Ironically, the incident comes just days after India participated in a global meet at Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss and amend international treaties on the safe use and disposal of hazardous and toxic substances.
The chemical leak from the Tughlaqabad container depot in Delhi on Saturday, that affected over 200 students from Rani Jhansi School for Girls, does not bode well for India’s record in handling hazardous substances.
The chemical — Chloromethyl Pyridine — is an organic compound used as a raw material to make pesticides and is hazardous and toxic in nature, experts said.
Ironically, the incident comes just days after India participated in a global meet at Geneva, Switzerland, to discuss and amend international treaties on the safe use and disposal of hazardous and toxic substances.
The meet — United Nations Conference of Parties (CoP) to the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions — concluded on Friday. India was represented by an inter-ministerial delegation, led by the environment ministry. Of the three conventions, the Rotterdam Convention, an international agreement, prescribes obligations on importers and exporters of hazardous chemicals and promote sound use of chemicals.
While domestically, the Manufacture, Storage and Import of Hazardous Chemical Rules, 2000, regulates safe handling and storage of hazardous chemicals and includes a list of 684 hazardous chemicals, awareness of these substances and enforcement is weak, experts said.
“It is definitely a hazardous substance used as a raw material. Even in Bhopal, the case was about negligent handling of toxic chemicals. After all these years, if handling of hazardous substances is so casual, it is tragic. Some of these substances are not allowed to be taken on public roads during the day. Also, because the ambient temperature is very high, the vehicles are not specially equipped to handle these substances,” said C Jayakumar, Director, Pesticide Action Network, a non-profit organisation, who was an observer at the global meet.
Others said that the list of chemicals flagged as toxic in the domestic rules needs to be expanded to keep pace with international standards. “There are a huge number of chemicals that are regulated far more stringently in other countries, whereas, we take a lenient view of them. The global conventions focus on exactly the kind of negligence seen in today’s incident. Due to trade restrictions, we tend to take a softer approach,” Satish Sinha, Associate Director, Toxics Link, a non-profit organisation, an advocacy group working on thesafe use and disposal of toxic substances.
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