CAG slams govt for no nuclear safety policy

Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India in its latest performance audit of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) under the Department of Atomic Energy tabled in the parliament on Wednesday has nailed serious inefficiency in the functioning of the regulatory body which should lead to an alarm.

“At the policy level, AERB has not yet prepared a radiation safety policy even after three decades of its existence…” according to the CAG findings, it also says that, “Delays in development of these safety documents have also been observed in audit. Regulation of nuclear and radiation utilities, which have varying degrees of hazard potential, involves an elaborate set of permissions.”

The Prime Minister of India who has been under immense fire from the opposition for an alleged irregularity in coal block allocation in another CAG report also directly heads the Department of Atomic Energy in the government.

“AERB failed to prepare a nuclear and radiation safety policy for the country in spite of a specific mandate in its Constitution Order of 1983. The absence of such a policy at a macro level can hamper micro level planning of radiation safety in the country. AERB had not developed 27 safety documents despite recommendations of the Meckoni Committee in 1987 and the Raja Ramanna Committee in 1997 to expedite development of safety documents. There were significant delays in development of the safety documents test checked in audit”, says the CAG report.

CAG which is the supreme independent audit institution of India also shockingly states, “..there are various types of radiation facilities which are operating without licenses, some with a high radiation potential. Registration of a range of facilities revealed major shortcomings. About 91 per cent of the 57,443 medical X-ray facilities operating in the country have no registration.”

“The report clearly points out gaping holes in the effectiveness of the regulator. The report has come out with multiple damning revelations. The auditor revealed that even though AERB is the nuclear regulator yet it does not have any authority even to revise the rules relating to nuclear safety, let alone frame more stringent rules,” says Hozefa Merchant, an activist with Greenpeace India.

The ignorance of the government in the recent times has led to the formation of People's Movement Against Nuclear Energy (PMANE) in Tamil Nadu after the announcement of Kudankulam nuclear power plant project. The construction of a mega nuclear power plant in the fishermen village of Kudankulam in the Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu has led to a marathon fast by locals, which has crossed nearly 370 days.

“Almost 30–35 thousand people living in this area. In them more than 20 thousand people are fishermen. Their only habitat is fisheries. Until the Fukushima they were not aware of the damage if the reactors fail in future,” explains S. P. Udayakumar, convener of the struggle who has been slapped with more than 270 cases of sedition and waging war against the state for his protest movement.

The Madras High Court meanwhile has reserved its order on two petitions filed against the two 1,000 MW Russian reactors at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KNPP).
The CAG in its audit report has quoted examples of Chernobyl episode of 1986 and the recent accident in Fukushima in Japan to warn the government of possible disasters if safety regulations are continued to be ignored.

One of the significant problems is that AERB has been left to be “one of the subordinate offices, exercising delegated functions of the Central Government and not the regulator”, according to the CAG. There lacks complete independence to the regulatory authority in India, unlike in Australia, Canada, France, United States etc.

“Lethargy in the bureaucracy and several vested interests are behind such damning revelations in the conduct of the government”, said a top official of the CAG to The Sunday Indian.

“CAG continues to be an independent body since nobody bothered till recently about its honest audit reports", the official further said, maintaining that “there has been an attempt to confuse the people on part of the government which has been defaming the CAG report on coal block allocation”.
Even as sensitive disclosures in galore have been revealed in the CAG report, it looks unlikely that the government or the opposition will step up work to restore manner in the conduct of nuclear safety leaving the country at the risk of a unpardonable man-made nuclear disaster.