Broken asbestos roofing tiles can be seen at a dump in central New Delhi, India on Sept. 24, 2023. If not properly disposed of, asbestos fibres can become airborne and potentially cause health problems.James Griffiths
Sitting inside his house in central New Delhi, Raja Singh leafs through folders packed with petitions, freedom-of-information requests and hard-won data from hospitals and local governments across India.
Dr. Singh is one of a number of researchers and activists who have spent years trying to prove something long accepted in most of the world: Asbestos is a danger to public health.
“There’s a lot of talk that there is no mesothelioma in India,” Dr. Singh told The Globe and Mail, referring to a type of cancer almost always caused by asbestos. “But I’ve gone and looked at each and every record available, and there are cases even in pretty small registries.”
India stopped mining asbestos in 1993, almost two decades before Canada did. But today, the South Asian country is the world’s largest importer of chrysotile, or white asbestos, which is prized for making fire-resistant products – but has been shown to cause cancer and other diseases among those exposed to it.
India, which accounts for more than 40 per cent of global asbestos imports, currently gets most of its supplies from Russia. But in the decade before Ottawa halted exports, almost half a billion tonnes of Canadian asbestos was sent to India.
Canada has also had an outsized effect on Indian policy. Arguments Ottawa once made to defend the asbestos industry are still cited by Indian lawmakers. The International Chrysotile Association (ICA), a leading asbestos lobbying group, was long based in Montreal, where it benefitted from political support and funding in a province that was once home to 10 of Canada’s 13 asbestos mines. For much of the 20th century, Quebec was the world’s biggest asbestos producer – and Canada the leading defender of chrysotile on the world stage, unsuccessfully suing France at the World Trade Organization in 1997 after that country moved to ban it.
According to Arthur Frank, a professor of environmental and occupational health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, “the Canadian government was in bed with [the industry]. They would invite people to embassies to extol the virtues of chrysotile.”
Eventually, though, Ottawa caved to pressure from domestic and international health experts, as well as miners and other victims who had inhaled the mineral’s carcinogenic fibres. The last Canadian mine was closed in 2011.
When Ottawa banned the import and export of asbestos and products containing it in 2018, the ICA – which did not respond to multiple requests for comment – relocated to Europe. From there, it has fought against international regulation while continuing to promote chrysotile in one of the only regions of the world where a majority of countries have not banned the product.
“They’re desperate to block bans in Asia, which is really their last market,” said Phillip Hazelton, a campaigner with APHEDA, the international aid agency of the Australian union movement.
In India, the industry has found not just a major customer but an important ally. Along with asbestos-exporting countries such as Russia, Kazakhstan and China, New Delhi has lobbied against listing chrysotile under the Rotterdam Convention, an international treaty regulating the trade in hazardous materials, taking up a role once played by Canada.
Experts recommended listing asbestos under the convention at its very first meeting in 2005, but such a measure – which requires unanimous agreement – has been blocked ever since by the aforementioned, shrinking group of exporters.
After a summit in May, Australia, Switzerland and Mali put forward a proposal to allow the listing of chemicals by a “three-quarters majority vote if all efforts to reach consensus … have been exhausted.” That too was defeated. In a public comment, India said it spoke for other developing countries in opposing the measure, which it said would undermine the Rotterdam Convention and allow a “select group” of countries to affect global trade.
The dangers of asbestos have been known since the 1920s, but it took decades for a global movement to ban the material to gain steam. The International Labour Organization called for the “total or partial prohibition of the use of asbestos” in 1986, and that same year, India placed a moratorium on new leases for asbestos mines, the last of which expired in 1993. Today, 69 countries have banned the carcinogen, and both the World Health Organization and the ILO support a global ban. The WHO estimates that more than 100,000 people die each year as a result of asbestos exposure.
Raja Singh, who studies airborne infection control at New Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture, said continued asbestos use in India will cause health problems for decades.James Griffiths
Worldwide consumption of asbestos fell from about 1.8 million tonnes a year in 2000 to 1.1 million in 2022. Led by India, Indonesia and China, Asian countries accounted for more than 99 per cent of all asbestos imports last year, worth more than US$500-million. By way of comparison, some US$15.3-billion worth of glass-fibre products, often used as an alternative to asbestos, were imported globally in 2022.
But, as in Canada previously, the diminishing value of the asbestos trade has not stopped the industry from having significant influence. This is particularly true in India, where the Supreme Court, labour organizations and Health Ministry have all warned about the dangers of asbestos – but political support for a ban remains vanishingly small.
“The Indian position is that Indian asbestos is poisonous, but foreign asbestos somehow isn’t,” said Gopal Krishna, the founder of the Ban Asbestos Network of India, adding that politicians often “simply parrot what the industry tells them to say.”
T.K. Joshi, the director of the Indian government’s Centre for Occupational and Environmental Health, said policy-makers at all levels “do not recognize the hazards of asbestos” despite the decades of international research on its dangers. “It can be like knocking your head against a wall.”
He finds it particularly frustrating that India often cited guidance from the WHO and other international health bodies during the pandemic yet continued to ignore their long-standing warnings against asbestos.
India’s Health Ministry and Ministry of Mines, which regulates chrysotile, did not respond to a request for comment.
Defenders of asbestos often justify its continued use for economic reasons – the material is cheap, and replacing it with alternatives, let alone stripping it out of existing installations, would be costly. But the public-health costs of not banning it can be significant.
According to the Australian government’s Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency, asbestos-related lung cancers and mesotheliomas cost the country about $430-million a year in direct health spending and lost productivity. In Canada, researchers have estimated the cost could be closer to $1.7-billion. Millions more are spent removing asbestos from buildings and disposing of it safely.
Many older buildings in central New Delhi used asbestos in their construction.
Raja Singh picks up an asbestos roofing tile at a dump in central New Delhi. Led by India, Indonesia and China, Asian countries accounted for more than 99 per cent of all asbestos imports last year.James Griffiths
In a 2019 paper, researchers Abhijeet Vasant Jadhav and Nilesh Gawde warned that India could see more than six million cases of asbestos-related diseases in the coming decades, with some 600,000 cancer patients. The Health Ministry has warned that “the burden of asbestos-related diseases is still rising, even in countries that banned the use of asbestos in the early 1990s.”
“Even if it stops tomorrow, the legacy of the past decades will continue to haunt us,” said Dr. Singh, who studies airborne infection control at New Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture.
Officials seeking to justify inaction can find ready support from the industry, which has long promoted dubious scientific studies casting doubt on the global consensus around asbestos.
The ICA is still a frequent presence at health conferences around the world. At the Rotterdam Convention summit in Geneva this May, it organized a side event titled “Chrysotile: Helping Local Communities.”
Ahead of the summit, the ICA lobbied hard against the proposed Australian-led amendment. An article on ChrysotileNews.com called the move “a profound threat to the international order” and an attempt by developed countries “to manipulate an international convention to impose their narrow interests on the international chemical market.”
The website that published the article – in English, Vietnamese, Khmer and Thai – does not identify itself as linked to the ICA, but domain data show it was registered by Asesores Comunitarios, a Spanish law firm that works for the group. The article was credited to Dr. Sjahrul M. Nasri, identified as “CIC Indonesia Director.” CIC is the Chrysotile Information Center, an Asian subsidiary of the ICA that previously pushed the false claim that white asbestos fibres “dissolve” in a person’s lungs within two weeks, according to ABC News.
When the amendment was defeated, the ICA said it would “remain vigilant in its defence of the Convention’s true purpose.”
Drexel University’s Dr. Frank, who has spent years campaigning against asbestos, said claims put forward by the industry are often ridiculous and anti-scientific but can still be effective. “The history of this goes back to the tobacco industry,” he said. “You can’t fight the science, it’s too good, so what you have to do is create doubt.”
So far, this has been working in India, where there is little sign of the government shifting its position. But Dr. Krishna, the Delhi campaigner, was optimistic his country would come around eventually.
“I think there is a logical compulsion to do this. Even the people who are deciding not to ban it, they are exposed to asbestos,” he said. “Nobody, not even the tycoons of India, the billionaires, none of them are safe. So whose interests are being pursued here?”