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Indian Enviros Urge Ban on Pesticide Endosulfan
Indian environmentalists called Wednesday for an immediate ban on endosulfan, a pesticide that is already outlawed in many parts of the world and has recently been linked to disease and deformity in southern India by a confidential government report.
Activists of the New Delhi based group Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) are calling on the southern Indian state of Kerala to reinstate an endosulfan ban that was lifted in March despite confidential findings presented to the Indian government by the National Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH) linking the pesticide to a wide variety of health disorders.
"We want the ban to be re-imposed on endosulfan on the basis of the NIOH report," said Chitra Gopalakrishan, co-ordinator of the CSE Media Research Centre.
In a statement last week, CSE, which claimed to have obtained a copy of the NIOH report from unnamed sources in Kerala, said that the report had found endosulfan residues in water and blood samples collected from Padre, a village in northern Kerala, in September and October last year, 10 months after the pesticide had last been sprayed on the region's cashew crops.
According to CSE, NIOH found a "significantly higher prevalence of learning disabilities, low IQ and scholastic backwardness" among children, as well as serious neurological problems and congenital and reproductive abnormalities among people in the region.
"It has also been found that workers in the cashew plantations suffer from neurological problems such as trembling hands," said Kushal Pandey, a reporter who has been following the issue up for CSE's environment magazine, "Down to Earth."
The use of endosulfan - which has been banned in the Philippines since 1994 and Colombia since 2001 - hit the headlines in February of last year when "Down to Earth" carried a report that established a link between the pesticide and serious health problems in the northern Kerala district of
Kasaragod.
The Kerala state government, in response, banned the aerial spraying of endosulfan in August 2001. The Indian Council of Medical Research asked the NIOH, an affiliated body concerned with issues relating to occupation hazards of workers, to conduct a probe.
The NIOH report, which was completed in March, has not yet been made a public document, a move which has been condemned by activists claiming that the pesticide lobby is working to undermine negative findings on the use of endosulfan.
"Has this damning report been kept secret because it clearly implicates the pesticide industry?" asks Jayakumar C, co-ordinator of Thanal, a non-governmental organization of Kerala working on environmental issues.
CSE stressed that the pesticide lobby has been campaigning to portray endosulfan as harmless. Prior to the lifting of the ban, a study conducted by the Plantation Corporation of Kerala, which has been spraying endosulfan on cashew plantations since the mid-1970s, concluded that the pesticide could not be linked to Kasaragod's health problems.
"Clearly, the silent screams of Padre's residents for environmental justice have fallen on deaf ears," CSE said.
The US$840 million pesticide industry in India is the fourth largest in the world. India is also the largest global producer of endosulfan.
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