The mercury waste is now being shipped to the US.
By Rakesh Agrawal
Trendy, fashionable and flashy, up-market products, generally launched by global companies are the objects of desire for the middle class in India who loves to possess them, uncaring and untouched by the fact that these MNCs generally flout environmental standards and adversely affect the health of their workers.
While a Center for Science and Environment (CSE), non-profit Delhi-based organization, has established the presence of fatal and carcinogenic pesticides like Lindane, a confirmed carcinogen, 140 times than allowed by EU and Bureau of India (BIS) standards, Chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxin, 200 times, heptachlor, banned in India and also has not been used in the US since 1988, four times higher than the proposed BIS standards and Malathion, another fatal pesticide was found, as reported by the India Resource Center at http://www.indiaresource.org/news/2006/1084.html.
That didn’t stop MNCs flouting environmental norms that are also health hazards for it’s the workers and the users of their products.
Latest in the series is Hindustan Lever (HUL), a subsidiary of Unilever, making soaps, detergents and toothpaste like Pepsodent & Lifebuoy and highly popular fairness creams: Fair & Lovely and also Fair & Handsome, promoted by the likes of megastars Shahrukh Khan that fair skin crazy Indians lap wholeheartedly.
For the last 15 years, the company is dumping highly toxic mercury in the water bodies of Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu, known for it’s the lush green landscape, cool winds and mesmerizing tea plantations, making the are highly poisonous and affecting its workers.
But, the people of Kodaikanal didn’t sit idle and opposed the company tooth and nail with Sofia Ashraf, a rap singer released a rap song against the company, that started a unique campaign demanding HUL to clean up this toxic waste.
It went viral on the social media, receiving more than two million hits within days of it being uploaded on YouTube and about 40 million likes on Facebook and thousands of people posing with a poster, “I boycott Unilever,” on Twitter and was sent to its CEO, Paul Polman, who is very active on Twitter and about 18 million people re-tweeted him.
Sofia Ashraf’s three-minute rap video ‘Kodaikanal Won’t’ is sung to the beats of Nicki Minaj’s racy hit, Anaconda, but its lyrics want Unilever to “make amends now,” forced the company to bend as www.Jhatkaa.org, an online protest campaign platform also joined her.
They compensated the workers for the adverse health impacts of the mercury and promised to take action to ensure the clean-up of soil within the factory premises. But, the victory is just half-won as the company is yet to clean up the mess it created outside the company premises and has poisoned community water resources like village ponds.
As India has no facility for processing mercury waste. The activists then forced it to ship some 300 tons of mercury-contaminated material and waste from the factory back to the United States. The battles have continued since that time as they claimed nearly 40 tons of crushed glass tinged with mercury had been disposed of to scrap merchants throughout the state.
Now, the waste is now being shipped to the US, a rare instance of concerted action against an MNC in India going in the community’s favor.