Following wide uproar over the illegal dumping of medical waste in Tamil Nadu, officials from Kerala reached Tirunelveli district and began clearing the waste on Sunday, December 22.
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) Southern Zone on Thursday, December 19 directed Kerala to take the responsibility of removing the waste, believed to have originated from its borders.
According to reports, eight trucks from Kerala accompanied Thiruvananthapuram assistant district collector and other officials to clear the waste from Kodaganallur and Palavoor villages in Tirunelveli district. Two persons–owner of the truck and a supervisor from a Kerala-based waste management company–have been reportedly arrested for discarding the waste in these villages.
Medical documents from Regional Cancer Centre (RCC), a state-owned cancer care hospital and research centre in Kerala, were also found along with the bio-medical waste. The document included the patient ID, name and signature of the patient and of their caretaker—raising doubts about medical data privacy, alongside health and environmental concerns for the villages’ residents. Similarly, documents from Credence Hospital & IVF Centre—a private establishment—such as doctors’ leave application forms that contain internal details including the doctor’s hospital code, date and nature of leaves taken, were also found.
The incident had also created a political storm after Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tamil Nadu President K Annamalai threatened to organise trucks to take the waste back to Kerala if the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government did not take immediate action.
“The DMK government should immediately stop the conversion of Tamil Nadu’s border districts into a garbage dump for the state of Kerala. If similar incidents continue in the first week of January 2025, we will mobilise the public, load this biomedical waste and garbage into trucks and dump it in Kerala. I am informing the DMK government that I will also be in the first truck,” he said on December 17.
The National Green Tribunal (NGT) on Thursday ordered the Kerala government to clear the waste in three days. A Bench of Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana and expert member Satyagopal Korlapati have also sought a report from the Kerala government, to be filed by Monday, December 23. The Tamil Nadu government argued that the incident was a recurring issue, highlighting incidents in Anamalai and Nanguneri. They said that both times it was the Tamil Nadu government that removed the waste, and they decided not to clear it this time as the Kerala government was yet to settle the outstanding dues of ₹69,000 mandated by an earlier bench of NGT.