)
Peter Kennedy, 49, cannot speak properly any more. With his left arm and leg almost paralysed, moving is also an ordeal for him. His 75-year-old father now takes care of him. V Daisy is 35. She has had three miscarriages and the only child she had was born with mental disabilities. He died at the age of five in 2001.
Kennedy and Daisy were both workers at the thermometer factory of Hindustan Unilever, or HUL, in the scenic hill station of Kodaikanal, around 500 km from Chennai. They are among the people affected by mercury exposure at the factory, alleges the Ex-Mercury Employees Welfare Association, an organisation of former employees of the thermometer factory.
The matter hogged limelight recently when rapper Sofia Ashraf's came out with her popular "Kodaikanal won't step down" video (it has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube).
Unilever vehemently denies this. "There were no adverse impacts on the health of employees or the environment. This has been confirmed by many independent studies. There was limited impact on the soil at some spots within the factory premises which required remediation," the company has said in a statement. The matter is pending before the Madras High Court.
An eerie silence today hangs in the misty air around the factory that is located about 1.5 km from the city on the southern crest of the upper Palani hills. The ghostly structure is in a state of decay.
Between 1984 and 1989, the factory was firing on all cylinders. Workers came in two shifts, 200 in each. Over time, more than 1,000 people have worked here. Today, but for monkeys and birds there is no sign of life on the verdant 25 acres on which the factory is located. Tall eucalyptus trees stand around it as though watching it rot.
It was the British who turned Kodaikanal into a hill station after BS Ward, a European surveyor, visited it in 1821. Back then, it was popular for its banana and orange. They were cultivated without using a drop of fertiliser or pesticide. With time, agriculture diminished and the hill station's economy started thriving on tourism.
In 1982, Pond's moved its factory to Kodaikanal from the United States after the plant owned there by its parent, Chesebrough-Pond's, had to be dismantled. For the people of Kodaikanal, this was good news. A factory was coming to town with the promise of jobs and good wages. Many of them left their farms and became workers at the factory, which was taken over by HUL in 1987 when it acquired Cheseborough-Pond's globally.
Mahindran Babu, president, Ex-Mercury Employees Welfare Association, worked in the factory for nearly six years. Like Daisy, he has no children, which, he believes, is a result of exposure to mercury.
The association, along with at least 15 non-governmental organisations, including Chennai Solidarity Group and Jhatkaa.org (it was behind Ashraf's video), wants HUL to adequately compensate the employees and clean up the area.
The organisations allege that between 1984 and 2001, 15 people died due to contamination and this figure later went up to nearly 50. All these people, they say, worked at the factory. Medical certificates and post-mortem reports that prove this are, however, hard to find.
"The soil is polluted, the walls are polluted, then obviously the people who worked inside the factory also got polluted," says Babu alleging that the workers were not given protective gear or training on how to handle mercury.
The association' general secretary, Raja Mohammed, who worked at the factory for six years, says the workers developed problems like nerve disorder, infertility, skin disease, renal failure, vision problem, loss of teeth and memory loss. And the women, he says, suffered miscarriages.
A recent study, "Moss, Lichen & Sediments study in Kodaikanal 2015", by NGO Community Environmental Monitoring, a project of the Other Media, an NGO, found high levels of mercury in vegetation and sediment collected from the Pambar Shola forest area near Kodaikanal. The study states that the site is leaking mercury into its surroundings, including into the ecologically sensitive Pambar Shola forest and the Pambar River.
Activists also allege that to date Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, or TNPCB, has not commissioned any study to assess the extent of contamination. Officials of TNPCB were not available for comment.
A HUL spokesperson says because the matter is in court, it would not be appropriate for the company to comment on specific aspects of the case. But he adds, "We would never allow our employees to suffer ill health because of their employment with us and not address it."
"Several independent studies carried out by experts on mercury-related health complaints concluded that the former employees were not harmed by working in our factory in Kodaikanal," says the spokesman. "Contrary to claims, there is no authoritative medical data from any report showing that our operations at Kodaikanal caused illness."
The company, however, admits that scrap from the plant was sold illegally to a dealer near the facility when it was closed down in 2001. The spokesperson says that the sale of glass scrap containing mercury residue to a dealer about 3 km from the factory was in breach of company rules. "We immediately addressed it and removed both the glass and the underlying soil," he says.
The company, which is India's largest producer of FMCGs, claims it did not dump glass waste contaminated with mercury on land behind its factory. The company on its website states that the recovered glass scrap was sent to the US for recycling in 2003. And in 2006, the plant, machinery and materials used in thermometer manufacturing at the site were decontaminated and disposed of as scrap to industrial recyclers.
The spokesman says the company is keen to The spokesman says the company is keen to continue work on clearing up the factory site. "We will commence soil remediation at the site once TNPCB gives a final consent."
After assessing and testing, TNPCB had granted permission for remediation of the soil in July 2008. Pre-remediation work was started at the site in 2009. However, in 2010, TNPCB decided to revalidate the soil clean-up standard in response to NGO requests.
On August 10 this year, HUL submitted a detailed project report for soil remediation to TNPCB. The company will start the soil remediation process once the procedural formalities are completed, says its spokesperson.
NGOs, however, allege that HUL's claim that the clean-up is being delayed because of TNPCB's failure to give a go-ahead is a ploy to skirt the dispute over the proposed clean- up standards. HUL is proposing a standard of 25 mg of mercury per kg of soil. It claims this will leave the soil safe for future residential and recreational purposes.
Environmentalists argue that these standards are not good enough, given that the factory site is ecologically and geographically contiguous with the sensitive Pambar Shola forest. In the US, the government has forced polluters to clean up to levels as low as 0.13 mg/kg.
The fight is clearly far from over.
