How asbestos firms brush cancer, disease under industry carpet

When 68-year-old Mangabhai Patel tries to breathe, it’s like he’s breathing through a straw—constricted and extremely painful. Suffering from asbestosis, a severe form of lung impairment, he’s one of the few surviving victims of this lethal form of asbestos exposure spending his last days in a hospital in Ahmedabad.
His crime: He worked for the thermal power plant, Ahmedabad Electric Company (AEC), now a Torrent Power plant. His typical day involved stopping leakages from pipe-joints and carrying asbestos blocks, ropes and belts from the stores to the factory floor.
Company doctors failed to diagnose his condition. It was only in 1996 when the Ahmedabad-based National Institute of Occupational Health concluded he was suffering from TB and asbestos-related illnesses. Armed with this, Mangabhai filed a writ petition in the Gujarat High Court asking for compensation from the company.
The Court passed an order on May 8, 1997 to pay Rs 10,000 as interim compensation to Mangabhai. With no family to support and even provide him medical assistance, he is one of the rare cases still fighting for compensation. Most of the others give up even before they start.
For the asbestos industry, people like Mangabhai are, effectively, invisible. With no regulatory structure in place to diagnose and monitor for mesothelioma—the lung cancer caused by asbestosis—industries are getting away. Even hospitals aren’t equipped to diagnose the disease. Result: compensation, the one stick to hold industry accountable, is a far cry.
This is evident in case histories of 500 asbestos patients that form the basis of a pending PIL in the Supreme Court asking for a ban on the use, import and manufacture of asbestos.
That punitive litigation helps is evident in the US where consumption of asbestos is now down to 2% of what it was 20 years ago—in the same time, the industry coughed up $11 million on Mesothelioma litigation involving 600,000 claims.
India is the only country in the world where consumption of asbestos is increasing by 12% each year as it imports a large chunk of what is produced in the world. Yet, the clean-up is yet to begin, making it the most attractive place for newer asbestos units.
This despite the fact that 10 years ago, the Supreme Court acknowledged the hazardous nature of asbestos and directed government and industry to:
• Maintain health record of all workers for 40 years
• Set up facility for membrane filter test at work place to diagnose illness at early stages.
• Ensure health coverage with Employees State Insurance Act or otherwise
• Regularly review permissible limit of asbestos fibre in the factories
• Special monitoring in small-scale factories
• Compensation to the affected to the tune of Rs 1 lakh.
Forget factories, even hospitals do not have the facility to diagnose lung cancers that are asbestos-related. The Occupational and Environmental Health Centre at LNJP, one of the busiest hospitals in Delhi, was set up in the late 90s for this purpose. So far, not one case has come to the centre.
‘‘For asbestos cases, doctors have to go to the patients. I am never allowed to visit any factory,’’ said Dr T K Joshi who heads the unit.
By the time he gets to a patient suffering from mesothelioma, it’s usually too late—average life span is reduced to six months to a year after detection.
No hospital in the country has the facility or the training to test for mesothelioma.
Patients do not come to institutes when they fall ill, they come to ordinary hospitals, explains Joshi.
For the 500-odd cases that have been attached to the PIL, S R Kamath, who is member of the Central Pollution Control Board on asbestos, scanned thousands of X-rays.
When diagnosis is tough, compensation is tougher. So far, less than 100 people have been awarded damages. Most employers claim their staff are insured with Employees’ State Insurance Corporation (ESIC).
‘‘They (ESIC) have even turned down patients that I have certified as suffering from mesothelioma,’’ said Kamath.
Experts say that instead of chasing compensation—a chunk of which goes as lawyers’ fees—there are several cases of the sick taking a token sum from the employer and striking a deal to get their relatives a job in the company after they die. In the process, they are never counted as those suffering from asbestos-related diseases.
The Pollution Control Board recommended that compensation be increased to Rs 4 lakh so there is more incentive for the sick to pursue their case and hence be counted. But that’s only on paper—like the Supreme Court’s directives. A study by the Institute of Public Health Engineers showed that health records of asbestos workers is not being maintained. The industry has found a way around it — they contract labour instead of putting them on payroll.