Industry at any cost

14/04/2000

Industry at any cost Gujarat has more than 90,000 industrial units, according to the state government. About 8,000 of these units are polluting, also says the state government. Major polluting industries are located in the Vadodara Petrochemical Complex, Nandesari, Ankleshwar, Vapi, Vatva and Hazira near Surat. The Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (gidc) was managing 270 industrial estates as on March 1996, and its activity plan for the year 1998-99 included sanctioning of eight new ones. "About 70 per cent of the investment in Gujarat since the 1970s has been in the chemicals sector,' says R C Trivedi, former chairperson of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (gpcb).

He says that in the 1970s, the state government was encouraging small-scale units in the chemicals sector through financial incentives. "These industrial units came up in huge numbers. But the government gave a very low priority to the environment. This is why environmental problems cropped up in Gujarat,' says Trivedi.

Nowhere more so than in the nearly 400-km stretch between Vapi in southern Gujarat and Vatva in northern Gujarat, called the golden corridor, an industrialist's dream come true. This stretch has become a hot bed of pollution. "In the golden corridor, we have created a number of potential disasters similar to the Bhopal gas tragedy. The time-bomb is ticking very fast,' says Achyutbhai Yagnik, secretary of Setu, an Ahmedabad-based ngo. Another example of an environmental nightmare is Alang, the largest shipbreaking yard of the world, situated 50 km from Bhavnagar. The 11-km coastline of the yard has been severely polluted due to scrapping of hazardous ships (see

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