Govind Ballabh Pant Sagar artificial reservoir is a crucial resource for more than a million people. However, years from coal-burning power plants, mines and heavy industries throw their toxic wastes into the waters. Central government knows it, but no official investigation has ever been conducted.

New Delhi (AsiaNews/Agencies) - In the mud huts of Jogaeal (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 965 kilometers southeast of New Delhi. At least a dozen more kids with similar symptoms succumbed, along with several adults.

Concern at the deaths sparked an investigation by the chief medical officers of the Sonbhadra district regional government. The results revealed that most of the victims has been caused by consuming water polluted with mercury.

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.

Govind Ballabh makes possible the industrial ambitions of a region that annually provides about 5 percent of India's total power capacity.

In 2010 a report of the National Green Tribunal ranked these waters among the most polluted in the nation. However, they serve as the region's chief source of drinking water and fish.

An October 2012 study by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Enviroment 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. A study conducted in 1990s by the state-run Indian Institute of Toxicology Research found dangerous levels of mercury in blood, hair and nails of people in the Singrauli region.

At the moment, 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. "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 to Bloomberg Ramakant Sahu, a Centre for Science and Environment scientist who helped to conduct extensive testing for toxic chemicals.

According to the association, in the area live 1,1 millions of people.

 

 

• india
• economy
• pollution
• mercury
• children