Kanpur, which is the centre of the leather industry, is now witness to a curious conundrum. Even in the face of stagnant domestic demand and plummeting export growth, leather tanneries continue to mushroom at an unprecedented rate all over the place. The rampant growth in the number of tanneries is all the more paradoxical in the face of the Supreme Court directive to the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) to close down polluting units.
Although the number of registered units have remained about the same, unregistered units have proliferated. For instance, in the Kanpur leather belt, Jajmau area had 165 registered units in 1990-91, when eight of them were forced to shut down by the apex court. A joint survey by UPPCB and Jal Nigam (an NGO), then put the number of unregistered units at 125. Their numbers have grown at the rate of 40 per cent since then, with most new units being opened in the past couple of years.
How do industry watchers explain this phenomenon? There is nothing on the demand side to justify such unbridled growth in the number of tanneries. According to experts, in sharp contrast to the boom period in the past, the rate of growth of leather exports now wallows at a measly 0.9 per cent. And domestic consumption has hardly inched northwards.
More From This Section
Ironically, it appears that this spurt in the number of tanneries is a direct fallout of the Supreme Courts directive itself. And UPPCBs half-hearted and feeble attempts to implement the toxic effluence control order have provided just the environment that the parallel industry needed to flourish.
In the aftermath of the apex court order, it became increasingly difficult for large, visible units to survive. Caught between a rock and a hard place, they either had to install expensive effluent treatment plants (which sent their costs skyrocketing in comparison to the unorganised sector) or shut down. Thus, it seemed eminently profitable to move out of the state machinerys vision altogether.
As a result, the tanneries started going underground, way beyond the purview of law. The fact that the implementation of pollution control norms was lax and piecemeal, provided an additional fillip to this parallel shift. For instance, around two months back, the UPPCB served Supreme Court closure orders to 30 units for disregarding pollution control norms and for not having set up the requisite primary treatment plants for effluents.
But few units have implemented the apex courts order. No order has yet reached us, is the constant refrain of tannery owners, who generally manage to `avoid receiving such orders. For all practical purposes work is on at almost all of these notified units. Whether this is because of apathy on the part of the UPPCB or the Post & Telegraph services is a matter of conjecture.
Only ten Kanpur tanneries have so far received the `no objection certificate regarding management of hazardous tannery waste from the Board. And even these orders have a tang of illegitimacy in the way they have come about. None of these tanneries ever reported actual production figures. That they reported approximately 50 per cent of their output for pollution control surveys was only to be expected. According to Jal Nigam (Ganga Pollution Control Unit) estimates, only 17,990 hides are processed per day in Kanpur. But that accounts for only half the actual production from the area according to industry experts.
Tanneries that have been ordered to shut down, but still covertly function, now generally operate at 40-50 per cent of original production levels to maintain a reasonably low profile. The rest of the requirement is outsourced, especially from the unregistered units which do not have to adhere to any norms whatsoever. The quality does indeed suffer. But such production is being targeted at a domestic market that has never been too finicky about quality anyway.
This under-reporting has had some other deleterious side-effects it resulted in smaller investments in primary treatment plants, and could also result in a smaller contribution to the overall maintenance pool for secondary and post treatment plants.
Effluence control has gone haywire, says Eco Friends Societys Rakesh Jaiswal, who has earned the sobriquet of `Ganga Man because of his running battle against pollution of the Ganges. The basic flaw can be easily found in the massive error in judgement that the UPPCB made while implementing the Kanpur section of the Ganga Action Plan (phase I). The Board calculated total effluence from the Jajmau area at 36 million litres per day (mld). Of this, the Board estimated tannery effluence to be only 9 mld (the rest being domestic sewage), a grossly under- stated figure.
Deepak Kumar, the Samajwadi Party MLA from the Unnao district near Kanpur, succinctly sums up the prevailing situation in his constituency: Nobody cares about pollution. No notified plant is closed and not one tannery treats all of its effluence. With the Ganga Action Plan ineffective in Unnao, there is no control over pollution, or production.
The number of illegal units in Unnao has swelled, and now almost matches the number of registered units (around 50). What aggravates the problem is that Unnao does not have the requisite secondary treatment plant. The effluence, therefore, does not reach the Ganges; it affects subsoil water. I get my rice, my vegetables, and the usual edibles from outside this area, admits Kumar, who too owns a tannery which he has given out on lease. I know the doubtful quality of whatever food is produced here.
Surely, in this sort of a situation with unorganised tanneries on the increase, quality and competency levels would inevitably dwindle further. There has been lots of noise made over tackling the general recession, and of fighting fierce competition from Chinese and Thai tanneries in the international market. The All India Skin and Hide Tanners and Merchant Association (AISTHMA) has called for the waiver of import duty on pollution control equipment. It has also called for reduction of duties on the 15 per cent requirement of critical chemicals for the industry.
The government response so far has been encouraging. It has responded with a general reduction in import duty from 40 to 30 per cent on dyes and pigments, and a general reduction in the peak rate of import duty from 50 to 40 per cent. There have also been efforts to ease the liquidity crunch. But all these benefits seem to stay restricted to top-end plants engaged in value addition, never really percolating down to the base-level tanneries.
Thus, pursuing the pollution control drive vigorously, may be one way of raising quality levels which are vitally necessary if India does not want to be left behind in international leather sweepstakes. An active pollution surveillance appears a roundabout way of capturing otherwise elusive production figures, but it is effective nevertheless. It may be the only way to drag this industry out of the quagmire that it is presently wallowing in.
However, all that effort made by the government could actually go down the toxic drains of tanning centres, if the mass-scale evasion of government revenue continues. For its own sake, the tanning and leather industry needs to dig itself out of the morass. And stricter pollution controls could be a good enough start. A necessary if not sufficient conditions for improving competitiveness.Caught between a rock and a hard place, the tanneries either had to install expensive effluent treatment plants, or shut down. Thus, it seemed eminently profitable to move out of the state machinerys vision altogether.