Last call for the ridleys?

February 20, 2009, TATA Centre, 16th Floor, TATA Steel Conference Room. This might well go down in history as the day on which the future of Gahirmatha’s turtles was sealed. As a phalanx of some of the best known environmental organizations and conservationists in the country sat down for a meeting with TATA Steel, L&T and the Dhamra Port Company, there was hope – not a lot, but some - that the port promoters would agree to a suspension of construction pending an independent assessment of the potential environmental impacts of the port.

These hopes were quickly and cruelly dashed – chucked out of the 16th floor window you might say — with none of the companies concerned ready to concede that the construction, particularly the dredging, might be posing a serious threat to the turtles and the local ecology and hence needed to be suspended until the completion of the independent environmental assessment. Nothing we said seemed to make a shred of difference – the Precautionary Approach, the futility of studying an environment while simultaneously causing large scale disturbance – none of it seemed to get through.

Neither did the fact that 98% of TATA customers that Greenpeace polled believe that the port construction should be halted immediately, pending the independent environmental assessment which everyone now agrees is necessary. After almost two hours of futile argument, with the other side unwilling to concede an inch, we were left with no option but to leave the meeting.

We’ve been talking to TATA and the other stakeholders for over 4 months now, since October 2008. All this time the port construction has proceeded, while Greenpeace’s public campaign on Dhamra has gone quiet. We did believe that something would come out of this process of dialogue. Maybe we were wrong. This could be an expensive mistake for the turtles….

So where do we go from here? Time will tell. Maybe the port promoters will see sense. Maybe not. Maybe the turtles will survive. Maybe not. The question: are we ready to take a risk with the survival of an ancient and enigmatic species?