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IN the Research Foundation case, the Supreme Court discovered that 80 per cent of the country's hazardous waste was generated in Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. In order to ensure that the generation of hazardous waste was kept to the minimum and such waste was handled properly in every State, the court appointed a monitoring committee. This committee was to oversee the compliance of the laws, the directions of the Supreme Court and the rules and regulations and file quarterly reports.
In the controversy over the breaking of the Danish ship Riky, the stand of the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) seems to have been strengthened by the qualified clearance given by this nine-member Supreme Court Monitoring Committee (SCMC). At its 10th meeting, held in Shillong from June 1 to 3, the SCMC observed that this case should be dealt with with utmost caution to ensure that all the conditions laid down by the court in the Research Foundation case for ship-breaking activities were followed scrupulously. It, therefore, decided that both the Central Pollution Control Board and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board should depute their officers to be present at the spot when the ship-breaking took place, initially for the first week and thereafter once a week. Frontline learns that this qualified clearance by the SCMC to the breaking of Riky was perhaps not unanimous and there were at least two dissenting opinions expressed at the meeting, by the Chairman and by another member, Claude Alvares.
On May 24 SCMC Chairman G. Thyagarajan expressed his strong reservations over the issue in an email to K.V. Bhanujan, Chairman of the GPCB and a co-opted member of the SCMC. Thyagarajan sent copies of his email to Supreme Court advocate Sanjay Parikh, who had written to him expressing great alarm, and sought the SCMC's urgent intervention.
Thyagarajan wrote: "The ship changing its name and arriving at Indian shore illegally clearly demonstrates its intention to cheat and deceive. Its arrival is in gross violation of the directions on ship-breaking in Paragraph 70.2 in the order of the Supreme Court ... [in the Research Foundation case] ... I am copying this to all the members of the SCMC, who I am sure will agree with me that Riky must be mercilessly driven out of Indian sovereign territory without any further loss of time... . It should go back to its source country, get decontaminated and thereafter, and only thereafter, seek to return observing in toto all the rules and regulations of the Basel Convention. I am surprised how the illegal entry was not detected in time and stopped by the concerned authorities. I also propose to seek a full-scale investigation on this matter by an appropriate Central Agency, to identify those responsible, in the ambit of contempt of Supreme Court directives."
When Frontline sought Thyagarajan's reaction to the SCMC's June 3 decision, he said over telephone from Chennai: "The ship was apparently carrying a small amount of asbestos, which cannot be removed, which is necessary to propel the ship. We are not concerned with the entry of the ship, which is within the jurisdiction of the Gujarat Maritime Board [GMB] and the Customs. The legality of the entry of the ship is something that we are not concerned with. Riky was inspected, and we found nothing on the ship. Asbestos as in-built material is different from asbestos as cargo."
Claude Alvares said that once a ship legally entered the Indian shores and beached, the SCMC's options were limited; it could only ensure that the court's guidelines in the Research Foundation case were enforced before the breaking of the ship.
The Ministry used this distinction between beaching and breaking of a ship in its defence, claiming that it is the GMB that gives the permission to beach, while it is the GPCB that gives the decontamination certificate, before the GMB grants permission for its breaking. The GMB was advised by the GPCB not to grant permission, pending clarification by the MoEF. It was at this point that the Ministry clarified to the GPCB that it could take further steps in the matter in view of its reply to the Danish Minister for Environment.
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