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| Gang rape of ecology fills coffers of officials in broad daylight | | 155 brick kiln operators pay monthly bribes to Omar’s officers in Budgam | | Ahmed Ali Fayyaz
BUDGAM, Oct 7: Making a brazen mockery of Chief Minister Omar Abdullah’s claim of restoring the culture of accountability “without any drum-beating”, officials of Revenue, Police, Power Development Department (PDD) and J&K State Pollution Control Board (PCB) have permitted a gang rape of ecology by an army of brick-kiln operators in three-fourth area of Budgam district. According to official records, as many as 155 brick kilns, out of 202 in Budgam district, are completely illegal and unauthorized and the authorities have not taken a single step to close down these dangerously polluting units. One and the only one reason, according to residents and well-placed insiders, is that each and every operator has been regularly paying bribes in cash and kind to the officials who, in turn, have been providing them support and facilitation at the cost of the health of more than 400,000 people.
All four of the state’s Chief Ministers---Dr Farooq Abdullah, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, Ghulam Nabi Azad and now Omar Abdullah---have publicly expressed their concern over the phenomenal ecological degaradation they have witnessed from their helicopters flying over Budgam district. They have also seen some of the massive damage during their occasional tours and election campaigns in the last 14 years. Since their words of concern were never translated into action, the number of brick kilns in the ill-fated Central Kashmir district has grown from 70 in October 1996 to 202 in June 2009.
Omar Abdullah has shown a little more seriousness when he pulled up the officials last month and called for records of all authorized and unauthorized brick kilns operating in entire Kashmir valley. He is understood to have got stunned on learning that out of a total of 374 units, only 31 had PCB’s Consent to Establish (CTE) and just 59 had Consent to Operate (CTO). Official records laid before Chief Minister indicated that as many as 343 units in the Valley were operating without PCB’s CTE and 315 units were “completely illegal and unauthorized” as they had not the mandatory CTO. He has learned that Budgam district was topping, both in terms of the number of units established as well as those running in total default and violation of nearly a dozen of the state laws.
A committee of officials, drawn from different departments, has been constituted and directed to find how these highly polluting industrial units had been laid and were running under the nose of senior officers. The committee is expected to recommend how the defaulting units could be closed down in a time frame. It may also identify spots which could be reserved for establishing of the brick kilns in future.
With 77% of the brick kilns being fully unauthorized in Budgam district, PCB’s official inventory---surveyed earlier this year and compiled in June 2009---shows that 80 units out of 108 in Budgam Tehsil are operating without CTO, which is a statutory pre-requisite in the process of granting license to the entrepreneur by Tehsildar concerned. Out of 52 kilns, 39 are operating without CTO in Chadoura Tehsil. Beerwah Tesil stands at number three in the dubious distinction as 31 units out of 36 are illegal. There are 6 units in Khansahab Tehsil and 5 of them have no authorization from the PCB.
Interestingly, but alarmingly, most of these unauthorized kilns have come up during the last six years of the Congress-PDP coalition government. Perhaps the more alarming fact is that just a couple of such units, which are said to have been deserted by the operators after exhausting the clay reserves, have been closed down by the authorities in the last eight months of the Congress-NC coalition government. According to the latest official figures, a total of 22 unauthorised brick kilns have been closed down in Anantnag district, five in Budgam, two in Pulwama and one in Kulgam till date. Action in Anantnag was initiated well after Chief Minister sounded furious.
“Evidently, there is no political will to enforce the law. More than four Lakh people have been clamouring for closure of these units in Budgam. They have been complaining of massive damage to their agriculture and horticulture land and diseases from ordinary chest and lung infections to cancer afflicting the population due to inhalation of poisonous gases emanating from low-level chimneys and engulfing hundreds of villages. Nobody is listening to them as the operators have been regularly bribing the officials of different departments”, said a middle aged doctor at Aga Syed Yousuf Memorial District Hospital of Budgam, wishing not to be identified. He said that his hospital and the office of Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Budgam had not properly maintained the records but insisted that “thousands of people” in Budgam district had contracted different pollution-related diseases and “scores of them” were now dying every year.
Former President of the brick kiln operators, Zahoor Ahmed Malik, says that the unit holders had been applying and getting licenses from concerned Tehsildars (Territorial) under “J&K Brick Kiln Act”. He believes that some of them had been subsequently completing necessary formalities and few of them were turning out to be defaulters whose units were supposed to be closed by the authorities.
PCB’s Legal Advisor, Mohammad Maqbool Shah, insisted that no law by the title of “J&K Brick Kiln Act” was in force in the state. According to him, that particular law had been imposed for a limited period during governor’s rule years ago but never ratified by the state legislature. It had automatically expired. He asserted that The Environment Protection Act of 1986, The Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act of 1974 and The Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act of 1981 had superseded all related laws and rules, in all states including J&K, and nobody was authorized by law to issue any license in favour of such industrial units without the mandatory CTE and CTO from the statutory PCB.
“We are authorized and responsible for closing down operation of all unauthorized units as also to prevent establishment of these units. We are supposed to take cognizance of public complaints and media reports, identify and advise the defaulters to observe law and rules and in case of continued default close down the units fully and permanently. We are authorized to issue closure orders and get them implemented by Deputy Commissioners and Heads of Departments, particularly Chief Engineers. If they do not respond to our orders, we are authorized to initiate legal proceedings, including petitions of punishment, against the not-responsive government officers”, Shah explained. He admitted that number of such harsh initiatives by PCB was zero till date.
However, in sharp contrast to Shah’s observation, newly appointed Chairman of PCB, Vinod Ranjan, expressed his total helplessness. “We have just a limited role. We don’t have staff to find and identify the defaulters. Once we went to a unit and found it being run by labours of Dharbanga, Bihar. We failed to find the real owner and returned helplessly”, Ranjan argued. He added: “Tehsildars and other officers of different departments should not issue licenses. Why do they issue? These units have been set up without our knowledge. What can we do?”
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