Maggi ban in India has caused a media ruckus. Once again we think- Is the food we eat safe? Fizzy drinks, vegetables and fruits, all contain a high rate of pesticides which affects the health of consumers. Is it practical to ban all of these? Pesticide content in cool drinks, vegetables, rice, hormones in meat and unhealthy food served in hotels -Well, all these stories have been out there for ages. But what about those people who were directly hit by the pesticides and chemicals? It is time we rethink about those villages which were made uninhabitable for generations by the pesticide and food manufacturing companies.
Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984 regarded as one of the biggest industrial disasters of all time, created a death toll of 16000 due to the lack of precautions by Union India Carbide Ltd. Three decades later, those villages still suffer from pollution and not a single person has been punished by our judiciary.
Fifteen years back when Coca Cola Company began a manufacturing plant in Plachimada, a hamlet in Kerala, they wreaked havoc for generations to come, in the villages nearby. Water became brackish and caused ailments among people due to the illegal water harvesting techniques used by the company. Palakkad district which was once the rice bowl of Kerala was officially declared as drought affected districts. Yet the company still functions proving our legal system exists not to protect a common man but to bow down to higher powers. Plachimada was just one village and we can be absolutely sure that there were many other villages which were made useless by these corporates.
Vandana Shiva, the environmentalist in India pointed out in her book The Violence of the Green Revolution that many fertilisers and pesticides which were sold at rates subsidised by Government has rented hectares of land uncultivable. Wells dry up quickly and the ground water is left polluted. Due to the dumping cocktail of pesticides, the villages surrounding the cotton plantations in Bhatinda had children with impaired mental growth. The story was uncovered by Green Peace foundation in India but justice is denied up till now. The water pollution level is critical that it has caused an unbelievable rise in the number of cancer patients in the village. The villages in the surrounding areas are known as ‘cancer villages’ due to the humungous number of cancer patients. The story does not end here either. Recent studies conducted to test the purity of groundwater in West Bengal revealed that about 48.1% of water contains arsenic in large quantities.
Battles against Endosulphan in Kerala was one of the biggest struggles against pesticide pollution in India. Children were born with deformities and the cancer rates in these villages were on an all-time rise. Following the investigations, there were many areas in Karnataka, Seemandhra, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal where people were found to develop strange diseases due to pesticides. In these areas, EndoSulphan was used as per the instructions of government authorities. Naturally, they refused to accept that EndoSulphan was causing these health hazards. After thirty years of struggle, EndoSulphan was banned in Indi. But this was because counties like Saudi Arabia and Oman who almost placed a ban on vegetables from India due to its pesticide content. In spite of the ban, EndoSulphan is used in tea plantations in India.
In 2011, India banned 15 pesticides because of health hazards. But still over 60 pesticides and fertilizers sold in India are banned officially in about 70 counties according to the report published by The Hindu in 2011. Most of these pesticides are dumped into India at very cheap rates since they cannot be sold elsewhere. Pesticides already brought are given free of charge by Government officials too.
People who are directly hit by these poisons are mostly villagers and peasants often isolated from the din of press. But media often lose interest in their issues that after a while they become another filed story. One can only hope that this sudden Maggi mania would make a significant difference and we would be able to have food and not poison someday. Maggi is a crowd pulling story because there are people from all over India affected by it and stand up against it. May be it is high time, we stood up for our farmers who put grains on our table. Their fate may befall upon us any day.
