Chromium That Outlasts Its Polluters: Why Kanpur's Poisoned Aquifers Are Now the State's Responsibility

Polluter-Pays Fails When the Polluter Is Gone

The standard is clear. Under BIS IS 10500:2012, drinking water should contain no more than 0.05 mg/L of total chromium, the same as the WHO guideline. Hexavalent chromium, the form at issue here, is a Group 1 human carcinogen.

It also dissolves readily in water, so once it enters an aquifer it spreads and stays. The problem is that it does not break down. Organic pollutants decay over time; heavy metals do not. In Kanpur Nagar, Kanpur Dehat and Fatehpur, tanneries and basic chromium sulphate units dumped waste for decades.

Some of those units may since have closed or been abandoned, but the contamination they left behind remains in the groundwater.

Where the Enforcement Chain Breaks This is not the

first time the NGT has acted. In 2019-2021, it reportedly imposed about ₹280 crore in environmental compensation on polluting units and the UP government over legacy chromium dumps at Rania in Kanpur Dehat. Remediation of the 62,000-tonne waste dump there is reported to remain incomplete.

In November 2025, the Tribunal ordered health mapping in Kanpur Nagar after 95% of those tested were reported to have chromium above permissible levels. Now, according to The Hindu's report, the Tribunal has issued notice to 14 authorities, including the UP Chief Secretary, the National Mission for Clean Ganga and AIIMS New Delhi.

Each step identifies a different weak point:

• Monitoring: The issue reached the Tribunal through a newspaper investigation, not through routine reporting by the State Pollution Control Board.
• Recovery: Compensation orders depend on there being a liable polluter who can pay. With legacy waste, the original polluter may have closed, moved or become insolvent.
• Remediation: Imposing compensation is not the same as cleaning up. A dump that remains partly remediated years after the order shows that the gap lies between collecting money and actually removing the waste. The Supreme Court confirmed in Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai v. Ankita Sinha (2021) that the NGT can take up cases on its own initiative. That power is working here. But a Tribunal acting repeatedly on press reports is filling a gap that should be covered by routine regulation.

Why the State Must Take Responsibility

The polluter-pays principle assumes that the polluter is identifiable and solvent. Legacy waste often fails both conditions. The people who bear the cost are rural households that depend on handpumps and who did not cause the contamination. That is why remediation needs to become a public duty in its own right:

• Fund cleanup first, from a dedicated State or central fund and recover costs from polluters where possible afterwards.
• Provide safe drinking water immediately in affected villages, independent of the litigation.
• Report publicly on chromium levels in groundwater, so that monitoring does not depend on journalism. For GS3, this case shows that environmental law is strongest at assigning liability and weakest at completing cleanup. For contamination that will last for decades, the State needs to take responsibility for remediation without waiting for the original polluter to be found.