'The Bill proposes to get compensation from the company and to form a tribunal to provide time-bound compensation. The tribunal is to have a chairman, a technical member and an administrative member'.
Piloting the bill, the water resources minister N K Premachandran said: "Plachimada factory caused serious damage to the agriculture sector and the area’s water resources, leading to serious shortage of drinking water, among other problems. Metals like cadmium, chromium and lead were also excluded from the factory and that caused health problems to several people in that area. This caused skin as well as respiratory problems to several people in that area".
The Kerala bill follows the recommendations of a high powered committee that suggested setting up a tribunal to realise Rs 216-crore compensation from Coca Cola.
The Plachimada bill is historic in many ways. Far away in Ecuador, a court held Chevron Corp. responsible for oil drilling contamination in a wide swath of Ecuador's northern jungle and ordered the oil giant to pay $9.5 billion in damages and cleanup costs.
The amount — $8.6 billion plus a legally mandated 10 percent reparations fee — was far below the $27.3 billion award recommended by a court-appointed expert but appeared to be the highest damage award ever issued in an environmental lawsuit.
But whether the plaintiffs — including indigenous groups who say their hunting and fishing grounds in Amazon River headwaters were decimated by toxic wastewater that also raised the cancer rate — can collect remains to be seen.
