Amid India’s Coal Fields Death Lurks in Poisoned Water.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-05/amid-india-s-coal-fields-death-lurks-in-poisoned-water.html

Death crept without warning to the mud huts of Jogaeal in central India.

One by one, children began to die, often in agony and exhibiting similar symptoms: convulsions, burning pain in the extremities, nausea, vomiting, fever and diarrhea. By the end of 2011, parents buried 53 of them in this forested hill country village occupied mostly by subsistence farmers and day laborers.

That scenario played out in three other villages in and around the contiguous coal-mining districts of Singrauli and Sonbhadra about 600 miles (965 kilometers) southeast of New Delhi. At least a dozen more kids with similar symptoms succumbed, along with several adults. Outrage at the deaths sparked an investigation by the chief medical officers of the Sonbhadra district regional government -- and the results only deepened the outrage.

Most were tied to drinking polluted water, according to reports obtained by Bloomberg News in October. They stopped short of identifying the pollutants but independent scientists who have conducted exhaustive toxicology tests in the region say they know the chief culprit: mercury.

An October 2012 study by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment, a public-interest research group, found mercury levels in some village drinking water samples to be 26 times higher than the Bureau of Indian Standard’s safe limit for human consumption. Fish taken from a lake near villages where residents routinely catch and eat them showed mercury levels twice what the Indian government deems safe, according to that report.

The Indian government has long been aware of this. In a three-year study conducted in 1990s, the state-run Indian Institute of Toxicology Research found dangerous levels of mercury in blood, hair and nails of people in the Singrauli region. Yet pollution continues to grow. United Nations datashow India is second only to China in annual mercury emissions.

Corporations First

All of this reinforces the criticism that India’s drive to modernize through extractive industries such as coal and uranium mining puts the priorities of corporations ahead of the health of its citizens.

India doesn’t yet “include the cost of the effects of pollution on human and ecosystem health at all”   

when it performs cost-benefit analysis for industrial projects, said Kritee, a Colorado-based senior scientist at the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund who has studied mercury pollution for years. Until that changes, “environmental and human health will come second,” according to Kritee, who uses only one name.

Statistics back this up. The World Bank estimates that environmental degradation costs India 5.7 percent of its gross domestic product every year -- and is responsible for about a quarter of the 1.6 million annual deaths among children.

How mercury and other pollutants got here is no mystery. What these victims shared was proximity to the sprawling Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar reservoir and the rivers that feed it. Flanked by mines, coal-burning power plants and heavy industry, these waters collect toxic effluent from plant discharges and absorb mercury that’s a residue from burning coal.

They are ranked by an Indian government report as among the most polluted waters in the nation -- and they serve as the region’s chief source of drinking water and fish. The reservoir is the region’s “main source of water” and “is seriously polluted with discharge of fly ash and other effluents from the industries,” according to the National Green Tribunal, created in 2010 by the Indian parliament to address environmental concerns. “There are thermal power plants and nearly 1,000 other polluting industries. This position is really not in dispute.”

Warning Signs

“The symptoms of mercury poisoning have already started showing in people in the area and it’s time the authorities need to sit up and take notice,” said Ramakant Sahu, a Centre scientist who helped to conduct extensive testing for toxic chemicals. “Mercury and other metals have been accumulating for years. The warning signs are all there.”

No one knows the full extent of pollution-related illnesses and deaths in these villages because no government agency has conducted the kind of exhaustive study required to get to the bottom of the matter. Amarendra Bahadur Singh, the current chief medical officer of the Sonbhadra district, said he planned to recommend such a study to his superiors.

The non-profit Centre estimates that many of the 1.1 million residents who live in proximity to the reservoir and its tributaries may be at risk.

Waste pours into the reservoir in the Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh.

A woman complaining of muscle pains consistent with metal contamination waits in a hospital in the Sonbhadra district of Uttar Pradesh, India.