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Sterlite Industries’ cup of woes overflowed on Tuesday, when the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board (TNPCB) rejected its application seeking consent to operate its existing copper smelter at Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu.
Its earlier consent to operate had expired on March 31 and, awaiting a renewal, the company had gone for a scheduled 15-day maintenance in the last week of the month.
In a communication to the stock exchanges, Sterlite said the maintenance shutdown would continue as it contemplates further action. The TNPCB rejected its application for “want of more clarifications”.
Protests have been mounting against the company’s plan to double its smelting capacity to 800,000 tonnes per year by 2019 at an investment of ₹3,000 crore.
Protesters, including some prominent politicians and activists, have been voicing their concern over the alleged pollution and health hazard from the plant ever since it was set up in Thoothukudi two decades ago; attempts to locate it in Goa and Maharashtra (Ratnagiri) failed due to opposition there.
The company maintains that its operations have had little impact on the environment.
Zero-waste claims
It further says the facility is a zero-waste discharge one, and that emission levels are in line with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards.
But the plant has been shut down often by the TNPCB for violation of pollution norms. In fact, the Supreme Court, in its April 2013 order, fined the company ₹100 crore for pollution.
“We are of the view that the... company should be held liable for a compensation of ₹100 crore for having polluted the environment in the vicinity of the plant and for having operated the plant without a renewal of consent by the TNPCB for a fairly long period...,” the order said.
The exact reasons why the TNPCB declined the consent to operate are not clear; environmentalists attribute it to the manner in which the company had “wrongly” obtained the licence to expand the capacity. The company, they argued, managed to get the approval without the mandatory public hearing by claiming that the expansion was happening within the notified SIPCOT Industrial area. But new evidence has emerged, they claimed, that proves otherwise, and any approval without a public hearing is infructuous. Senior company officials did not respond to calls seeking clarifications.
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