DELHI, 4-5-1999: Environmental researchers, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, today told the press that they were not going to be intimidated by a legal notice seeking damages worth Rs.100 crore served on them by the automobile giant, TELCO. "At a time when pollution is growing rapidly with serious consequences for public health, we cannot let industrial firms feel that they can get away by threatening us with dire consequences," said Agarwal and Narain at a press conference. "We have told TELCO’s lawyers that we are quite happy to see them in court. It is our life’s work, convictions, integrity and research that is at stake," they added.

Agarwal and Narain had jointly written an article against the current trend in the automobile industry to sell diesel cars pointing out that there is growing evidence worldwide that diesel exhaust has some of the strongest carcinogens in the world and several countries were tightening regulations against diesel vehicles. In India, the quality of both diesel engines and diesel fuel is very poor compared to international standards. The article had pointed out that the industry was ignoring this evidence.

TELCO has said that a picture carried with the article had singled the company out as a polluter. Instead of admitting the seriousness of the issue raised in the article and taking appropriate action, the company is looking for technicalities to gag us, said Agarwal and Narain. "We are prepared to face the consequences and have told the company that we stand by every word we have written," they added.

Agarwal and Narain said that every effort must be made to control pollution. A study conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment has shown that during 1975 and 1995 whereas the Indian GDP grew only by about 2.5 per cent, the annual vehicular pollution grew by about 8 times. "Not surprisingly, more and more Indian towns and cities are gasping for clean air today, " said Agarwal and Narain. "Forget the big cities like Delhi, even erstwhile clean towns like Dehra Dun, Agartala and Srinagar were suffering from pollution. One monitoring station in Dehra Dun recorded the highest pollution in the country in 1995 ," said Agarwal and Narain. As only a tiny fraction of urban Indians have motorised vehicles today, the process of ‘motorisation’ is going to grow rapidly in the years to come and, therefore, what is bad today is going to become a living hell today unless we take strong action to prevent such a scenario, pointed out Agarwal and Narain. Therefore, we cannot buckle under threats from companies like TELCO.

Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain are director and deputy director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a leading public interest research organisation. CSE has been producing studies that point out that as diesel vehicles contribute heavily to pollution from carcinogenic particles. Furthermore, as the pollution level from particles is already one of the worst in the world in cities like Delhi, CSE has been asking for a rapid reduction in the use of diesel and a ban on private diesel cars.

TELCO’s notice to Agarwal and Narain may be linked to the fact that Agarwal is a member of the Environmental Pollution Control Authority for the National Capital Region and the Supreme Court is already hearing a recommendation from the Authority suggesting a ban on private diesel cars. It is during these hearings that the Supreme Court recently ordered the preponement of the application of EURO-I and EURO-II vehicular emission norms to June 1, 1999 and March 31, 2000 and has put a limit on all cars with current emission norms, including diesel cars. This preponement means that EURO-I norms have to be applied nine months in advance of government orders EURO-II norms five years in advance. As TELCO is heavily into diesel trucks and buses and is now launching a diesel-based small car called Indica, which has obtained a high number of orders in Delhi, CSE’s campaign threatens TELCO’s economic interests.

For more information contact Anumita Roychowdhury, Durga Ray, Sandhya Sharma, or Chandrachur Ghosh at CSE, Tel. Nos. 6981124, 6981110, 6983394