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Pit falls

India's first secured hazardous waste landfill, coming up Ankleshwar, is being built and managed by Bharuch Envirci Infrastructure Limited (BEIL), a company formed for the purpose by the industrialists of ' the area. Some 160-odd industries, including chemical units, firms producing pharmaceuticals, dyes, dyes intermediates, pigments and pesticides will be dumping their solid wastes in this landfill.

The landfill is being built on Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) land. An earlier attempt in 1996 to set up such a landfill near a village in the same district was aborted, owing to stiff local resistance and a Public Interest Litigation filed against the landfill.

"The landfill is being developed as per German standards," says Ashok Panjwani, director of BEIL. What he does not say is that the same German standards would classify the landfill as suitable only for sanitary wastes, and not for the toxins Ankleshwar-based industries produce everyday.

Would the landfill win official approval in Germany? Jochen Vida, a hazardous waste management advisor of the Indo-German Cooperation Project (GTZ), technical advisors to this landfill, is clearly uncomfortable with such questions. -The venture was limited due to resource availability," he confesses, "This landfill, which costs Rs 20 crore is about one-tenth the value of an acceptable hazardous waste landfill in Germany."

Manoj Datta, a lining expert at the civil engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, says, "There is absolutely no doubt that this lining will leak in a few years time." And when it does, the impacts will be disastrous: for the people as well as the local ecosystem.

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