Industry versus the people: The Sterlite tragedy could have been averted

The death of 12 people and serious injuries to hundreds of others in clashes with the police around the Sterlite copper smelter in Tuticorin on Tuesday holds a critical lesson for the political leadership of all states that hope to bank on rapid industrialisation to create jobs and move up the development ladder. It is that people and politicians do not necessarily view industrial development through the same prism. For the former, it can spell dispossession of land or a deterioration of lifestyle, livelihood and health, and the latter often fail to understand these deep-seated reservations in their quest for the glittering electoral prize of job creation. The failure to address the genuine and sometimes unexpressed apprehensions of project-affected people and to imaginatively harmonise corporate action with local concerns lies at the heart of India’s quest for rapid development. The upshot is that states are forced to make binary choices — pro-people or pro-industry — without exploring a middle path. This has been the lesson from Nandigram in West Bengal in 2007, when protests over a state-sponsored chemical hub led to the death of several protestors in police firing, and from Vedanta’s troubled attempts to mine bauxite in Lanjigarh, Odisha in 2008. 

In that sense, the festering Sterlite controversy was a tragedy waiting to happen as local grievances were frequently ignored in the quest for turning Tamil Nadu into the dynamic industrial hub it had become. Complaints from locals about the air and water pollution posed by the smelter date back to the time the plant was set up in 1997. Since then, there have been several attempts to close the plant only to have them overturned by the machinery of the state. In 2013, local complaints about eye irritation and respiratory problems were dismissed by the local bureaucracy. A gas leak soon after, however, raised the spectre of the infamous Bhopal tragedy and prompted the then Chief Minister Jayalalithaa to order the closure of the plant, an order that was overturned on appeal by the National Green Tribunal. It is noteworthy, however, that the plant’s licence to operate expired on March 31 this year, the application for a renewal having been rejected on grounds that the company had not complied with local environmental laws. The company had appealed this decision and the hearing was posted for June. 

The sparking point for Tuesday’s tragedy was the company’s announcement that it was investing Rs 25 billion towards doubling the capacity of its existing facility. Since March, there has been a series of peaceful protests against this expansion. Had the state administration been alert, it would have read the signals of a simmering crisis that demanded intermediation between aggrieved locals and the company. If the company is really a violator, the state government should have taken decisive action. Instead, Chief Minister E K Palaniswami has not helped matters by blaming unarmed protestors for inviting reprisals from the armed state security apparatus. At the same time, the High Court’s stay on Sterlite’s expansion is unlikely to send encouraging signals to other prospective investors in Tamil Nadu. At a time when Tamil Nadu has slipped from being one of India’s top investment destinations to a lowly number 12, behind West Bengal and Odisha, it is now in the familiar Catch-22 situation that assails many large projects in India.