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The Andhra Pradesh Government should not choose a destructive model of development, local activists caution. In its hurried bid to industrialise the State after bifurcation, it should not foul up the fragile ecological system in the nine coastal districts by allowing chemical and petro-chemical units, they said.
Several speakers at a seminar organised here on Sunday urged the AP Government to give up the Petroleum, Chemicals, Petro-chemical Investment Region (PCPIR) proposal between Visakhapatnam and Kakinada for which the master plan had been prepared. It would sound the death knell to fisheries in the districts of Visakhapatnam and East Godavari as 97 villages in 10 mandals of the two districts would be affected. Most residents of the affected villages are fishermen. The investment region would spell both an ecological disaster and social disaster as the livelihood of the fishermen and farmers would be ruined.
‘TDP breaks promise’KS Chalam, convener of the struggle committee against the coastal corridor and the PCPIR, said the Telugu Desam Party had promised when in the Opposition that it would shelve these projects. However, after assuming power it has changed its tune and “it is clearly betraying the interests of the people, especially marginalised sections of the society such as fishermen.” K Vijay, Assistant Professor at Central University (Hyderabad), said that MNCs which had set up such petro-chem units in developed countries were forced to shut down operations because of stringent ecological laws. As a result, they were trying to shift their units to Third World countries. AP’s coastal belt proves an attractive proposition for them.
N Venugopal, editor of a Telugu monthly, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu shared the same wavelength as far as such a destructive model of development was concerned. “The Prime Minister, during his Japan visit, said red tape would be cut out and the red carpet would be rolled out to foreign investors. Cutting out the red tape is fine, but rolling out the red carpet to such MNCs would be disastrous,” he said.
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