Exporting Cures, Importing Misery

By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted January 14, 2005.

Nagamani slaps a wet shirt against a rock. "Oh, no, I only wash clothes in this stream," she says. "If you bathe in it, you get a rash."

She pulls more clothes from her bucket. It's a quiet, peaceful scene, typical of rural India – if you don't get too close to the dark brown stream water with its strange odor, and if you turn your back to the dark plumes rising from a half-dozen smokestacks on the horizon.

Outside his home in the nearby village of Gandigudem, a farmer named Janardhan points to his abandoned plow, his junked rice mill and his idle irrigation well and pump. "Around here, if we have good water we can survive," he says. "Now, without good water, we're finished. If this pump still worked, the water would be coming out of the ground that color." He points to my bright green shirt.

"Look at the trailer I use to haul soil and sand. It's completely rusted out. I bought it new, on ... " He writes the date in the palm of his hand: 26/11/98. "If our soil and water does that to steel in six years, imagine what it's doing to our bodies?" He opens his shirt and points to a rash on his neck and chest. "I walk a few steps, and I'm out of breath. I'm only 39 years old!"

A neighbor, Rekha, says that her subsidized rice ration never lasts till the end of the month. "Before the pollution, we grew our own rice. Now I can't grow crops, four of my water buffalo have died, and we're forced to depend on the government."

Two miles upstream from Gandigudem is the notorious Kazipally industrial area, home to an assortment of chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Behind one factory, identified by a sign as belonging to SMS Pharmaceuticals, tar-like water dribbles over a concrete dam, runs down a deep gully, and meanders through a barren field beyond.

A second sign in front of the plant, erected by court order, lists some of the chemicals being used: toluene, methyl isothiocyanate, DMSO, chloroform. It's nearly impossible to breathe anywhere within a hundred yards of the plant, and it's hard not to retch.

Poisonous History

Kazipally lies in the drainage of the Nakkavagu rivulet, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. This was once good farm country. The watershed, about 10 miles by 25 miles, was crisscrossed by intermittent streams, their water conserved in a chain of 14 small, picturesque reservoirs called cherus that provided irrigation water during the long dry season.

But by the 1970s, the area's good water, wide open spaces and proximity to Hyderabad (India's fifth largest city) made it a prime target for economic development. The first big industrial park was sited near Patancheru, the Nakkavagu basin's only town of any size. Since the late '80s, a half-dozen such estates have cropped up across the surrounding countryside. Over that time, the word "Patancheru" has come to acquire multiple meanings: a lake, a town, a region, and an ecological catastrophe.

In travel books, India is inevitably described as "colorful." The term is certainly apt in this area, but with a nasty twist. Where National Highway 9 crosses the Nakkavagu just west of Patancheru, the sluggish stream is deep purple. In a dump outside the Isnapur industrial estate south of the highway, an alien landscape of grey ash mounds is dotted by clumps of burnt-orange and sulfur-yellow powder. Asanikunta, a lake bordering the Bollaram industrial estate, has the color of cabernet sauvignon and the aroma of paint thinner.

The Patancheru region has fallen into this state through the combined impacts of diverse industries: pesticides, steel, chemicals and others. The destruction of agriculture was largely the result of salts, acids and heavy metals moving from factories into streams, groundwater and soil.

But more and more, the area's biggest problem is drugs – perfectly legal drugs.

Unnatural Disaster

India's domestic pharmaceutical industry supplies its own market of over a billion people, with plenty to spare. Exports have shot up in recent years to $2.5 billion and are predicted to hit $6 billion by 2010. India was the United States' top source of imported antibiotics in 2002. Thirty-five to 40 percent of India's bulk-drug manufacturing now occurs along a 20-mile-long arc from Patancheru to Hyderabad; that's a lot of production, and a lot of waste.

Stan Cox is senior research scientist at the Land Institute in Salina, Kan. and a member of the Institute's Prairie Writers Circle. To learn how to support medical care in the contaminated Nakkavagu drainage, contact the Venkata Rama Rao Charitable Trust.

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