May 18, 2006

The death of a boy in Karachi’s SITE industrial area by exposure to toxic waste is tragic and could have been entirely avoided had the various government agencies tasked with checking pollution and dumping of hazardous waste been doing their job. One child is dead and another had his leg amputated after exposure to the toxic waste which had been dumped in an empty plot where they were playing cricket.

After the death, the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency, true to form, came out with a statement telling us what we already knew, and that is, explaining the factors behind the boy’s death. A senior police official chipped in for good measure saying that a case would be registered against those responsible. And then we had Sindh’s industries minister promising a probe and cancellation of the lease of the plot where the waste had been dumped.

The moral of the story, one may ask, is what? Well, for starters, it is that we, as a nation, never learn from the past. Be it democracy, to promulgation of new laws, to more tangible issues like traffic management, ensuring vehicle safety or, in this case, environmental pollution and disposal of hazardous waste, the Pakistani society in general and the state in particular never seem to learn any lessons. They –– especially the government and the agencies that work under its command –– always have to be goaded into doing something, and this normally happens after people having died.

Even then, the response is mostly of a cosmetic nature, with compensation being announced for the families of the victims, with a perfunctory (and hypocritical) statement by some minister or a senior functionary and a promise to carry out a ‘thorough’ investigation and to ‘punish the culprits’.

It should be clear to everyone that the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency and the Sindh industries ministry did not carry out their responsibilities. The failure on this count by the Sindh EPA in particular, to carry out its job even to a minimal level of satisfaction, is typical of the working of an organisation riddled by bureaucratic inertia. The Sindh EPA lacks technical staff and very often it tries to make up for its non-functioning by issuing facetious press statements or its officials giving interviews to state-owned news services where lofty promises are made to stamp out pollution.

The truth is that this is not the first time that hazardous industrial waste has been dumped by an industrial concern in Pakistan –– and it certainly won’t be the last. Hence, the questions that need to be asked from the Sindh EPA, are why has it not carried a survey of industrial areas in the province, taken samples of the waste being generated and dumped there, analysed the samples, and fined any factory that was found dumping hazardous waste.

There is also a larger issue here, and that is what is stopping the Sindh EPA from enforcing the guidelines regarding air and noise pollution, and safe disposal of industrial and hospital waste as contained in the Pakistan Environment Protection Act of 1997? Why does it have to wait for innocent children to die before getting into action against industrial polluters?

It is clear that the Sindh EPA in particular, and the Sindh government in general, have learnt no lessons from specific incidents in the recent past where environmental degradation and pollution has taken dozens of lives.

The most obvious example that comes to mind in this context is the deaths of several dozen people in Hyderabad district last year, which occurred when their drinking water supply –– Manchar Lake and some local subsidiary canals –– became contaminated because of the dumping of untreated chemical waste by some local factories.

Apart from the usual statements by ministers of compensation and promises of a probe, nothing happened after that tragedy either. None of the officials responsible or any of the factories found polluting were punished.

The fear in this SITE pollution case is that in all probability some well-connected businessman or company owns the plot and to save his/its skin, it will do whatever it has to do to escape any punishment from the government. Matters such as punishing a flagrant violator of the law, which are taken care of immediately in civilised nations, are unfortunately a grey area in Pakistan. And as long as that happens, cases of children and even grown ups dying from exposure to toxic waste dumped in an open plot will continue to happen.

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