Toxic Chemicals Are Maiming Thousands Around the World

I don't know how anyone survives there.

My first visit to the SIPCOT Chemicals Hub in Cuddalore, India could have appeared deceptively pleasant to outside eyes. It's a beautiful day and there's a good breeze as we drive past the welcome sign for SIPCOT. The air in some places seems far cleaner than the air in nearby Chennai. In some spots it smells sweet, in others, like opening a bottle of ibuprofen -- an antiseptic, medicinal smell.

That is until my throat gets sore, I feel a bit nauseated and my guide starts retching. My guide, a local community environmental monitor finally recovers with bloodshot eyes. A headache follows and I begin to wonder how anyone manages to work in these facilities. SIPCOT Chemical Hub sandwiches its picturesque fishing villages in between rusting hulks of chemical factories. The court ordered waste channels are overflowing with an eerily pale blue green liquid, cattle graze not far away.

I visited the Cuddalore chemical hub, 2.5 hours south of Chennai on my most recent trip to India this January. I was in India to meet with the survivors of the world's worst industrial disaster, in which more than 8,000 people were gassed to death nearly overnight in 1984 by a Union Carbide chemical leak. Water contamination and long term effects of the toxic gas have killed 15,000 more since that December night. Cuddalore is a case study of how growing chemicals manufacture in the Global South for western and local markets is setting the stage for future Bhopals. While major consumer markets from New Delhi to New York rely on chemical manufacturing from impoverished communities in the Global South, toxics come back concentrated in products and food produced in the same impoverished communities.

The SIPCOT Chemicals Hub is currently an 8km stretch of pharmaceutical, explosive, dye and pesticide manufacturers. If it is completed as planned, it will stretch more than 38 kilometers, possibly trapping thousands of people on a strip of land between the Uppanar River and the sea that is less than 1km wide. One of my guides, Center for Environmental Monitoring organizer Shweta Narayan, works to keep this already toxic hotspot from reaching the boiling point and to help protect the local population from further egregious harm.

What might be a one-time chemical exposure for a healthy visitor, is a daily sensitization to highly toxic pollutants for the people living nearby. The villagers fish the polluted waters, and breathe belches of black and yellow smoke that smell like pickled cabbage, rotting carcass, sulfur gas or pesticides depending on the factory.

Victory Chemicals is making its toxic and likely radioactive sludge into bricks to give to villagers. But they doesn't find many takers. The bricks now lie dumped near the riverbank, crumbling into the water and from there into the body of a plant, a fish, a human being. Factory workers come out and stand close to the car, arms crossed, hoping harsh stares will generate enough force to push our concern out of the way. The District Environmental Engineer is called. He tries to blow off the claim that the waste is toxic. When that fails, he shrilly professes total impotence to address contamination complaints, before issuing a command for clean up; which all present know is destined to be ignored.

Over time, the body loses its ability to cope with these chemicals designed to confound our natural systems, and each exposure gives a more and more severe effect.

A chemical that will have no visible effect on an adult, can have catastrophic effects on the developing fetus and the young child -- dulling the mind, triggering birth defects, and setting the stage for autism, asthma, allergies and cancer. What may only make an adult nauseated, will cripple the dreams of a child and of a family for a healthy future; a whole and better life.