Brandix India Apparel City (BIAC), the Indian arm of Brandix from Sri Lanka, is a 1,000 acre apparel park that is recognized as a Special Economic Zone by the government of India. BIAC was inaugurated in May 2010 and developed on ‘fibre to store' concept.
Brandix built a pipeline to dispose industrial effluent that would be released into the Bay of Bengal.
Brandix, in their promotional video available on YouTube [2], states that all the wastewater in the park is processed meeting the strict environmental standards and then discharged into the ocean 9 km away.
The fishermen in the affected areas near Pudimadaka villages, where the pipeline is built, argue that the pipeline has killed all the fish close to the seashore and has forced them to go deeper in the ocean to procure their catch. Being small-scale fishermen, most of these workers lack any equipment or skills to fish in the deep waters. They argue that the Brandix pipeline has caused them to lose their livelihood.
The Pudimadaka fishermen were assured jobs after they lost their livelihood due to the pollution from effluent released by the apparel company. The company assured the fishermen that they would give jobs to 3,000 fishermen of Pudimadaka. However, only 600 of the fishermen from the village were given jobs and even they were removed when the entire Pudimadaka village started agitating against the company.
Now the fishermen are seeking employment in the company and compensation in line with the package the company had promised. To make their demands known they have even started hunger strike in 2013. During a 2011 protest by the fishermen, Human Rights Forum (HRF) extended its support to demands of fishermen who are protesting against BIAC.
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