It is dawn in Kattukuppam, an inland fishing village by the Kosasthalaiyar river in North Chennai. As the sky lightens, the river remains the colour of night, streaked with an industrial palette of diesel, raw sewage and ash. Boats drift in with the day’s catch on this modern-day Styx, power plant chimneys smoking in the background. As nets are emptied into straw baskets and the women gut fish in the streets, coach RL Srinivasan is already out the door. Two streets away, a drowsy legion of boys pace in their Ennore Kabbadi jerseys in front of the municipal school’s playground. “This one has slept till 6 am,” says coach, rolling his eyes and ruffling the six year old’s hair, before giving him a swift thump on the back. “Go swim in the river and come!” It’s a threat enough to wake anyone up.
Kabbadi comes from kai pidi (catch my hand if you can) and is believed to have its roots in Tamil Nadu. It is a high contact sport unlike any other, where lone raider from each team of seven must cross enemy lines, make contact and make a run for it. Chanting ‘kabbadi’ is mandatory to demonstrate to the referee that you’re not holding your breath.
Chennai residents had best be holding theirs. Last Diwali, the city’s air quality gave Delhi a run for it, with monitors recording particulate matter levels maxing out in both genteel Besant Nagar (which recorded 1017 μg/m3) and North Chennai’s Manali industrial area (recording 999.99 μg/m3) alike. Last week, on 6th November, Ennore recorded PM 2.5 levels of 916 μg/m3 between 5:55 pm and 7:55 pm.
Coach Srini watches the younger children on this tiny court struggle to keep pace. “Kids here are born with a permanent shelli (cold),” he says, before breaking them up into groups of two to practice escaping each other’s grip.
From someone who once sold insurance on the streets of Chennai, Srini has come a long way. He has been the head of the fisherfolk cooperative society that has been taking on big polluters, filing complaints with the National Green Tribunal, organising fishermen against illegal industrialisation and educating villagers on the health and livelihood impacts of air pollution.
He has been instrumental in getting other fishing villages to find their voices, even as they found an articulate and educated voice in him. “Srini was one of the first people we got in touch with in Ennore,” says Pooja Kumar of the Coastal Resource Centre that organises toxic tours of Ennore in an effort to bridge both worlds and restore the city’s commons. In December 2017, based on a petition filed by a six-village committee he brought together, the National Green Tribunal ordered for health studies to be conducted in villages around Ennore. “He realised that one village cannot fight alone and insisted that everyone has to be represented. From calling meetings to explaining what impacts are- he has the knowledge of the river, and is the voice of the public.”
Walking through the tiny lanes of Kattupakkam, toddlers who can barely walk rush to be swung from his muscular arms, just as the fisher men crowd around him to check on the status of diesel subsidies and compensation for pollution.
The heaviness in Ennore’s air is hard to escape as an outsider: every breath is like swilling a potent, grey amalgam that smells of ammonia, coal, raw sewage and diesel, mingling with the sea. The thermal ash spewed by Ennore’s power plants- measured by monitors set up with Srini’s help- makes it unbreathable, even on its best days. Fly ash contains trace quantities of toxic heavy metals and silica that get accumulated in the respiratory tracts and lungs, and forms the major contributor to fine particulate matter that Chennai’s residents inhale.
As we drive along the coast, past miles of shipping containers, Pooja opens up a map on the minibus. An hour’s drive from Marina beach, North Chennai is a dystopian landscape of fishing villages wedged between industry and the sea. On the east lie two thermal power plants, one which serves the Ennore SEZ, which is being built on a fly ash pond. There’s the Kamaraj port and the Kattupalli port, recently acquired by the Adani group. To the west, inland, are a coal terminal and a petroleum refinery. Natural gas pipelines run alongside rusted ash pipelines, leaking slurry at the slightest provocation into the river, along with hot water.
What were once salt pans have been replaced by a 1000-acre coal ash pond that currently serves the North Chennai power station. The leaking pond, filled beyond its capacity, has contaminated nearly 340 hectares of land and waterbodies outside its banks.
Seppakkam is a village that has turned ghostly white. Children run out of houses ankle-deep in grey slurry, playing hide-and-seek between laundry lines flecked with grey, their arms covered in rashes, eyes reddened and voices made breathless from inhaling the fine, oily excesses of Tamil Nadu’s power generation. The ash costing them their youth is also making it impossible for their families to afford living here, given that the closest clinic that can treat them is 6 km away. “We all have bank accounts but they’re empty. Every visit, we spend around 700 to 800 rupees for scans, fees and medicine, and another 200 rupees for petrol. Sometimes, we keep our jewellery in the pawn shop to get money for medical expenses,” said a 28-year old woman from Sepakkam. “Either TANGEDCO (the power company) has to leave this place, or we have to leave this place.”
It’s a demand that’s found little support. “Sepakkam has 60 houses, it is not enough of a votebank enough to get them rehabilitated,” sighs Dr. Vishvaja Sambath, a public health researcher. Families here have been helping her document their lived experience of pollution and impacts of radioactive coal ash on their health. This work has not been in vain: until November this year, development projects didn’t need to assess health risks for getting a green clearance. This month, as a result of reports that looked at Ennore as a case study, India’s environment ministry has mandated that new coal plants must conduct community health assessments and periodic health monitoring.
What does that mean for people in Sepakkam dealing with existing pollution?
“Rehabilitation here is only possible through court case,”Coach Srini admits. In 2017, two ships collided off the coast of Chennai, spewing 196 tonnes of fuel oil along the coast. The fishing villages of Ennore were among the worst hit. While the state Fisheries department pegged the livelihood loss to Rs 203.22 crore, fishermen are yet to be paid full compensation, a process that had been further delayed by the closure of the Chennai bench of the National Green Tribunal.
As head of the fisherfolk’s society, Srini has been instrumental in liasing with the Fisheries department to ensure those who were worst impacted receive their due for damaged nets and boats. Clean-up measures have been widely criticised as inadequate, with volunteers and fishermen like Srini doing most of the heavy lifting in and out of court. “Imagine, in this Digital India, they were using a bucket to clean out an oil spill, with nothing to remove the ash or coal dust.” A little over a week ago, another oil spill took place off the coast of Ennore.
South Chennai’s lungs seem to have a different threshold. In 2011, the Madras High Court directed the Union Shipping Ministry to relocate a highly-polluting coal yard from the Chennai port to Ennore. “It, naturally sends shocking waves through the nerves and makes one to think as to what we are breathing in- oxygen or these black particles?” said the judges in their verdict.
Out on the river, Subhash, Srini’s older son, has his eyes transfixed on the coal wagons passing on the bridge above. “I bet I can tell you the name of every train that passes through the city,” says Subhash. Kabbadi champions used to get recruited in the railways or the police, as part of a sports reservation. Despite the school trophies lined up in the house, Subhash and Srini both know he doesn’t have the stamina to keep up with the city kids.
His talents are limited in other ways. “Nehru stadium caters to only children in a 10 km radius, our kids can’t go there all the way,” says Srini. “This maybe Chennai’s first ward but there are no parks here for four wards.” In this neck of ward number one, most streets have only one tap. Women queue up with bright plastic buckets, and keep track of the kids playing. “Four days, we get corporation water, but everybody is drinking from cans,” says Srinivasan.
What Digital India forgets is that Ennore is part of a delicate buffer of ecosystems of rivers, estuaries, mud flats and mangroves that include the Pulicat lake and form the city’s drainage. These waters and marshes that sustain biodiversity and livelihoods have since been bridged, built over, drainedand poisoned to serve the city’s power needs to disastrous consequences. “During the Chennai floods, water went where it wasn’t supposed to be- in the sea. No firemen could help, only fishermen,” says Srinivasan, who lead a group of a hundred boats that rescued nearly thirty thousand people in Chennai’s floods in 2015. Srini also won a case in the National Green Tribunal, preventing a road for a coal conveyor system from being built over the mouth of the Kosasthalaiyar river where it drains into the Ennore Creek, because it increased the flood vulnerability of the city andaffected livelihoods.
After the fisherfolk society complained, the Madras High Court issued an order preventing any dumping of ash or construction material in 10 hectares of mangroves, given the irreparable damage to health and environmental degradation it would cause.
“Fish catches have dwindled by nearly seventy percent, which is why even I have to rely on contract work. We have gone from relying on the river to provide us everything, to relying on industry that has taken our independence away from us,” he says.
“We provide Chennai with its power. But during the floods, some people didn’t even offer fishermen food. Can we expect them to join in our fight?”
One way that Srini is convinced this can happen is through the arts, an endeavour in which he found an unexpected ally in the neo-classical singer-activist TM Krishna. Krishna’s masked ode to Ennore and the city’s commons, titled Poromboke, was thought of, shot and first performed in this very landscape, with the fisherfolk society’s blessing.
Together, they’re the forces behind Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha, an arts festival that brings the sabha (culture) to the beach, and folk to spaces perceived as high-art or niche, as a means of questioning inequality in the arts and as a means of reclaiming public spaces. Bureaucrats were moved by what they saw and heard and the festival got Ennore got its first water treatment plant.
Kaattukuppam could teach South Chennai a thing or two about community, a connection with the commons and what it takes to fight for public spaces. As the sun sets, the old boys gathers for another round of kabaddi- this time, the competition is fierce. In another corner of the school ground, grandmothers sit back-to-back in a circle, shooting marbles and catching up with gossip in the open-air.
Coach Srini is wistful. “We’re supplying power to all of the city. But here, fishermen’s kids don’t know how to swim. What do we have to offer the next generation?”
This story first appeared in The Hindu Magazine https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/meet-the-kabaddi-coach-whos-fighting-for-clean-air-in-ennore/article25790301.ece