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by FREDERICK NORONHA

This high powered panel is under the chairmanship of Professor M.G.K. Menon, former minister for science and technology, and current chairman of the Board of Governors of the India Institute of Technology, Bombay. It was constituted in October 1997 by the federal Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) at the direction of the Supreme Court. The panel resulted from the decision of the court following public interest litigation filed by the Delhi based not-for-profit organisation Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy.

In their interim order, the judges observed that huge quantities of hazardous wastes are generated across India each day in addition to the wastes imported illegally, which is an indication of the magnitude of the problem.

The panel is examining what hazardous wastes have entered India, and is discovering some strange facts. Some toxic wastes were exported to India via shipping containers, but no one is coming forward to claim the containers now that they have been sneaked into this country.

India's Ministry of Environment and Forests says it has been making "concerted efforts" to collect basic data on the waste material lying around at various ports and container depots. But several letters later, and despite reminders by the Supreme Court, the information is still slow in coming.

Recently, the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust at Mumbai (Bombay) said it had received 126 containers of imported hazardous wastes in 1996-97 and 19 containers in the following year. There are in all 262 containers having "various scrap items" lying in the Bombay Port Trust port. Bombay functions as the country's commercial capital and is also a gateway into India.

Inland Container Depot at Tughlakabad in New Delhi said it has accumulated some 108 containers, each of an average 18 tonnes, with four types of hazardous wastes: zinc ash, lead ash, lead batteries and waste oil.

Out of these, five containers with battery scrap were "auctioned" to the highest bidder in December 1997. Customs officials at Tughlakabad disagree as to whether or not they should be disposing by "auction" of the orphaned hazardous waste.

The Basel Convention bans international trade in hazardous wastes. But countries like the United States are not signatories to the Convention. So, the view here is that pressure cannot be put on exporting countries, and at best can be applied to shipping companies if the political will exists to do so.

The Research Foundation, the Delhi-based group which initiated the hazardous waste action through the courts said, "It is not difficult to find out from the Customs the names of the exporter, exporting country and the name of the importer. This may give a clue as to how these consignments have come in illegally without any permission...and may help in giving such recommendations which will plug these loopholes in future."

Under the Basel Convention, parties to the agreement are required to accept illegal imports back within 90 days. And under the Basel Convention, imports to, or exports from non-parties is also illegal.

Imports are also considered illegal if:

• the exporter has not been granted permission by the Ministry of Environment and Forests
• the importer does not have a valid no-objection certificate from the State Pollution Control Board
• the importer does not have a valid licence for imports
• the importer is not an actual user and does not have a valid authorisation for handling hazardous wastes.

Suddenly, India is realizing the need to understand how hazardous these toxic wastes really are. Help is being sought from experts across the country, as the new government at New Delhi evaluates the skills available across India to tackle this issue.

Some of the hazardous wastes were sent to the Shriram Institute for Industrial Research at Delhi for testing, and to other centers too. Lead and ash samples collected from the Indian Customs in New Delhi were sent to the National Metallurgical Laboratory in Jamshedpur, in eastern India, for testing.

Toxic elements were found in the samples including arsenic, selenium, mercury and chromium. But the National Metallurgical Laboratory said that these toxic elements are "non-leachable" in an attempt to reassure the public that they would not migrate from the wastes into the surrounding soil and water.

The Central Pollution Control Board has laid down suggested methods of sampling and analysis for zinc ash, skimmings, dross, lead ash or batteries. Indian Institute of Petroleum at Dehradun has offered tips on how to conduct the analysis of waste and used oil samples.

Customs officials have differing perspectives on when and how to release hazardous wastes. Recent guidelines say that zinc and lead ash require all consignment documentss to be released for analysis.

Committee members have been examining the problem of zinc ash imported through various ports other than Mumbai, and have decided to seek full information about the arrival and storage of hazardous wastes from all the ports and custom houses in India. Units like Sunrise Zinc in western coastal state of Goa and Bharat Zinc of Bhopal, the city notorious for the Union Carbide industrial disaster there in 1984, have come under the panel's scrutiny.

But the panel is not looking at the problem of hazardous wastes as a whole. It is only concerned with those non-ferrous metallic and oil wastes which are being imported for "recycling" in India, and about which current national regulations here are vague.

The Basel Convention's Technical Working Group has defined a banned category of wastes (in List A), and those that can be allowed transboundary movement for recycling (in List B). But it has yet to firm up its findings, and there are a large number of items in List C, which can be put in either List A or List B, depending upon their hazardous potential.

Some experts on the panel doubt whether information on the manifest documents accompanying the shipped material and labeling the containers is accurate. There is a possibility that hazardous materials may gain entry to the country through wrong, vague or unclear declarations.

"Laws should be such that the undesired material should not be allowed to be imported or landed or taken back by the exporter if landed in an illegal manner," said Professor Menon, who heads the panel.

Ports serve as control points for imported wastes, but there are no control points for locally-generated stuff.

Professor Menon has expressed anxiety about the lack of properly designed disposal sites in India for hazardous wastes. He asked how the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board grants authorisation to Indian companies which do not have properly designed waste disposal facilities. Maharashtra in western India, is a federal state of which the industrially important region around Bombay is a part.

Wastes generated within Maharashtra include solvents, oil wastes and discarded off-specification products. One firm, Indian Lead Limited of Thane, has been authorised by the Ministry of Environment and Forests to import wastes. But officials now say it is possible that certain units have obtained imported hazardous wastes through local traders.

The Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, when asked whether it had a role in analyzing samples of wastes imported from abroad, washed its hands of the problem saying it is up to Customs to undertake such an analysis.

In Maharashtra it was found that permits were given to plants producing hazardous wastes, even if they did not have proper disposal sites. Officials merely said that many units in the region kept their wastes in secured landfills, and others store them safely in containers, waiting for a common disposal site to be developed by the state government. This disposal site has not yet been created.