A surface water purification project proposed by the Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) in Gogi in Northern Karnataka has created a storm and the residents are caught in the middle.
While UCIL claims it is an honest effort to decontaminate drinking water that has various metals including uranium, activists allege that it is an attempt by the centrally- owned Public Sector Undertaking to take over the area for uranium mining.
“This is a pure Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity not connected in anyway with our mining interests in the region.
The residents currently filter water through a crude filtration system run by the local authorities and we have offered to provide filtration technology that would reduce harmful content in the water,” said N M Bahl, the executive director - Projects South, UCIL.
Residents of Gogi said they get water supplied under a government scheme as well as by tankers every few days. “It is this raw water drawn from lakes, and rivers that we aim to purify,” he said.
There are 15,000 residents in Gogi. Bahl said that UCIL had put forth the project to reduce the impurities in the water. While tests on the groundwater in Gogi has revealed that it contains traces of uranium as the region has sizable deposits of the metal, the surface water shows deposits of other dangerous substances like flouride.
“We have selected an NGO to run the operations and even deposited close to `40 lakh for the same. While UCIL would bear the cost, the NGO would handle the day-to-day operations,” Bahl said. UCIL’s proposal aimed at providing a scientific method of purifying the water that was currently being supplied, he added.
“We would modify the current scheme and replace the sand filters as well as add other technologies like backwash,” he said.
However, the move has not gone down well with various activists who have been opposing the setup of UCIL operations in the region. A group of activists a few months earlier had protested against the project during a public meeting in the city alleging that its operations were making the local populace prone to various diseases.
A team of UCIL and Department of Atomic Energy officials had tried to addressed the issue by convincing the gathering that Uranium was always present in Gogi’s water. “There are vested interests in place who are not letting us carry on the filtration project. So far we have not even started mining and processing.
These protests are just denying good health to the people of Gogi,” Bahl added. In the midst of this argument, the residents of Gogi are left to depend on the most basic of filtration systems for their drinking water. “They said they would start filtration projects, however we have not seen anything happen yet. We are facing a lot of problems due to unsafe drinking water,” said Vijaykumar, a resident of Gogi.
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