Killing the land
In the past five to 10 years, the indiscriminate mushrooming of coal-based sponge iron factories in Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Goa and Karnataka has ravaged the countryside, affected groundwater supplies, polluted air and water bodies, and severely damaged crops, the forest cover, livestock, health and livelihoods.
The problems are more or less the same, all across. Factory owners, interested only in the profit margin, circumvent basic safety and pollution control measures. At every plant site local villagers voice an identical litany of complaints (see box: Black veil). Almost without exception, all small and medium scale plants shut their esps in the evenings to save electricity costs and speed up the production process (it costs a plant about Rs 6 lakh a month to run an esp continuously).The dust collected from the esps is not handled properly, but dumped outside the plant in dry form, causing severe pollution. Further, there is no system for disposing coal char. The toxic slag is dumped haphazardly along highways, in villages, forests and streams. Coal char, if it seeps underground, can contaminate the water table. Rampant deep boring for water, necessary for the plants' cooling systems, has depleted groundwater tables in regions where this has been done; and run village wells dry. One plant can have anything from six to 20 deep bore wells.
State factor
Chhattisgarh is one of the major centres of the industry because the two major raw materials required for making sponge iron
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