At ground zero, reality is frightening. Periyavilai is like any other hamlet in Tamil Nadu’s picturesque Kanyakumari district that survives on fishing. But the stench of fish and seaweed hides a dark fact. There is an unusually high incidence of people dying of cancer or suffering from the disease.

The villagers blame it all on the Indian Rare Earths Ltd. (IRE), the Mumbai-based PSU which mines for monazite, a rich thorium-based ore, at Periyavilai. They also accuse it of not providing them protective work gear as they “scrape or dig” the sand from the shore.

The IRE, which comes under the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), refutes all such claims. “We are not producing any radioactive material,” says a senior IRE official on condition of anonymity. “None of our activities is increasing radiation. We are merely collecting the beach sand and separating the minerals, including monazite.”

Adds S. K. Malhotra, who heads DAE’s Public Awareness Department: “Even if we stop the operations, the sea will continue to deposit the monazite-rich sand. In fact, the IRE is “doing the village a favour by removing monazite from the sand” which is causing the high background radiation, he said.

The problem really began six years ago, when people from Periyavilai and five others villages insisted that IRE use manpower instead of machines for mining. Today, the company employs nearly 2,000 workers from six villages, including Periyavilai, paying the Workers’ Society, which in turn distributes daily wages to the workers. At least 600 villagers from Periyavilai work at the IRE plant.

These people also allege that sometimes they are forced to dig as deep as two metres to retrieve the mineral-rich sand, a claim denied by the senior IRE official, who says the workers only “scrape” the top layer to a depth of “merely 15 cms”. While admitting that there has been a high incidence of cancer in Periyavilai as well as the neighbouring Chinnavilai, the official felt that it had nothing to do with the mining operations. In fact, the company gives the village Rs 5 lakh every year under a medical scheme. “This is out of social obligation rather than as an apology for our operations,” said the official.

But the dole is not sufficient to cover even the basic screening expenses at the nearby International Cancer Centre at Neyyur run by the Kanyakumari Medical Mission Hospital. “The incidence of cancer at Periyavilai seems unusually high,” says Dr Sudhakar, head of the radiotherapy department at the hospital, citing the WHO norms for cancer prevalence in India as one per 1,000 people. According to hospital statistics, three patients from the village were diagnosed with cancer in 2002, three in 2003, and one each in 2005 and 2006.

Sudhakar says the fall in the number of cancer cases from the village in the past two years could be because the patients are seeking treatment elsewhere. As the 50-bed hospital has trouble dealing with the flow of complicated cases from the region, the villagers are turning to the Thiruvananthapuram-based Regional Cancer Centre, about two hours from Kanyakumari. The taxi ride costs them about Rs 1,500 and the treatment too is expensive.

While various studies of regions containing monazite in Kerala (by the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd., the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) have been conducted, one such study pegs the average radiation dose to about four times the normal exposure. Another research among 75,000 consecutive births found the overall malformation rate to be around 1.5 per cent, “which is comparable to malformations observed in most international studies and the multicentric study done in India”.

But given the high incidence of cancer at Periyavilai, villagers are reluctant to buy these findings. They have demanded studies by a “neutral” body, better medical facilities close to their village and financial assistance. Perhaps, somebody will listen.