CHENNAI:In response to the recent campaign undertaken by Sterlite Copper to clean up its image, T Swaminathan, former professor of IIT Madras and former scientist from NEERI (National Environmental Engineering Research Institute), a research institute created and funded by the Union government, along with social activist Nityanand Jayaraman of Chennai Solidarity Group, said that there was no truth in Sterlite’s claims.
Speaking at a press meet here on Thursday, they said Sterlite had only 60% of the land required to run a 1,200-tonne-per-day smelter unit, but had obtained a licence to expand it, based on a false claim that it had 172.17 hectares when it had only 102.3 hectares, according to a statement issued at the press meet.
They also said that the zero liquid discharge (ZLD) claim by Sterlite was a farce as successive reports from NEERI (2011), the Central Pollution Control Board (2012) and the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (2017) had found Sterlite’s ZLD system inadequate and dysfunctional, the statement said.
On Sterlite’s claims that the cancer data of Thoothukudi suggests no abnormal instances of cancer in the district, the statement said Sterlite cannot make claims, based on district-level data and has to take into account the presence of cancer clusters at the village level.
“By complying with the Supreme Court direction to carry out health studies, Sterlite could have generated village-level data. But it failed to do so,” the statement said.When contacted, N Venkatesan, associate manager-public relations, Sterlite Copper, said that the truth would be proven in court.
“Sterlite is always seen through the lens of suspicion. Until the proposal to expand, we had no problems. The expansion would have been a big blow for China,” he said.