The Supreme Court's order to compensate endosulfan victims within three months is a welcome move, but India still needs to strengthen its pesticide management system to avoid a similar crisis in the future.
IN FEBRUARY 2001, Down To Earth broke the story on endosulfan poisoning in Padre village in Kasargod, Kerala. Due to two decades of aerial spraying of the pesticide, diseases such as cerebral palsy, mental and/or physical retardation, epilepsy, congenital anomalies, liver and blood cancer, infertility, and asthma had become unusually common among the residents of Kasargod. Apart from the effects on the community, the pesticide also affected the local ecology—bees, frogs and fish disappeared from the area. The Pollution Monitoring Laboratory of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based non-profit, provided evidence that all these were linked to the spraying of the pesticide. A bitter fight ensued between the community and the pesticide industry (see ‘End of endosulfan’, p16), which eventually led to the banning of the pesticide by the Supreme Court (SC), in 2011. And on January 10, 2017, the SC directed the Kerala government to release the entire compensation, ₹5 lakh to each of the over 4,000 victims, within three months.
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