The Waste Dumping Story

Earlier this week, I got this link from a friend. It tells about an incident where customs authorities seized some containers at Cochin, which were supposed to contain brown paper mix, but actually contained municipal waste from NewYork.. These are a few more subsequent links from other media [1] , [2] and [3] . The third link cites the name of the company which 'exported' this waste as 'Belsun Corp' .

I dug in a little bit into this using Google. I couldn't find the any website for this 'Belsun Corp'. However, this link gives details about its operations in NewYork. It seems it has been in operations since 2000 ( How much Garbage would they have 'exported' to India ?? ) . However, the striking thing is that its president seems to be an Indian ( Sanjay Kedia ) .A google search on Sanjay Kedia listed threw even more interesting results . Now, there is no way that we can conclusively establish that the 'infamous' Sanjay Kedia and the Belsun's Sanjay Kedia are same. After attending the Statistics classes by Prof: Shankar Venkatagiri @ IIMB , I know the pitfalls of going into such generalizations and gut feel even based on comparable backgrounds .. Hence , I'm a little bit reluctant to conclude that both Sanjay Kedias are same based on those Google searches.

However, another Google search on 'Belsun Corp' resulted in this link .Thats a PDF filed with SEBI - Securities & Exchange Board of India by an Indian company , Sarju International .They claim that Belsun is their subsidiary . Whats the most disturbing from these facts are that, this actually seems to be a big racket organized by Indians themselves to 'import' garbage from abroad to here ( as if the garbage here is not enough ) . As I've heard all political parties are up in arms in Kerala against the "imperialist western world" for dumping their waste to developing nations ( Have they declared a Bandh ?? ). Little do they realise that Indians themselves form an integral part of this racket.. Obviously as developed cities pay people huge money to dispose their municipal waste, it is an extremely lucrative thing for people to collect money from there , import municipal waste to here and throw it here and there in cities like Cochin. The Cochin firm which handled the 'client operations' is 'Kochin Kadlas' ( no worthy google links for this )

Though belatedly , SC has criticized Center over its failure on issues like this . I sincerely wish at-least this issue is well-handled & implemented.. These municipal waste could be one of the main sources of diseases like Dengue & Chikungunya which spread far and wide across the southern states sometime back.

India has enough waste to dispose or reprocess..Why for a few bucks these people are doing all this nonsense, which'll ultimately cause great harm to themselves ? In this connection, its worthy to read about Alang , the largest ship-breaking port in the world itself located in Gujarat. The wikipedia link has enough information about that.. Alang is another instance where the cost-advantage and lax environmental regulations bring money, but cause great harm to the Nation.


( Updated later: All Google Ads appearing for this post seems to be from various waste-management companies.. This is the first time I'm getting such a high correlation between the content in the post and the Ads appearing. I never knew that this waste management is such a thriving industry in the West.. Who knows how many Belsun Corps are there among these ..Sigh!!! )

Ajith