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by MAHESH UNIYAL

The environmental activists say they are disappointed with India for setting the wrong example for poor countries by permitting toxic waste imports even after an Indian court ordered this stopped last April.

This not only infringes Indian laws, but a global treaty which the country agreed to last year. The Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes which comes into effect on the first day of 1998, bars exports from rich to poor nations of a range of substances known to harm human health and the environment.

An expert panel is giving final shape to this list at a meeting in Geneva this week. India is vice-chair of this panel and Greenpeace Toxics Campaigner in India, Malini Morzaria says that the government's dithering on sending a representative to this crucial meeting shows it is not keen on the ban.

Officials of the Ministry of Environment and Forests dealing with the toxic waste trade could not be contacted to answer the Greenpeace charges.

In a media attention-grabbing action this week, the activists sent samples of toxic waste in sealed jars labeled ''Do Not Dump On Asia'', to top ruling party politicians in Australia which Greenpeace accuses of being the world's leading exporter of toxic wastes.

Greenpeace researchers in Asia cite Australian government statistics which show that country exported more than 1,450 tonnes of hazardous wastes like scrap lead batteries, zinc and copper ash to India.

A Greenpeace analysis of India's foreign trade data found that at least 1,127 tonnes of zinc ash were imported mainly from the United States, since May 1996. Some 569 tonnes of lead battery wastes were brought in through the main seaport of Mumbai between October 1996 and January this year.

Greenpeace claims being informed by ''sources close to the Indian lead industry'' that about 40,000 tonnes of broken lead batteries were imported last year.

''Our investigations show that international waste traffickers are still sending their toxic trash to India with impunity in clear and total defiance of Indian laws,'' says Von Hernandez, Greenpeace Toxics Campaigner for Asia.

Hernandez who was in India this week said ''there is a move to dilute the Basel ban in India.'' This is being done by the Ministry of Environment and Forests by reclassifying wastes so that they can be imported despite the toxic content. There is also a move to fix the permissible levels of toxicity above those allowed under the Basel treaty, he said.

While lead acid batteries are in the Basel ban list, India's Directorate General of Foreign Trade last year allowed free imports of lead battery plates and terminals. ''We think this is even more dangerous,'' says Hernandez. Scrap battery exporters are now sending the wastes to other nations for breaking up before sending to India.

But the Basel treaty cannot be diluted by local rules. The Convention stipulates that national legislation will prevail only if it is more stringent than the conditions in the international law.

Greenpeace alleges that some 150 companies and trading houses are importing toxic wastes into India, though only seven are licensed to do so.

Samples of Australian zinc ash headed for India which it tested, were found 'to have extremely high levels of cadmium and lead which are at least 13 times higher than draft New South Wales guidelines for containment thresholds in hazardous wastes,'' says a Greenpeace press note.

In their defence, waste importers say that an import ban would affect the jobs of hundreds of thousands of people hired by the metal recycling industry. The Indian Non-Ferrous Metals Manufacturers Association estimates that almost half of India's metal industry gets its raw material from scrap recycling in some 5,000 plants employing half a million people.

Environmental activists counter that imports are not needed because large amounts of metal scrap are produced by local industry. Moreover, not all the imported waste is recycled and large amounts are instead dumped, mostly in open disposal sites.

Two years ago, a much-publicised Greenpeace investigation of a licensed hazardous waste importer in India found substances with highly unsafe levels of dangerous contaminants, openly dumped on the recycling factory's premises in the central Indian city of Bhopal.

Laboratory tests in Britain of the samples obtained by Greenpeace from the Bhopal factory which processes zinc and lead wastes bought from the United States, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany, found their lead content to be 100 times higher than the permissible limit of 0.03 percent.

According to Greenpeace, like their counterparts in the exporting nation, customs and environment authorities in India rarely test waste imports for toxicity.