investigating the matter, the government and scientists ask them to prove it. The effects of slow poisoning may be really slow but when they surface, it is too late to do anything," he adds bitterly.

Meanwhile, the CSE sent a team of scientists to Kasargod late in February and took samples from Padre. Dr. Sripati Kajampady assisted them. Soil, water, bovine milk, butter, vegetables, fish and blood samples were extensively drawn and tested at CSE's Pollution Monitoring Laboratory. The test results were shocking. "Alarming" high levels of endosulfan residues were found in the blood, tissues, water, milk, soil and fruit and vegetable samples. The report says, "It is beyond doubt that the dramatic cases of endosulfan poisoning in Padre village in Kasargod district of Kerala can be directly linked to a decision-making process dominated by a government undertaking which has resorted to aerial spraying of endosulfan thrice a year from 1976 onwards without sufficient back-up from, or debate with, experts in other disciplines, including pesticide experts, social scientists, environmentalists and others."

The CSE's report states that the maximum residue limits for the pesticide in the soil, water and vegetables from Padre had been breached several times over. "But human blood! We could not find any maximum residue limit for that. The tests conducted at the CSE laboratory show that each resident of Padre whose blood sample was tested has endosulfan residues several hundred times the residue limit for water."

Anil Agarwal, Director of the CSE, says he was "stunned" when he first saw pictures of the victims of endosulfan from Padre. In a communication to The Hindu, Mr. Agarwal raises several issues. The first is the role of the medical community, which despite repeated pleas from Dr. Mohana Kumar over many years, did not respond at all. The second is the apathy of local administration, which appears to be oblivious to the distress of the people. The third is the management of pesticides "Everybody knows that the aerial spraying endosulfan is not recommended without major precautions being taken," says Mr. Agarwal. If toxic substances can be used without any controls are we saying that their use and production is more important than public health? he asks. A central issue is also one of economic development, the mode of industrialisation that uses more and more toxic substances and the urgent need for the scientific community to be more interactive with the media and civil society groups so that information is available to challenge interest groups, says Mr. Agarwal.

Lawrence Surendra, economist and development expert, discussing the situation at Padre also stresses that the tragedy is connected to our greed for using agriculture for export crops and spraying poisonous chemicals for production, unmindful of the extreme damage to human beings and natural systems.

He feels that "the tragedy is of the scale of Bhopal, the 'silent Bhopals' everyone spoke about in the aftermath of Bhopal but which we have slowly forgotten". Milan Kundera's words used so often in the context of Bhopal "'the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting' will and should keep ringing in our brains," he says.

In the Enmakaje panchayat, a resolution banning any kind of spraying of endosulfan, both aerial and ground, was passed in January until a survey and investigation of all the problems both physical and psychiatric were carried out. As Mr. Padre and Dr. Mohana Kumar point out however, more and more cases of the effects of poisoning are emerging from neighbouring panchayats and villages. The most recent case is that of six-year-old Balakrishna in Nettinage village who has cancer. His parents are farm labourers who have had to sell what little they had to meet the cost of his treatment. "Who will come forward to help people like them?" asks Mr. Padre in anguish.

The sense of powerlessness and despair is overwhelming. With very little external support in their struggle for justice, these people are currently looking to the courts for some relief. Not that any compensation will ever make up for the lives that have been lost and, in many cases, lives that have been scarred beyond redemption.

The tragedy of slow poisoning in Kasargod underlines not only the despotism of a certain kind of material progress that is at the cost of human health and life, but the fact that a government which claims to represent a people should be the agent of their deaths.

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