No green nod to slaughter house in Vizag

Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, who was to inaugurate India's third largest abattoir, located 25 km from Vizag towards Vizianagaram, will have to wait as the ribbon is not yet cut. 

With just twenty-four hours to go for the inauguration of the abattoir, the environmentalist lobby riding on a petition filed by an NGO, Chennai-based People for Cattle in India, got a reprieve. 

The petitioner pointed out several reasons why the NGT should stop the commissioning of the plant. 

• It said that according to the Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal corporation's survey, the site of the slaughter house is a water body. "It just shows that we have not learnt any lessons from what Chennai went through last December. Here on a water body, the abattoir has been built. We do not want Vizag to be another Chennai,'' says Arun Prasanna G, Secretary of the People for Cattle in India. 
  
• The corporation would have to supply 640 kilolitres of water daily to the slaughter house. 550 KL of that water would be just to help with the processing and washing.  
  
• Two educational institutions - Andhra Pradesh Tribal Welfare Residential Junior College of Excellence and Chaitanya Residential Junior College, with 5000 students, are in the building adjacent to the abattoir. This is in clear violation of rules. 
  
•  From an affluent point of view, an abattoir is a red category polluting body, which causes severe damage to the environment. Critics of the project say that no clarity will treat the effluents.
  
•  The Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board's manual says 33 percent of the area must be covered with a thick green cover. The petitioner states, as per photographs, less than 2 percent of the land is covered with a green cover. The company, Vizag Food Private Limited, claims two of the 10.5 acres on which the slaughterhouse is built, is green. This needs to be verified.

The company, however, points out that in 2012, the Ministry of Food Processing in the central government had recommended setting up of modern world-class abattoirs that would not indulge in water and air pollution. "There are four slaughterhouses in Vizag, which do not discharge their effluents efficiently. If we had opened today, they would have been shut down immediately,'' says Mohammed Naziruddin, Director of Vizag Foods Private Limited. 

The Centre and Andhra government are looking at the economics of the export industry. The estimate is that 2000 sheep and 500 buffaloes will be slaughtered every day. Naziruddin says the goats and sheep will be used entirely for the domestic market while the buffalo meat will be exported to UAE, Egypt, Oman, Iraq, Iran, China, Vietnam and Russia. 

India is the world's largest exporter of beef - nearly 8 to 10 lakh tonnes - that generate forex revenue of Rs 20,000 crore every year. China is the biggest market, importing 50 percent of India's buffalo meat. 

The target is to generate 90 tonnes of bovine meat every day from this plant, for which the catchment area will be Odisha, north coastal Andhra and central districts of the state. The Visakhapatnam Port Trust will make it convenient to export the meat. 

The people in charge of the abattoir say their mandate also is to develop four model air conditioned shops for frozen and fresh meat to offer to the people of Vizag, a different way of buying meat. The city is now home to 1800 meat shops that sell meat in the most unhygienic conditions, with no proper disposal of waste. 

But unless the Andhra government can give clear answers that environment will not be a casualty, the NGT is unlikely to give the nod to the slaughter house.