New Gujarat industrial policy could ignore environment

New Gujarat industrial policy could ignore environment
DARSHAN DESAI

GANDHINAGAR, JULY 4: Despite the stress of the environmentalists on a need to restrict the haphazard growth of chemical and petro-chemicals industry in Gujarat in the interests of environment-conservation, the State's new industrial policy, which is expected next month, is likely to come out with ways to encourage this very sector.

A confidential theme-paper for discussions on the new five-year industrial policy states that the State Government should give special attention to developing downstream chemical and plastic-processing industries in view of the increasing investment in the chemical and petro-chemicals industry.

Though the state government recognises environmental concerns, the theme-paper reflects that industrial pollution is seen just as an irritant in industrial growth and not that causes irreversible damage to natural resources and marine ecology. It nowhere speaks of the fact that chemical estates in the state have reached `saturation levels', which several organisations fighting against pollution have raised.

This despite the fact of official figures saying that the share of the chemicals and petro-chemicals industry, which was 40 per cent at present, was likely to touch 57 per cent soon. During the last seven years, as much as Rs 20,000 crore have been invested in this sector alone.

There are 743 chemical and petro-chemical units with an investment of Rs 19,264 crore and they form 40 per cent of the total industrial investment in the state. As many as 487 others, investing Rs 58,169 crore, are under different stages of implementation, taking the share of the chemicals sector to over 57 per cent.

This does not include 139 projects worth Rs 1,135 crore coming up in the drugs and pharmaceuticals sector. With this, the share of potentially-polluting industries would increase to over 59 per cent. At present, 203 pharmaceuticals units, with an investment of Rs 1,310 crore, were in production.

Environmentalists have often expressed apprehensions that the mushrooming chemical units could have disastrous consequences, following the state government's failure in checking the environmental pollution generated by this sector. Even, international environmental watch-dog, Greenpeace, has published reports about this, while its surveys have concluded that delayed pollution-control measures initiated at the chemical estates in the state were inadequate to tackle the effluents discharged by the industrial units.

Additional Chief Secretary (Industries) G Subba Rao, on his part, thoroughly disagreed with the environmentalists. Maintaining that the state government was making the utmost efforts in the preservation of the environment, he said, ``Common effluent-treatment plants (CETPs), installed at several chemical estates, have cut down pollution-levels to a great extent.'' He said further that Gujarat was the first state in the country to have these CETPs, which were being run by private agencies.

Denying that chemical estates in the state have reached a saturation point, he held, ``We greatly need the chemical and petrochemicals industries for the growth of the State.''

Of course, knowing that they cannot be seen to be ignoring an important issue like ecology, government officials paid lip-service to it by saying that the state government was also evolving a comprehensive environment policy alongwith the industrial policy.

Additional Chief Secretary (Environment) P Basu told The Indian Express that the environment policy would ``focus on creating awareness among the industrial units about various environmental laws to prevent harassment to them''.

He said another priority area of the environment policy would be to cut the red-tape involved in granting various environmental clearances to industrial units. ``The policy would work out a system through which all clearances are given at one go, and reduce the delays,'' he said. He also agreed on the inadequacy of the pollution-control measures being undertaken by the state government.

On being queried whether the environment policy would address this issue, he replied, ``Yes, but after creating awareness about the laws. It will be a comprehensive policy.'' However, he refused to give a clear time-frame for the formulation of the policy.