Vedanta must be the best in the business when it comes to when it comes to managing the media. Either they are successfully able to block news from trickling out, or they can control what appears in the media. Quite often it is a combination of the two.
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that reports of a recent toxic waste leak from Vedanta Aluminium Ltd’s Lanjigarh alumina refinery into a nearby river made no headlines in major news outlets in India. The Vedanta-Cairn deal, however, has been big news for a while now.
On May 18, the India Real Time blog of the Wall Street Journal reported that a pond storing waste from the Vedanta refinery had started overflowing into a nearby river after heavy rains in Lanjigarh. The spillage of thick red waste, known as red mud, apparently continued for about an hour until Vedanta officials repaired the wall of the pond, it quoted filmmaker and activist Samarendra Das as saying.
The river that was polluted is the Vamsadhara, which flows from Lanjigarh into the Bay of Bengal in Andhra Pradesh. It is the source of water for drinking, bathing and washing for locals. Breaches in the Lanjigarh refinery pond is alleged to be a regular phenomenon.
Vedanta issued a flat denial:
On the 16th May, a heavy thunderstorm struck Lanjigarh, Orissa. Red Mud waste from the refinery is stored in a Red Mud Pond which is an earthen pond with sloping dyke walls with a base of 40 M wide and height of about 30M. Work to increase the height of the walls has been ongoing for the last six months.
During the rainstorm, the heavy rain caused loose earth from the construction area and the sloping sides to be washed into a local pond. At no time, did the Red Mud waste overflow the dyke–the discoloration in the local pond was due to the natural orangish colour of the clay earth from which the dyke is constructed.
This video, however, contradicts the Vedanta statement.
