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Tamil Nadu-Chennai
By Feroze Ahmed
In a recent meeting between Energy Developments Limited (EDL), the company promoting the project, and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB), EDL representatives were not able to adequately answer several queries on safety and environmental concerns, say activists who participated in the meeting. About 20 days later came the announcement by the Chief Minister in favour of the project, setting haywire the smoke radars of environmentalists. They are especially concerned that the Government is promoting a project that still does not have the right answers or a technical report specific to its operations here. The TNPCB had in fact, in a correspondence to the Municipal Administration and Water Supply Department last year, stated its views that the EDL project was "too expensive a technology which may work in ideal conditions in the native environment where it is tested. But its performance in Indian conditions is yet to be tested". The 14.85 MW plant proposed in Chennai is essentially being lobbied in Government circles here based on the functioning of a 5 MW EDL plant in Wollongong, Australia, which has in place a three-bin waste segregation system. In the TNPCB meeting here on January 7, the EDL presentation included a section on a `Perungudi Waste Composition Study' conducted in September 2002, which environmentalists say do not include many crucial components. An academic and environmentalist participating in the meeting had asked the EDL managing director, Sunand Sharma, if the company had looked for mercury in the study. "He replied that he had not as the method used by them for waste characterisation did not require them to look for mercury. Asked if they had a mercury-elimination design if mercury was found, he replied again that he did not look for the metal," says Citizen Consumer Action Group (CAG) coordinator, Bharat Jairaj, who participated in the meeting. In the meeting, Mr. Sunand had also challenged the TNPCB's "rejection" of the project last year, asking the board what it was rejecting when the company had not submitted to them a detailed project report, says Mr. Bharat. To several other technical queries raised by the TNPCB and other participants - like on the chemical reactions inside the plant, inertness of the residue and heavy metal elimination - EDL representatives had replied that their technical team was not with them, and so they would get back with the answers later, says another participant, Rajesh Rangarajan of Toxics Link. What worries environmentalists is that the Government has given a go-ahead for the project just days after such a meeting. The TNPCB officials were not available for comment. Speaking to The Hindu from Delhi, Mr. Sunand countered the charges saying, "Every imaginable procedure has been followed." However, he conceded that an agreement with the Chennai Corporation had not been finalised yet because of the Assembly elections in 2001 and the subsequent change in Government. On the specification of the project for Chennai, he said all the parameters were already defined in the tender. The proposed plan, however, has undergone changes since then, including several technical revisions, as admitted by EDL.
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