Kumareddiapuram is the event horizon of the black hole that is now the shut Sterlite Copper plant. Inside the village, a couple of ladies are angry at the way the dispute has been handled (we explained the backstory here) and the police atrocities that followed. They had started the peaceful sit-in protests within the village and had received support from other villages. They had not even reached the city when the events of May 22 unfolded. And yet, they say, their boys are being picked up by the police on false charges.
An elderly lady who kids address as Lathachi wonders if we are there to help Sterlite reopen the factory.
“They have been allowed to use the office. What work do they have in office when the factory itself is closed? We know where this is going. But, if they want to open the factory again, let them first bomb this village, kill us all, and then do it,” she says angrily.
Other younger women join her with anecdotes of recent deaths. They are surprisingly well informed and updated about everything that is happening around Sterlite and meet rival arguments with well-articulated counters.
Has Sterlite not brought jobs and economic betterment to the area?
“Velakamaatha kuduthan Sterlite kaaran,” she shoots back. It literally means Sterlite gave them only a broom. The colloquial usage means Sterlite gave zilch.
“Those who are supporting the company today are village presidents and contractors who supply JCBs and trucks to the company. These are either politicians or people close to them. They are least bothered about whether we live or die,” a young woman in her thirties says.
Two sides to the story
There is another woman, younger than these women, who lives a few kilometres away, inside the Sterlite township adjacent to the factory premises. Her name is Raji Subramanian. A Sterlite employee, she has taken to Twitter to defend her company, which she thinks has been unfairly targeted.
The handle @iamraji had taken Twitter by storm around July, rebutting claims against Sterlite and giving it back to protestors.
Raji Subramanian@IamRajii
I'm an year old employee of Sterlite copper.If I'm spending my weekend on Twitter to write about #STERLITE, it's not because of my pay hike(I'm not covered under appraisal yet) or the loyalty (I'm GenY and I can get job anywhere else) but simply because I believe in truth!
9:35 AM - Jul 31, 2018
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Subramanian tells ET Prime she had joined Sterlite as a trainee in the HR department about a year ago. When the crisis came, she could see how rumours were being spread indiscriminately.
“Irrespective of which department [they worked in], every employee felt strongly about this,” she says. “Our management has also encouraged us to communicate the facts among our friends and relatives on social media.”
There is no doubt that Sterlite has had a huge economic impact on Tamil Nadu. There is even lesser doubt that it has not been able to address the concerns that people have had about the alleged deleterious impact of the discharge from its Thoothukudi plant.
There is a section of people who have got jobs or contracts from Sterlite. They back the company. The locals, on the other hand, believe Sterlite has used its economic might in cahoots with the administration to suppress their concerns.
Between these two bitterly opposed points of view lies the tale.
The might of Sterlite
Vedanta-Sterlite holds 33% share of the country’s refined copper demand of about 0.675 million tonnes per annum.
Sterlite is a major domestic supplier of phosphoric acid, which is a key raw material for fertiliser-manufacturing companies, with a capacity of 0.22 million tonnes per annum. These fertiliser units will now need to import phosphoric acid. It is also the largest supplier of sulphuric acid in Tamil Nadu with a 95% share of the market. Sulphuric acid is used in the detergent and chemical industries.
“The plant provided direct employment to 3,500 to 4,000 people and more than 70% of these employees are from Tamil Nadu. Further, the plant operations impact more than 20,000 people engaged in various supplier and customer units. The plant engages about 1,000 trucks/tankers on a daily basis with consistent load, thereby providing livelihood to around 9,000 truck drivers and cleaners per month. We have over 650 supply and service partners and we help them generate a business of close to USD134 million every year,” Sterlite said in one of its statements after the shootout.
Copper India, the vertical within Vedanta which houses copper facilities in other places, contributed INR1,308 crore to the EBITDA of Vedanta in FY18, which was 5% of the consolidated annual EBITDA.
Had the plant remained functional and embarked on the “Tuticorin II” expansion of 400ktpa (by FY20), it would have become one of the world’s largest single-location copper smelters.
Few takers for Sterlite’s stand on pollution
Clearly Sterlite is strong, rich, and powerful and has been standing its ground on environmental concerns, but to no avail. For example, it has cited the district cancer data, according to which other districts of Tamil Nadu have reported much higher incidence of the disease.
But the Kumareddiapuram villagers do not buy the argument. One of them rubbishes the claims that health issues are being exaggerated, saying, “They say cancer patients in Chennai are more than those in Thoothukudi. But, if you send all those who contracted cancer here to Chennai for treatment, numbers would obviously be higher.”
Nityanand Jayaraman, an environmentalist who has worked closely with Fatima Babu, one of the protest leaders, and other protestors, says district-level data could hide local spikes. “At a district level, this may not be abnormal. However, if a disproportionate number of the 1,282 cancer cases are from Tuticorin town or the villages surrounding Sterlite, that would certainly be abnormal,” he says.
Jayaraman and other protestors similarly rebut each of the claims of the company. Jayaraman says the primary reason for the factory coming to India was environmental. He contends that the siting of a hazardous industry in such a densely populated area was in violation of laws. According to him, when a large company is the violator, the administration does not come down heavily on it. This has led to people losing confidence in the administration.
“For the people of Thoothukudi, it has been a tale of continuous betrayal. And the biggest of them was the Supreme Court decision in 2013,” says Jayaraman. The apex court in its decision then had fined Sterlite INR100 crore but allowed the plant to operate. Sterlite executives maintain that there is nothing illegal about their operations and all laws have been followed.
Lives in a limbo
Now, around the plant, there is a crowd-induced impasse.
Subramanian, the young Sterlite employee, continues to live in the Sterlite township along with some 150 other families. “Maids who work in the township come from nearby villages. They say they would not be able to earn as much outside. And that others in the villages are jealous of them. The protests are complex, it is a collective of various emotions,” she says.
On Monday, a group of villagers led by the former village president of nearby Therku Veerapandiapuram submitted a petition to the chief minister seeking the reopening of the plant, saying the closure has affected their livelihood.
Subramanian calls the protestors antisocial elements who are misleading the public for their own personal ends. She believes that many in the villages are getting compensated either through cash or through groceries.
Her strong views have not gone down well. “I started getting threats on Facebook. I had to deactivate the account for some time,” she says. But, she returned and continues to feistily defend her company on Facebook and Twitter.
The protestors are equally adamant that they will not settle for anything less than the dismantling of the plant itself.
It is time to leave Thoothukudi. At the bus stop at Therku Veerapandiapuram, near a tailoring shop, a couple of young men are watching Hindi songs on their smartphone.
One of them, a lean, dark fellow, says he is from Jharkhand and was working in the VV Titanium factory. He says there are other workers from Bengal staying in the village who were working for Sterlite. Have they gone back? “No, they are waiting,” he says before going back to his video.
It could be a long wait. For everyone.
(Graphic by Ankita Mehortra)
The Economic Times Prime
Venkata Subrahmanyam Voruganty
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The Sterlite saga: from orange clouds to red flags
Sterlite’s Thoothukudi copper plant used to account for 40% of India’s copper production. It is now shut. ET Prime’s reportage reveals the cause: strange company manoeuvres, a fusion of myriad protest groups, and the government’s inability to see the coming storm.
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N Sundaresha Subramanian
21 Aug 2018
PROTESTORS AT VEDANTA'S STERLITE COPPER UNIT ON MAY 24, 2018; PHOTO BY BA RAJU/BCCL
At ten past eight in the morning, bus number 102 leaves the Anna bus stand in Thoothukudi and takes the Palayamkottai High Road, one of the three arterial roads of the port city. The word ‘Sterlite’ is written prominently in Tamil, among the names of the other villages the bus will pass through. It passes through the South police station, courts, and the VVD (a consumer brand named after its owner VV Dhanushkodi) junction.
Before the collectorate, it takes a right turn on the Madurai Bypass aka NH 38.
A few minutes later, after passing a couple of Sipcot (State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu) bus stops, the factory that has become the focal point of various stakeholders in the district comes into view.
The Sterlite Copper campus, which stands where the village road to Therku Veerapandiapuram meets the highway, looks deserted, except for some sporadic police presence. The road to Therku Veerapandiapuram passes the high-power transmitter of the All India Radio. A couple of shops selling tea and snacks are doing brisk business as workers head to VV Titanium Pigments, on the opposite side of the road.
Sahayam, a truck driver-turned-Sterlite protestor from nearby Madathur, calls to say he wouldn’t be able to make it that day. He is helpful with directions, though. He says Therku Veerapandiapuram is about a kilometre from there, and a couple more kilometres down lies Kumareddiapuram, the village where it all started in July 2017.
A half-an-hour walk leads to the edges of Kumareddiapuram. A milestone with barely visible markings says “Thoothukudi 9 km”.
“Muthu Kuzhithurai”, as Thoothukudi is referred to because of its pearl-fishing legacy, is an ancient city that had trade links with the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. It came into the limelight because of the incident of May 22, 2018, when a crowd had gathered to protest the alleged environmental pollution caused by Sterlite’s copper plant. The Tamil Nadu police opened fire on the crowd, killing 13 people. The plant is now shut.
When operational, the plant was a significant contributor to Tamil Nadu’s economy and accounted for around 2% of the world’s copper production. It produced 0.438 million tonnes of India’s annual copper output of 1 million tonnes, and was directly and indirectly responsible for the livelihood of 25,000 families.
ET Prime travelled to Thoothukudi and nearby areas in Tamil Nadu to unravel the sequence of events that led to the disappearance of 40% of India’s copper production. The story we discovered is an extremely cautionary tale of how businesses deal with their environmental footprint, because in India once a footprint is big enough, it will find a political backstop. Businesses and governments that are not proactive about addressing these concerns will see loss of precious lives and a massive hit to reputation.
Let’s go back to the ground at Kumareddiapuram. The soil is black, probably suitable for cotton farming. A lone water pump stands in a corner of a field. Some cows are out grazing. Few hundred metres ahead is the compound wall of Sterlite Copper. Some goats appear on the dirt track around the wall. Chinnachami, the goat herder, says the wall has been there for several years now, “perhaps five or more”.
Act I: land acquisition
The trouble, according to him, started when Sterlite started leasing land around the Kumareddiapuram village in the second half of last year. “They were paying INR10,000 per acre per month. A person with seven acres of land was getting INR70,000 per month. Who would refuse that kind of money?” he says.
Soon, people realised the company was getting land this way on three sides of the village of about 100-150 households. “People started realising they would be blocked and their movement crippled.”
Around the same time, a lot of heavy construction work began within the Sterlite premises. Information that Sterlite was increasing capacity reached the villagers from someone working in the plant or associated with it.
“That scared everyone. People have been complaining of miscarriages and other health problems, especially breathing related. If the capacity was doubled, we will all be ruined,” says Chinnachami.
Villagers allege that Sterlite often released its troublesome emissions at night. The emission settled on the grass and other greenery and if the cattle ate them, they fell ill with dysentery and other ailments, say villagers.
“I myself was in Thoothukudi (then Tuticorin), during one of those leaks (in 1997 allegedly from Sterlite). I was working there at that time and had just gotten down from the bus. I couldn’t breathe. I thought it was just me and started running. I will never forget that experience. If something happens, who will be responsible?” says Chinnachami.
Pamela Philipose, a senior journalist who was part of a public inquest organised by civil society, recalled recently how the villagers often saw “orange clouds in the sky” and the air smelt “as if a rat has died in the sky”.
To be sure, Sterlite Copper has had a troubled history, having been shut down several times for alleged leaks and other health scares since 1994, when the then chief minister laid the foundation stone. (See timeline at the end of this story.)
The last of the recent shutdowns came in March 2013, when a sulphur dioxide leak from the plant led to suffocation, which the local people and even the then collector Ashish Kumar were said to have experienced.
Act II: expansion
In a bid to cater to rising demand from export markets, the Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta group had plans to invest between INR2,500 crore and INR3,000 crore to double the capacity of its copper unit at Thoothukudi to 8 lakh tonnes per annum. Vedanta had talked about the expansion plans in 2016.
Work on the expansion, which would start as soon as the company gets some pending clearances from the state, is likely to start towards early next year and will be completed in two years, R Ramnath, CEO, Sterlite Copper, told the Financial Express in an interview.
Sterlite Copper has a smelter, refinery, phosphoric acid plant, sulphuric acid plant, copper rod plant, and three captive power plants at Thoothukudi. It also has a refinery and two copper-rod plants at Silvassa (Dadra and Nagar Haveli).
On February 2, Kuldip Kaura, CEO of London-listed Vedanta Resources, the parent company of Sterlite Copper, said during an analyst conference call: “The copper smelter … we have the requisite permits, and project has already been awarded and the construction work has commenced. This is a two-year project; we should have the project commissioned towards the end of financial year 2020.”
Act III: Fatima Babu and protest coalition
Sometime around February 5, says Fatima Babu, 65, a retired English professor who has been involved in the protests against the Sterlite plant over the past two decades, she received a call from Kumareddiapuram. Babu says this was something special. “Earlier we had to go to the villages, explain to them (the villagers) about the perils of the plant. Still, people would not be interested. But, for the first time in the long history of protests against Sterlite, people were inviting us to join the protests.”
Over the next week or so, Babu joined the villagers in sit-in protests and hunger strikes, in which people would sit under a neem tree in the village, taking turns from dawn to dusk.
On February 12, the villagers decided to organise a hunger strike at the VVD junction at the heart of the city. The junction is close to the court complexes and the South police station. That day, the protestors refused to leave. When they refused to disperse for the second day in a row, the police decided to arrest them.
Initially, they were put in a marriage hall. Later, the police arrested some protestors, including Babu. They were all sent to jail after being taken to the magistrate late in the night. The arrest of Babu seems to have triggered a set of events that got the local merchants’ association involved.
Babu hails from the fishing community, which is largely Catholic, and is married into a Hindu family. The merchants’ association is led by people from the Nadar community. Though Thoothukudi has a mix of many communities, the Nadars and the Catholic fisherfolk dominate it.
Babu, who speaks fluent English, has had a long association with the merchants’ association, which dates back to the days of inter-religious peace committees formed after communal riots in the 1990s.
Soon after Babu’s arrest, on February 15, the merchants’ association called an emergency meeting and passed a resolution for a bandh in the city in solidarity with the protestors. The association coordinated with over 100 units such as the transporters’ association and auto drivers to ensure full participation.
Word started getting around and some lawyers entered the fray. G Hari Raghavan and S Vanchinathan got involved in helping the arrested village folk get bail. The duo belong to an organisation called Makkal Adhikaram, loosely translated as People’s Power. At that time, Babu and her allies did not know much about this group. The merchants’ association initially planned to organise a shutdown on March 17. They also wanted to do a public meeting. However, the police refused permission. The lawyers of Makkal Adhikaram swung into action and helped them get the requisite permissions from the Madurai bench of Madras High Court, says Thermal S Raja, joint secretary of the merchants’ body.
In the end, March 24 became the appointed day of the shutdown and it was decided that a quiet public meeting would be held that evening at the VVD junction.
Act IV: Coalition attracts members and gains momentum
By now, the anti-Sterlite protestors’ coalition had already attracted different groups of people — villagers directly affected by the expansion, the merchants’ association and lawyers of Makkal Adhikaram.
Others who had been part of the earlier protests against Sterlite also joined. Sterlite executives blame Mohan Lazarus, a preacher who was instrumental in getting the crowd. In a video on YouTube, Lazarus is seen appealing to the faithful of the three main churches, Roman Catholic, Pentecost, and CSI (Church of South India), to attend the protests against Sterlite’s “poisonous” factory.
Sterlite’s executives say when the expansion work started, the company had received grievances from the local community around requirements of roads and water and tried to address the concerns. However, subsequently, the protestors “made unfounded allegations around the environmental practices of the existing plant” and wanted it shut, they add.
The crowds that gathered on March 24 surprised even the organisers. Several villages around Thoothukudi, such as Madathur, Pandarampatti, and Milavittan, also pitched in. “A total of 15 villages came out in support after March 24,” says Raja of the Merchants’ association.
That success also seems to have led to cracks among the protesting groups.
“I thought I was in control,” says Babu today, but she concedes that the huge crowd they saw that day probably made them complacent. The protestors also became more aggressive in their aim.“We wanted to ensure that the next protest we do is even bigger,” says Babu.
Babu was convinced that getting such a crowd would not be possible without support from the merchant community. Merchants did not want to do shutdowns frequently. So, everyone agreed that something would be done two months later.
The merchants’ association in its state-level summit on May 5 announced May 24 as the date of the next protest.
Act V: a suspicious peace meet, a mysterious Section 144 order, and the tragedy of May 22
A day after the March 24 protests, the smelter plant was shut down for planned maintenance.
“Smelting operations at Tuticorin were stopped as part of a planned maintenance shutdown for approximately 15 days with effect from 25 March 2018,” the company said in its results press release.
Sterlite also applied for renewal of consent to operate (CTO) for the smelter during this time. In early April, the application was rejected, leading to the extension of the shutdown.
Meanwhile, the protestor cavalcade was attracting more factions. With that, new leaders who wanted a starring role emerged.
The villages came under the banner of ‘Anti Sterlite Village People alliance’ (Sterlite Ethirppu Grama Makkalin Koottamaippu). M Mahesh, a youth from Therku Veerapandiapuram, is said to have emerged as the key person in this group.
Mahesh, who was also associated with the Naam Thamizhar, a political party, then announced a protest on April 23, without consulting the other groups. “In fact, they wanted to keep us out. It was also the first time that we saw the names of lawyers from Makkal Adhikaram being mentioned in the press releases as ‘legal advisors’,” says Raja.
Separately, PM Tamilmandan, another old-time Sterlite protestor, did an exhibition of material on the long history of the anti-Sterlite movement on April 13. He then followed this up with a hunger strike on May 5. Neither the merchants’ association, the Babu group, nor the village alliance were part of these efforts.
There is a suspicion among the protesting groups that this divide was engineered by the administration, as they were unnerved by the March 24 experience. This is difficult to establish at this point of time.
Babu says her plan was to keep the protests in the collectorate on May 21, a Monday. “My idea was that Monday is the local petition day at the collectorate. No one can be stopped from entering the premises that day. So, we would hand everyone a petition to shut down Sterlite and after that, we would sit down in protest.”
But the villagers did not agree to that date. They wanted it to be on May 22. “The only logic seemed to be that it should not be a date that we suggested,” Babu says.
“In a meeting of the protest groups on May 11, we wanted to know what their (village alliance’s) plan was, but there was nothing concrete,” says Raja.
However, there were hints that a section of the village alliance was planning to provoke the fishing community and cause trouble. So, the merchants’ association distanced itself from it. In a statement released on May 14, the association said it would show its solidarity by participating in the shutdown, but remained silent about participation in the sit-in at the collectorate.
Tamilmandan says throughout the 100 days of the protest, the police and administration kept turning down requests for peaceful protests. “Even a prayer meeting was not allowed. I had to move the high court for a hunger strike. This is what drove the people to a mentality that anyway they would not permit, so let us go ahead come what may.”
In a related move, Sterlite moved the Madurai bench of Madras High Court with an unusual appeal. It said it had received information about inflammatory messages being spread through pamphlets by Makkal Adhikaram and wanted orders under Section 144 be passed to declare the areas around the factory as a “no-protest zone”. The Court allowed the district administration to take necessary steps on May 18.
Henri Tiphagne, a senior human-rights lawyer who runs People’s Watch in Madurai, says he could not find any ruling where a private party has ever sought prohibitory orders under Section 144 and an Internet shutdown.
Tiphagne also takes exception to the manner in which the administration called a peace meeting on May 20, a day before the imposition of Section 144. “You should have called everybody. But you call only 23 organisations. You decided and got a settlement that the protestors would go to SAV Grounds and not the collectorate. But is it not your business to proclaim this?”
People who were active in the protests and are now being blamed by the police for the events of May 22, especially those belonging to organisations such as Makkal Adhikaram, Puthiya Jananayagam, Revolutionary Student and Youth Federation, and the Human Rights Protection Centre, were not called for the so-called peace meeting.
Tiphagne wonders if the prohibitory orders under Section 144, which were clamped on the evening of May 21, were done according to procedure. The order which was proclaimed late in the evening did not get enough distribution among the public. Courts have taken exception to these lapses while recently ordering a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the matter. A mini poster stuck by the Revolutionary Youth Front in Kumareddiyapuram calls for the complete closure of the Sterlite plant, which is destroying "Tamil soil and people"; photo by N Sundaresha SubramanianThe role of Makkal Adhikaram
Makkal Adhikaram and its sister organisations, which are now being blamed for the mishaps, have emerged from a Marxist-Leninist umbrella of organisations. In early years, the group functioned as a cultural organisation, popularly known by the acronym Ma Ka Ei Ka, focusing on art and literature.
State coordinator C Raju says Makkal Adhikaram’s role initially was to gather support for the protests in the rest of the state. Gradually it got involved with the village alliance and helped each village organise by identifying key people to lead the protests.
The group’s philosophy revolves around the premise that the state machinery is unable to solve the problems facing the people and has itself become a source of several problems. Therefore, there is a need to give power back to the people, hence People’s Power.
The organisation has been at the centre of protests in other areas of Tamil Nadu too. Its members Vanchinathan and Hari Raghavan were booked under the National Security Act (NSA), but the court recently quashed those charges. “You can’t slap NSA for democratic dissent,” says Raju.
In the police clampdown after the May 22 police firing, the police have extracted several confessions from key protestors. People from the fishing community and D Ponpandi, an AIADMK functionary from Madathur village, have given statements to the authorities blaming Makkal Adhikaram for provoking them into violence.
Maria Raja Bose Reagan, a fishing community leader, says they were provoked by a media interview given by the members of Makkal Adhikaram, in which it claimed the protests started from the Basilica of Lady of Snows aka Panimaya Madha Kovil.
“Though it’s a church open to all communities, any reference to it primarily means putting the blame on the doors of our community. That is why we went and reported,” Reagan tells ET Prime.
In addition to such rivalry among the protesting groups, in the days after the firing, the police registered hundreds of open FIRs against “unknown persons” for sporadic acts of violence. These were then used to extract confessions from them implicating one another, allege protestors.
In one such detailed confession, Mahesh, who led the Kumareddiapuram protests, is seen blaming all other leaders, including Fatima Babu and Hari Raghavan, as having openly planned to attack the collectorate with petrol bombs and damage property in the Sterlite quarters and so on.
Tamilmandan recalled how several cases were slapped on him, and his wife, who is a teacher, was harassed by the police. Following efforts by the legal team led by Tiphagne, the Madurai bench of Madras High Court ordered on August 3 that over 200 FIRs filed on incidents of May 22 be clubbed and treated as one under the CB-CID investigation. On August 14, it ordered the handing over of the probe to the CBI.
The government has appointed Aruna Jagadeesan, a retired high court judge, to probe the allegations of police excesses. The confidence of the people in the process is low.
“The government committed the massacre. How can it be expected to do a fair job? There is no confidence in the commission. It won’t be honest. Even if it was, it would be put in cold storage,” says Tamilmandan.
Ironically, though most of the protestors suspect collusion between the authorities and the company, not many are sure how high above this goes. If at all it was there, was it at the district or state level, or even higher?
In response to Sterlite’s appeal to the National Green Tribunal against the plant’s closure, the principal bench of the tribunal on Monday ordered that a three-member team led by a retired judge shall look into the issue.
The tribunal has also said that the committee should be headed by a retired judge and two members each from the Central Pollution Control Board and the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change. The company had objected to the nomination of retired judges from Tamil Nadu on the fear of bias. The tribunal has ordered that the report be filed in six weeks.
12.12.1989: Foundation stone laid in Ratnagiri for Sterlite Copper smelter.
01.05.1994: Sharad Pawar-led Maharashtra government throws it out after protests from locals and Alphonso farmers.
30.10.1994: Foundation stone laid in Thoothukudi by the then chief minister Jayalalithaa; concerns about effluents affecting marine life rise almost immediately; the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) gives conditional clearance and directs that environment-impact assessment (EIA) be done.
March 1996: A cargo ship, MV Reeza, carrying copper ore to the Sterlite factory berths near Thoothukudi; a mini navy of 74 motor boats, 34 country boats and over 500 fishermen set sail into the sea and block it from entering the port.
April 1996: The district administration stops the company from laying a pipeline carrying waste to the sea.
May 1996: Communal riots break out between fishing and merchant communities; it’s a major setback for the anti-Sterlite movement.
October 1996: Cargo liner MV Parasgavi, carrying copper ore, is sent back after fierce protests; Sterlite announces that effluents will be handled within the factory itself; the plan to drain them into sea is dropped.
January 1997: The plant begins operations, producing 391 tonnes of copper anode per day.
July 5, 1997: Ninety girls working in Ramesh Flowers swoon after an alleged leak from Sterlite; eyewitnesses see a big smoke cloud emerging from the adjacent Sterlite compound; Sterlite blames flower company's processes.
November 24, 1998: Madras High Court orders the plant shut after an inspection by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Neeri).
December 25, 1998: Court modifies order, asking Neeri to do a fresh study.
February 1999: Neeri recommends a fresh EIA study while the factory is in full run.
March 2, 1999: Eleven workers at an All India Radio station near Sterlite complain of distress due to a gas leak and have to be hospitalised.
March 1999: TNPCB gives a clean chit to Sterlite and allows expansion of capacity from 40,000 tpa to 70,000 tpa.
July 2003: Sterlite submits EIA after a delay of nine years.
September 2004: The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee (SCMC) inspects Sterlite and recommends that permission to expand production for the plant should not be given.
September 2004: The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change allows Sterlite to expand capacity.
November 2004: TNPCB says Sterlite illegally producing copper — more than double the amount it was licensed to.
2005: The environment ministry and SCMC ask TNPCB to allow Sterlite to operate despite the violations.
September 2010: Madras High Court orders Sterlite shutdown in 1996 case filed by the National Trust for Clean Environment, V Gopalasamy, and others.
October 2010: Supreme Court stays the Madras High Court order.
March 2013: TNPCB orders another shutdown of the Sterlite plant, as people complain of a gas leak that caused suffocation, coughing, and eye problems. Sterlite challenges the order, saying the other factories are causing the pollution. The closure is revoked.
April 2013: Supreme Court delivers the final judgement, accepting that Sterlite polluted Thoothukudi. But the apex court does not shut the plant on account of its effect on the economy and jobs. It fines Sterlite INR100 crore.
February 2, 2018: Vedanta talks about expansion work commencing in Thoothukudi.
February 12, 2018: A 100-day protest by various groups begins in Thoothukudi and nearby villages.
April 2018: TNPCB declines Sterlite a renewal of its consent to operate based on its violation of environmental norms.
May 22, 2018: Thirteen people die in a shootout by police in Occupy collectorate during protests demanding closure of the Sterlite plant.
May 23, 2018: TNPCB orders disconnection of power and water supply to Sterlite and Madras High Court stays the expansion of the plant.
May 28, 2018: The Tamil Nadu government orders a permanent shutdown of the plant.
August 9, 2018: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) allows Vedanta to access Sterlite’s administrative office and directs TNPCB to submit scientific data on pollution around the plant area.
August 18, 2018: The Supreme Court refuses to intervene in the NGT’s order.
Source: People's inquest report; Down to Earth; anti-Sterlite movement; media reports
(Graphics by Ankita Mehrotra)
An elderly lady who kids address as Lathachi wonders if we are there to help Sterlite reopen the factory.
“They have been allowed to use the office. What work do they have in office when the factory itself is closed? We know where this is going. But, if they want to open the factory again, let them first bomb this village, kill us all, and then do it,” she says angrily.
Other younger women join her with anecdotes of recent deaths. They are surprisingly well informed and updated about everything that is happening around Sterlite and meet rival arguments with well-articulated counters.
Has Sterlite not brought jobs and economic betterment to the area?
“Velakamaatha kuduthan Sterlite kaaran,” she shoots back. It literally means Sterlite gave them only a broom. The colloquial usage means Sterlite gave zilch.
“Those who are supporting the company today are village presidents and contractors who supply JCBs and trucks to the company. These are either politicians or people close to them. They are least bothered about whether we live or die,” a young woman in her thirties says.
Two sides to the story
There is another woman, younger than these women, who lives a few kilometres away, inside the Sterlite township adjacent to the factory premises. Her name is Raji Subramanian. A Sterlite employee, she has taken to Twitter to defend her company, which she thinks has been unfairly targeted.
The handle @iamraji had taken Twitter by storm around July, rebutting claims against Sterlite and giving it back to protestors.
Raji Subramanian@IamRajii
I'm an year old employee of Sterlite copper.If I'm spending my weekend on Twitter to write about #STERLITE, it's not because of my pay hike(I'm not covered under appraisal yet) or the loyalty (I'm GenY and I can get job anywhere else) but simply because I believe in truth!
9:35 AM - Jul 31, 2018
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Subramanian tells ET Prime she had joined Sterlite as a trainee in the HR department about a year ago. When the crisis came, she could see how rumours were being spread indiscriminately.
“Irrespective of which department [they worked in], every employee felt strongly about this,” she says. “Our management has also encouraged us to communicate the facts among our friends and relatives on social media.”
There is no doubt that Sterlite has had a huge economic impact on Tamil Nadu. There is even lesser doubt that it has not been able to address the concerns that people have had about the alleged deleterious impact of the discharge from its Thoothukudi plant.
There is a section of people who have got jobs or contracts from Sterlite. They back the company. The locals, on the other hand, believe Sterlite has used its economic might in cahoots with the administration to suppress their concerns.
Between these two bitterly opposed points of view lies the tale.
The might of Sterlite
Vedanta-Sterlite holds 33% share of the country’s refined copper demand of about 0.675 million tonnes per annum.
Sterlite is a major domestic supplier of phosphoric acid, which is a key raw material for fertiliser-manufacturing companies, with a capacity of 0.22 million tonnes per annum. These fertiliser units will now need to import phosphoric acid. It is also the largest supplier of sulphuric acid in Tamil Nadu with a 95% share of the market. Sulphuric acid is used in the detergent and chemical industries.
“The plant provided direct employment to 3,500 to 4,000 people and more than 70% of these employees are from Tamil Nadu. Further, the plant operations impact more than 20,000 people engaged in various supplier and customer units. The plant engages about 1,000 trucks/tankers on a daily basis with consistent load, thereby providing livelihood to around 9,000 truck drivers and cleaners per month. We have over 650 supply and service partners and we help them generate a business of close to USD134 million every year,” Sterlite said in one of its statements after the shootout.
Copper India, the vertical within Vedanta which houses copper facilities in other places, contributed INR1,308 crore to the EBITDA of Vedanta in FY18, which was 5% of the consolidated annual EBITDA.
Had the plant remained functional and embarked on the “Tuticorin II” expansion of 400ktpa (by FY20), it would have become one of the world’s largest single-location copper smelters.
Few takers for Sterlite’s stand on pollution
Clearly Sterlite is strong, rich, and powerful and has been standing its ground on environmental concerns, but to no avail. For example, it has cited the district cancer data, according to which other districts of Tamil Nadu have reported much higher incidence of the disease.
But the Kumareddiapuram villagers do not buy the argument. One of them rubbishes the claims that health issues are being exaggerated, saying, “They say cancer patients in Chennai are more than those in Thoothukudi. But, if you send all those who contracted cancer here to Chennai for treatment, numbers would obviously be higher.”
Nityanand Jayaraman, an environmentalist who has worked closely with Fatima Babu, one of the protest leaders, and other protestors, says district-level data could hide local spikes. “At a district level, this may not be abnormal. However, if a disproportionate number of the 1,282 cancer cases are from Tuticorin town or the villages surrounding Sterlite, that would certainly be abnormal,” he says.
Jayaraman and other protestors similarly rebut each of the claims of the company. Jayaraman says the primary reason for the factory coming to India was environmental. He contends that the siting of a hazardous industry in such a densely populated area was in violation of laws. According to him, when a large company is the violator, the administration does not come down heavily on it. This has led to people losing confidence in the administration.
“For the people of Thoothukudi, it has been a tale of continuous betrayal. And the biggest of them was the Supreme Court decision in 2013,” says Jayaraman. The apex court in its decision then had fined Sterlite INR100 crore but allowed the plant to operate. Sterlite executives maintain that there is nothing illegal about their operations and all laws have been followed.
Lives in a limbo
Now, around the plant, there is a crowd-induced impasse.
Subramanian, the young Sterlite employee, continues to live in the Sterlite township along with some 150 other families. “Maids who work in the township come from nearby villages. They say they would not be able to earn as much outside. And that others in the villages are jealous of them. The protests are complex, it is a collective of various emotions,” she says.
On Monday, a group of villagers led by the former village president of nearby Therku Veerapandiapuram submitted a petition to the chief minister seeking the reopening of the plant, saying the closure has affected their livelihood.
Subramanian calls the protestors antisocial elements who are misleading the public for their own personal ends. She believes that many in the villages are getting compensated either through cash or through groceries.
Her strong views have not gone down well. “I started getting threats on Facebook. I had to deactivate the account for some time,” she says. But, she returned and continues to feistily defend her company on Facebook and Twitter.
The protestors are equally adamant that they will not settle for anything less than the dismantling of the plant itself.
It is time to leave Thoothukudi. At the bus stop at Therku Veerapandiapuram, near a tailoring shop, a couple of young men are watching Hindi songs on their smartphone.
One of them, a lean, dark fellow, says he is from Jharkhand and was working in the VV Titanium factory. He says there are other workers from Bengal staying in the village who were working for Sterlite. Have they gone back? “No, they are waiting,” he says before going back to his video.
It could be a long wait. For everyone.
(Graphic by Ankita Mehortra)
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The Sterlite saga: from orange clouds to red flags
Sterlite’s Thoothukudi copper plant used to account for 40% of India’s copper production. It is now shut. ET Prime’s reportage reveals the cause: strange company manoeuvres, a fusion of myriad protest groups, and the government’s inability to see the coming storm.
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N Sundaresha Subramanian
21 Aug 2018
PROTESTORS AT VEDANTA'S STERLITE COPPER UNIT ON MAY 24, 2018; PHOTO BY BA RAJU/BCCL
At ten past eight in the morning, bus number 102 leaves the Anna bus stand in Thoothukudi and takes the Palayamkottai High Road, one of the three arterial roads of the port city. The word ‘Sterlite’ is written prominently in Tamil, among the names of the other villages the bus will pass through. It passes through the South police station, courts, and the VVD (a consumer brand named after its owner VV Dhanushkodi) junction.
Before the collectorate, it takes a right turn on the Madurai Bypass aka NH 38.
A few minutes later, after passing a couple of Sipcot (State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu) bus stops, the factory that has become the focal point of various stakeholders in the district comes into view.
The Sterlite Copper campus, which stands where the village road to Therku Veerapandiapuram meets the highway, looks deserted, except for some sporadic police presence. The road to Therku Veerapandiapuram passes the high-power transmitter of the All India Radio. A couple of shops selling tea and snacks are doing brisk business as workers head to VV Titanium Pigments, on the opposite side of the road.
Sahayam, a truck driver-turned-Sterlite protestor from nearby Madathur, calls to say he wouldn’t be able to make it that day. He is helpful with directions, though. He says Therku Veerapandiapuram is about a kilometre from there, and a couple more kilometres down lies Kumareddiapuram, the village where it all started in July 2017.
A half-an-hour walk leads to the edges of Kumareddiapuram. A milestone with barely visible markings says “Thoothukudi 9 km”.
“Muthu Kuzhithurai”, as Thoothukudi is referred to because of its pearl-fishing legacy, is an ancient city that had trade links with the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. It came into the limelight because of the incident of May 22, 2018, when a crowd had gathered to protest the alleged environmental pollution caused by Sterlite’s copper plant. The Tamil Nadu police opened fire on the crowd, killing 13 people. The plant is now shut.
When operational, the plant was a significant contributor to Tamil Nadu’s economy and accounted for around 2% of the world’s copper production. It produced 0.438 million tonnes of India’s annual copper output of 1 million tonnes, and was directly and indirectly responsible for the livelihood of 25,000 families.
ET Prime travelled to Thoothukudi and nearby areas in Tamil Nadu to unravel the sequence of events that led to the disappearance of 40% of India’s copper production. The story we discovered is an extremely cautionary tale of how businesses deal with their environmental footprint, because in India once a footprint is big enough, it will find a political backstop. Businesses and governments that are not proactive about addressing these concerns will see loss of precious lives and a massive hit to reputation.
Let’s go back to the ground at Kumareddiapuram. The soil is black, probably suitable for cotton farming. A lone water pump stands in a corner of a field. Some cows are out grazing. Few hundred metres ahead is the compound wall of Sterlite Copper. Some goats appear on the dirt track around the wall. Chinnachami, the goat herder, says the wall has been there for several years now, “perhaps five or more”.
Act I: land acquisition
The trouble, according to him, started when Sterlite started leasing land around the Kumareddiapuram village in the second half of last year. “They were paying INR10,000 per acre per month. A person with seven acres of land was getting INR70,000 per month. Who would refuse that kind of money?” he says.
Soon, people realised the company was getting land this way on three sides of the village of about 100-150 households. “People started realising they would be blocked and their movement crippled.”
Around the same time, a lot of heavy construction work began within the Sterlite premises. Information that Sterlite was increasing capacity reached the villagers from someone working in the plant or associated with it.
“That scared everyone. People have been complaining of miscarriages and other health problems, especially breathing related. If the capacity was doubled, we will all be ruined,” says Chinnachami.
Villagers allege that Sterlite often released its troublesome emissions at night. The emission settled on the grass and other greenery and if the cattle ate them, they fell ill with dysentery and other ailments, say villagers.
“I myself was in Thoothukudi (then Tuticorin), during one of those leaks (in 1997 allegedly from Sterlite). I was working there at that time and had just gotten down from the bus. I couldn’t breathe. I thought it was just me and started running. I will never forget that experience. If something happens, who will be responsible?” says Chinnachami.
Pamela Philipose, a senior journalist who was part of a public inquest organised by civil society, recalled recently how the villagers often saw “orange clouds in the sky” and the air smelt “as if a rat has died in the sky”.
To be sure, Sterlite Copper has had a troubled history, having been shut down several times for alleged leaks and other health scares since 1994, when the then chief minister laid the foundation stone. (See timeline at the end of this story.)
The last of the recent shutdowns came in March 2013, when a sulphur dioxide leak from the plant led to suffocation, which the local people and even the then collector Ashish Kumar were said to have experienced.
Act II: expansion
In a bid to cater to rising demand from export markets, the Anil Agarwal-led Vedanta group had plans to invest between INR2,500 crore and INR3,000 crore to double the capacity of its copper unit at Thoothukudi to 8 lakh tonnes per annum. Vedanta had talked about the expansion plans in 2016.
Work on the expansion, which would start as soon as the company gets some pending clearances from the state, is likely to start towards early next year and will be completed in two years, R Ramnath, CEO, Sterlite Copper, told the Financial Express in an interview.
Sterlite Copper has a smelter, refinery, phosphoric acid plant, sulphuric acid plant, copper rod plant, and three captive power plants at Thoothukudi. It also has a refinery and two copper-rod plants at Silvassa (Dadra and Nagar Haveli).
On February 2, Kuldip Kaura, CEO of London-listed Vedanta Resources, the parent company of Sterlite Copper, said during an analyst conference call: “The copper smelter … we have the requisite permits, and project has already been awarded and the construction work has commenced. This is a two-year project; we should have the project commissioned towards the end of financial year 2020.”
Act III: Fatima Babu and protest coalition
Sometime around February 5, says Fatima Babu, 65, a retired English professor who has been involved in the protests against the Sterlite plant over the past two decades, she received a call from Kumareddiapuram. Babu says this was something special. “Earlier we had to go to the villages, explain to them (the villagers) about the perils of the plant. Still, people would not be interested. But, for the first time in the long history of protests against Sterlite, people were inviting us to join the protests.”
Over the next week or so, Babu joined the villagers in sit-in protests and hunger strikes, in which people would sit under a neem tree in the village, taking turns from dawn to dusk.
On February 12, the villagers decided to organise a hunger strike at the VVD junction at the heart of the city. The junction is close to the court complexes and the South police station. That day, the protestors refused to leave. When they refused to disperse for the second day in a row, the police decided to arrest them.
Initially, they were put in a marriage hall. Later, the police arrested some protestors, including Babu. They were all sent to jail after being taken to the magistrate late in the night. The arrest of Babu seems to have triggered a set of events that got the local merchants’ association involved.
Babu hails from the fishing community, which is largely Catholic, and is married into a Hindu family. The merchants’ association is led by people from the Nadar community. Though Thoothukudi has a mix of many communities, the Nadars and the Catholic fisherfolk dominate it.
Babu, who speaks fluent English, has had a long association with the merchants’ association, which dates back to the days of inter-religious peace committees formed after communal riots in the 1990s.
Soon after Babu’s arrest, on February 15, the merchants’ association called an emergency meeting and passed a resolution for a bandh in the city in solidarity with the protestors. The association coordinated with over 100 units such as the transporters’ association and auto drivers to ensure full participation.
Word started getting around and some lawyers entered the fray. G Hari Raghavan and S Vanchinathan got involved in helping the arrested village folk get bail. The duo belong to an organisation called Makkal Adhikaram, loosely translated as People’s Power. At that time, Babu and her allies did not know much about this group. The merchants’ association initially planned to organise a shutdown on March 17. They also wanted to do a public meeting. However, the police refused permission. The lawyers of Makkal Adhikaram swung into action and helped them get the requisite permissions from the Madurai bench of Madras High Court, says Thermal S Raja, joint secretary of the merchants’ body.
In the end, March 24 became the appointed day of the shutdown and it was decided that a quiet public meeting would be held that evening at the VVD junction.
Act IV: Coalition attracts members and gains momentum
By now, the anti-Sterlite protestors’ coalition had already attracted different groups of people — villagers directly affected by the expansion, the merchants’ association and lawyers of Makkal Adhikaram.
Others who had been part of the earlier protests against Sterlite also joined. Sterlite executives blame Mohan Lazarus, a preacher who was instrumental in getting the crowd. In a video on YouTube, Lazarus is seen appealing to the faithful of the three main churches, Roman Catholic, Pentecost, and CSI (Church of South India), to attend the protests against Sterlite’s “poisonous” factory.
Sterlite’s executives say when the expansion work started, the company had received grievances from the local community around requirements of roads and water and tried to address the concerns. However, subsequently, the protestors “made unfounded allegations around the environmental practices of the existing plant” and wanted it shut, they add.
The crowds that gathered on March 24 surprised even the organisers. Several villages around Thoothukudi, such as Madathur, Pandarampatti, and Milavittan, also pitched in. “A total of 15 villages came out in support after March 24,” says Raja of the Merchants’ association.
That success also seems to have led to cracks among the protesting groups.
“I thought I was in control,” says Babu today, but she concedes that the huge crowd they saw that day probably made them complacent. The protestors also became more aggressive in their aim.“We wanted to ensure that the next protest we do is even bigger,” says Babu.
Babu was convinced that getting such a crowd would not be possible without support from the merchant community. Merchants did not want to do shutdowns frequently. So, everyone agreed that something would be done two months later.
The merchants’ association in its state-level summit on May 5 announced May 24 as the date of the next protest.
Act V: a suspicious peace meet, a mysterious Section 144 order, and the tragedy of May 22
A day after the March 24 protests, the smelter plant was shut down for planned maintenance.
“Smelting operations at Tuticorin were stopped as part of a planned maintenance shutdown for approximately 15 days with effect from 25 March 2018,” the company said in its results press release.
Sterlite also applied for renewal of consent to operate (CTO) for the smelter during this time. In early April, the application was rejected, leading to the extension of the shutdown.
Meanwhile, the protestor cavalcade was attracting more factions. With that, new leaders who wanted a starring role emerged.
The villages came under the banner of ‘Anti Sterlite Village People alliance’ (Sterlite Ethirppu Grama Makkalin Koottamaippu). M Mahesh, a youth from Therku Veerapandiapuram, is said to have emerged as the key person in this group.
Mahesh, who was also associated with the Naam Thamizhar, a political party, then announced a protest on April 23, without consulting the other groups. “In fact, they wanted to keep us out. It was also the first time that we saw the names of lawyers from Makkal Adhikaram being mentioned in the press releases as ‘legal advisors’,” says Raja.
Separately, PM Tamilmandan, another old-time Sterlite protestor, did an exhibition of material on the long history of the anti-Sterlite movement on April 13. He then followed this up with a hunger strike on May 5. Neither the merchants’ association, the Babu group, nor the village alliance were part of these efforts.
There is a suspicion among the protesting groups that this divide was engineered by the administration, as they were unnerved by the March 24 experience. This is difficult to establish at this point of time.
Babu says her plan was to keep the protests in the collectorate on May 21, a Monday. “My idea was that Monday is the local petition day at the collectorate. No one can be stopped from entering the premises that day. So, we would hand everyone a petition to shut down Sterlite and after that, we would sit down in protest.”
But the villagers did not agree to that date. They wanted it to be on May 22. “The only logic seemed to be that it should not be a date that we suggested,” Babu says.
“In a meeting of the protest groups on May 11, we wanted to know what their (village alliance’s) plan was, but there was nothing concrete,” says Raja.
However, there were hints that a section of the village alliance was planning to provoke the fishing community and cause trouble. So, the merchants’ association distanced itself from it. In a statement released on May 14, the association said it would show its solidarity by participating in the shutdown, but remained silent about participation in the sit-in at the collectorate.
Tamilmandan says throughout the 100 days of the protest, the police and administration kept turning down requests for peaceful protests. “Even a prayer meeting was not allowed. I had to move the high court for a hunger strike. This is what drove the people to a mentality that anyway they would not permit, so let us go ahead come what may.”
In a related move, Sterlite moved the Madurai bench of Madras High Court with an unusual appeal. It said it had received information about inflammatory messages being spread through pamphlets by Makkal Adhikaram and wanted orders under Section 144 be passed to declare the areas around the factory as a “no-protest zone”. The Court allowed the district administration to take necessary steps on May 18.
Henri Tiphagne, a senior human-rights lawyer who runs People’s Watch in Madurai, says he could not find any ruling where a private party has ever sought prohibitory orders under Section 144 and an Internet shutdown.
Tiphagne also takes exception to the manner in which the administration called a peace meeting on May 20, a day before the imposition of Section 144. “You should have called everybody. But you call only 23 organisations. You decided and got a settlement that the protestors would go to SAV Grounds and not the collectorate. But is it not your business to proclaim this?”
People who were active in the protests and are now being blamed by the police for the events of May 22, especially those belonging to organisations such as Makkal Adhikaram, Puthiya Jananayagam, Revolutionary Student and Youth Federation, and the Human Rights Protection Centre, were not called for the so-called peace meeting.
Tiphagne wonders if the prohibitory orders under Section 144, which were clamped on the evening of May 21, were done according to procedure. The order which was proclaimed late in the evening did not get enough distribution among the public. Courts have taken exception to these lapses while recently ordering a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into the matter. A mini poster stuck by the Revolutionary Youth Front in Kumareddiyapuram calls for the complete closure of the Sterlite plant, which is destroying "Tamil soil and people"; photo by N Sundaresha SubramanianThe role of Makkal Adhikaram
Makkal Adhikaram and its sister organisations, which are now being blamed for the mishaps, have emerged from a Marxist-Leninist umbrella of organisations. In early years, the group functioned as a cultural organisation, popularly known by the acronym Ma Ka Ei Ka, focusing on art and literature.
State coordinator C Raju says Makkal Adhikaram’s role initially was to gather support for the protests in the rest of the state. Gradually it got involved with the village alliance and helped each village organise by identifying key people to lead the protests.
The group’s philosophy revolves around the premise that the state machinery is unable to solve the problems facing the people and has itself become a source of several problems. Therefore, there is a need to give power back to the people, hence People’s Power.
The organisation has been at the centre of protests in other areas of Tamil Nadu too. Its members Vanchinathan and Hari Raghavan were booked under the National Security Act (NSA), but the court recently quashed those charges. “You can’t slap NSA for democratic dissent,” says Raju.
In the police clampdown after the May 22 police firing, the police have extracted several confessions from key protestors. People from the fishing community and D Ponpandi, an AIADMK functionary from Madathur village, have given statements to the authorities blaming Makkal Adhikaram for provoking them into violence.
Maria Raja Bose Reagan, a fishing community leader, says they were provoked by a media interview given by the members of Makkal Adhikaram, in which it claimed the protests started from the Basilica of Lady of Snows aka Panimaya Madha Kovil.
“Though it’s a church open to all communities, any reference to it primarily means putting the blame on the doors of our community. That is why we went and reported,” Reagan tells ET Prime.
In addition to such rivalry among the protesting groups, in the days after the firing, the police registered hundreds of open FIRs against “unknown persons” for sporadic acts of violence. These were then used to extract confessions from them implicating one another, allege protestors.
In one such detailed confession, Mahesh, who led the Kumareddiapuram protests, is seen blaming all other leaders, including Fatima Babu and Hari Raghavan, as having openly planned to attack the collectorate with petrol bombs and damage property in the Sterlite quarters and so on.
Tamilmandan recalled how several cases were slapped on him, and his wife, who is a teacher, was harassed by the police. Following efforts by the legal team led by Tiphagne, the Madurai bench of Madras High Court ordered on August 3 that over 200 FIRs filed on incidents of May 22 be clubbed and treated as one under the CB-CID investigation. On August 14, it ordered the handing over of the probe to the CBI.
The government has appointed Aruna Jagadeesan, a retired high court judge, to probe the allegations of police excesses. The confidence of the people in the process is low.
“The government committed the massacre. How can it be expected to do a fair job? There is no confidence in the commission. It won’t be honest. Even if it was, it would be put in cold storage,” says Tamilmandan.
Ironically, though most of the protestors suspect collusion between the authorities and the company, not many are sure how high above this goes. If at all it was there, was it at the district or state level, or even higher?
In response to Sterlite’s appeal to the National Green Tribunal against the plant’s closure, the principal bench of the tribunal on Monday ordered that a three-member team led by a retired judge shall look into the issue.
The tribunal has also said that the committee should be headed by a retired judge and two members each from the Central Pollution Control Board and the Ministry of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change. The company had objected to the nomination of retired judges from Tamil Nadu on the fear of bias. The tribunal has ordered that the report be filed in six weeks.
12.12.1989: Foundation stone laid in Ratnagiri for Sterlite Copper smelter.
01.05.1994: Sharad Pawar-led Maharashtra government throws it out after protests from locals and Alphonso farmers.
30.10.1994: Foundation stone laid in Thoothukudi by the then chief minister Jayalalithaa; concerns about effluents affecting marine life rise almost immediately; the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) gives conditional clearance and directs that environment-impact assessment (EIA) be done.
March 1996: A cargo ship, MV Reeza, carrying copper ore to the Sterlite factory berths near Thoothukudi; a mini navy of 74 motor boats, 34 country boats and over 500 fishermen set sail into the sea and block it from entering the port.
April 1996: The district administration stops the company from laying a pipeline carrying waste to the sea.
May 1996: Communal riots break out between fishing and merchant communities; it’s a major setback for the anti-Sterlite movement.
October 1996: Cargo liner MV Parasgavi, carrying copper ore, is sent back after fierce protests; Sterlite announces that effluents will be handled within the factory itself; the plan to drain them into sea is dropped.
January 1997: The plant begins operations, producing 391 tonnes of copper anode per day.
July 5, 1997: Ninety girls working in Ramesh Flowers swoon after an alleged leak from Sterlite; eyewitnesses see a big smoke cloud emerging from the adjacent Sterlite compound; Sterlite blames flower company's processes.
November 24, 1998: Madras High Court orders the plant shut after an inspection by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Neeri).
December 25, 1998: Court modifies order, asking Neeri to do a fresh study.
February 1999: Neeri recommends a fresh EIA study while the factory is in full run.
March 2, 1999: Eleven workers at an All India Radio station near Sterlite complain of distress due to a gas leak and have to be hospitalised.
March 1999: TNPCB gives a clean chit to Sterlite and allows expansion of capacity from 40,000 tpa to 70,000 tpa.
July 2003: Sterlite submits EIA after a delay of nine years.
September 2004: The Supreme Court Monitoring Committee (SCMC) inspects Sterlite and recommends that permission to expand production for the plant should not be given.
September 2004: The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change allows Sterlite to expand capacity.
November 2004: TNPCB says Sterlite illegally producing copper — more than double the amount it was licensed to.
2005: The environment ministry and SCMC ask TNPCB to allow Sterlite to operate despite the violations.
September 2010: Madras High Court orders Sterlite shutdown in 1996 case filed by the National Trust for Clean Environment, V Gopalasamy, and others.
October 2010: Supreme Court stays the Madras High Court order.
March 2013: TNPCB orders another shutdown of the Sterlite plant, as people complain of a gas leak that caused suffocation, coughing, and eye problems. Sterlite challenges the order, saying the other factories are causing the pollution. The closure is revoked.
April 2013: Supreme Court delivers the final judgement, accepting that Sterlite polluted Thoothukudi. But the apex court does not shut the plant on account of its effect on the economy and jobs. It fines Sterlite INR100 crore.
February 2, 2018: Vedanta talks about expansion work commencing in Thoothukudi.
February 12, 2018: A 100-day protest by various groups begins in Thoothukudi and nearby villages.
April 2018: TNPCB declines Sterlite a renewal of its consent to operate based on its violation of environmental norms.
May 22, 2018: Thirteen people die in a shootout by police in Occupy collectorate during protests demanding closure of the Sterlite plant.
May 23, 2018: TNPCB orders disconnection of power and water supply to Sterlite and Madras High Court stays the expansion of the plant.
May 28, 2018: The Tamil Nadu government orders a permanent shutdown of the plant.
August 9, 2018: The National Green Tribunal (NGT) allows Vedanta to access Sterlite’s administrative office and directs TNPCB to submit scientific data on pollution around the plant area.
August 18, 2018: The Supreme Court refuses to intervene in the NGT’s order.
Source: People's inquest report; Down to Earth; anti-Sterlite movement; media reports
(Graphics by Ankita Mehrotra)
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