Nearly 20 years ago, America’s largest chemical multinational company attempted to set up a factory to produce Nylon 6,6 (a synthetic fibre) at Kerim, Ponda. After one of the biggest demonstrations in popular history of Goa – which claimed the life of Nilesh Naik, one of the demonstrators – the company beat a total retreat. The Panchayat Raj Act 1994 had just been made into law. Under the new law, separate Panchayat permission was now required for setting up of factories. The Panchayat of Kerim used that provision. It took a resolution rejecting permission for the plant to be set up.

At Navelim, scene of another major demonstration on August 27, 2012, the circumstances appear to be somewhat different. The integrated iron and steel plant that Sesa Goa (Vedanta) wants to operationalise is located within an industrial estate in the village. The IDC Act was long ago amended to carve such industrial estates out of the jurisdiction of panchayats. Secondly, the Sesa plant is already constructed and eager to go. At Kerim, only a few buildings and wall had been erected. They were brought crashing down by public anger over the company’s arrogance.

On that count – arrogance – both companies are similar. Sesa Goa is as arrogant as Du Pont. Both have huge money power. Sesa has people too numerous to mention to do its beck and call within the Goa administration, at all levels. Do the villagers of Navelim then stand any chance of asserting their rights to approve what happens in their own backyard?

The High Powered Committee (HPC) that took the decision to allow Sesa’s proposal was aware of the IDC issue. Therefore, it imposed an unprecedented condition: Even though the Sesa proposal was located inside the industrial area, Sesa would nevertheless have to obtain the NOC from the panchayat. Perhaps the HPC was aware that pollution can cross the boundaries of an industrial estate and invade the rest of the village – exactly what happened on August 18, 2012, when soot, allegedly caused by malfunctioning burners, disrupted life in not just Navelim, but other nearby wards and villages, far beyond the boundaries of the industrial estate.

Knowing that Panchayat approval might be difficult to obtain, Sesa did the next best thing: it got an NOC issued illegally by the sarpanch. The matter of the illegal NOC was discussed in great detail by the High Court during the hearing of a writ petition filed by villagers against the plant. Eventually, the court concluded in its judgement that the panchayat was fully within its rights to take up the matter on its own and the Court would not interfere.

The Panchayat’s NOC mandated by the HPC becomes all the more crucial if one considers the fact that the mandatory public hearing required for such a huge plant was given the go-by because the proposed location was within the industrial estate. The EIA notification of 2006 states that if a plant is to come up in an established industrial estate, there is no need for a public hearing. If that was the situation, the panchayat’s approval or NOC became paramount. Getting the sarpanch to write an NOC on a stolen letterhead of the panchayat would not clear the plant’s proposers of getting a proper consultation with the villagers who had faced the air pollution of the older pig iron plant at Amone for several years.

The problem with Sesa’s proposal was that it claimed to be an “expansion” of a pig iron plant located outside the industrial estate, some 1.5 km away, in the adjoining Amone village. Thus the expansion of a pig iron plant located outside the industrial estate did not require a public hearing because the so-called expansion was inside the industrial estate!

The Navelim panchayat changed actors during the recent panchayat elections. The new panchayat took the High Court’s order seriously and wrote to the authorities about the fraudulently obtained NOC. It also communicated to them the decision of the Gram Sabha that the NOC was being rejected. The Director of Industries wrote back to the panchayat asking it to take appropriate action because any action regarding the NOC was squarely within the domain of the panchayat and not the Directorate. On receipt of the letter, the panchayat proceeded accordingly and passed a resolution rejecting the NOC. It then communicated its decision to the Goa Pollution Control Board in August 2012 and asked it to suspend the consent to operate issued by the Board to the plant, thus setting the stage for another show-down very similar to what DuPont had faced at Kerim.

The question now is whether the pall of soot that descended on people’s homes, clothes, food and general environment is going to be a macabre symbol of things to come.

The politicians behind the HPC had no real clue about what they were approving at Navelim. Not one of the members of the HPC knew that they were approving much more than a pig iron plant. Sesa simply hid the nature of the plant from them. Before the Expert Appraisal Committee of the Ministry of Environment & Forests in New Delhi, Sesa sought environment clearance for a brand new integrated iron and steel plant. (The word used in the proposal is “greenfield” project, which means a brand new plant.) Before the HPC, however, Sesa claimed it was only installing “additional capacity” to its existing pig iron plant. However, the existing plant was not at Navelim but at Amone, on a different set of survey numbers, which had no connection with either the survey numbers or Navelim village or the industrial estate.

The manipulation was necessary because integrated iron and steel plants are expressly prohibited in the State of Goa, as they fall within the list of “red category” industries.

After the August 18 pollution incident, the Pollution Control Board issued orders for the offending coking unit to be shut down within 48 hours. However the Member Secretary issuing the order must have been instructed that the Board itself had manipulated its records a year or so earlier in order to permit the plant to get its consent to establish the unit. On the consent order, the Sesa plant is not shown as a greenfield integrated iron and steel plant, which it very much was, but shown as “an expansion” which it decidedly was not.

Please note that the Goa Pollution Control Board has never had a competent air pollution control expert ever since it commenced its existence in 1987. In fact, consents issued by it under the Air Act are mostly deficient. All decisions on air pollution including enforcements of norms and equipment to meet such norms are taken mostly out of ignorance or on the basis of stories told to the board’s personnel by plant managers. As for the public of Navelim and Amone, it is likely they are even less in the know of what an integrated iron and steel complex can do to their lives forever in terms of pollution.

It is interesting that nearly a year ago, the Collector held a public hearing for the expansion of the pig iron plant at Amone as the plant is outside the industrial estate. The public hearing was abandoned after demonstrators hired by the company physically pushed the Collector off the stage. I was present at the hearing and saw the pandemonium with my own eyes.

The question any person of normal intelligence will ask now is: if the expansion of the Amone plant was only now coming for environment clearance, how could the Goa Pollution Control Board show the greenfield integrated iron and steel plant at Navelim also as an “expansion” of the same Amone plant?

First, you procure a fraudulent NOC from the sarpanch of Navelim. Next, you tell the Ministry of Environment & Forests that you are putting up a greenfield integrated iron and steel plant. But you tell the HPC that you are only expanding the existing Amone plant. You construct the plant at Navelim, and then put up a second proposal for the “expansion” of the Amone plant. You get absolved from a public hearing because the Environment Ministry is told the plant is within an industrial estate. In fact, the EIA for the new proposal at Navelim and the EIA for the proposal to expand the Amone plant do not mention each other! If this is the way Sesa Goa operates, God help the people of Navelim, Amone and Goa!

The first nasty incident of accidental pollution has already come visiting. But there is worse to come. The sinter plant, which is without any approvals, is under erection. The air pollution caused by sinter plants is legendary and what is worse, fairly incurable. Even highly developed States like Maharashtra have been unable to control the pollution from such plants. Goa, with a non-existent pollution control machinery, can expect much worse. Nothing in the record of approvals granted by the various authorities for the Navelim plant proves that any of those responsible for the decisions taken really took either the welfare of the people or their environment into account. They only listened to Sesa. So now the chickens have only come home to roost.

(Published in O Heraldo, Goa and Lokmat, Goa)