GLOBAL GOENKARS SPEAK
The writer is professor at Columbia University in the USA who hails from Cortalim
I work with water. But the first time I understood that water could be harmed was not through science, but through lived experience. It was the mid-1970s. I was still in elementary school in my village of Cortalim.
Around then, the Zuari Agro Chemicals Ltd (ZACL) plant began operations on the Sancoale plateau. What followed was not a single dramatic disaster, but something slower, quieter, and in many ways more unsettling. Fish began to wash ashore in Velsao Bay, close to where the factory discharged its effluents. Paddy fields in Sancoale began to lose their colour and wither. Wells people depended on no longer felt the same, and both villagers and their animals began falling ill.
Something shifted in our collective understanding of water. Residents of Sancoale knew that something had entered their landscape that did not belong. Fishermen of Velsao sensed the same in their seascape.
THE CONTAMINATION
We did not yet have the scientific language to describe what was happening. We did not speak of free ammonia, toxic effluent, nutrient loading, or groundwater contamination. But we trusted our senses. The sharp, pungent smell of ammonia in the air gave the polluter away. The contamination carried a signature. It announced itself before science could fully name it.
People began to protest. In the afternoons, after school, we would cycle up the plateau to what was then called Upas Nagar, long before it became Zuari Nagar, to join villagers gathering in resistance. This was among the earliest environmental conflicts in Goa after Liberation in 1961. At the time, it was not framed as a policy or political struggle. It was simply about something that felt wrong, the water, the fish, the land, the fields, all telling us so.
Only later did the fuller contours of that episode emerge. The plant, part of India’s Green Revolution push, used the Haber–Bosch process to produce ammonia for fertilisers. Within months of its commissioning in 1973, fish kills and crop damage were reported.
What entered the estuary was more than nutrient enrichment. There were suspicions that effluent may have carried arsenic, then used as a corrosion inhibitor in ammonia production systems, an invisible metabolic poison. These were not slow, diffuse inputs. They were acute discharges, chemical shocks capable of killing fish outright.
Scientists Singbal, Fondekar, and DeSouza from the National Institute of Oceanography, who would later become my senior colleagues when I joined the institute in the mid-1980s, were part of the team that studied the fish kill events. They documented elevated ammonia and altered water chemistry near the outfall.
But their findings were necessarily cautious. The tools to detect trace contaminants like arsenic at low concentrations, or to capture short-lived toxic pulses in a tidal estuary, were limited.
What they recorded was a system under stress. What they could not definitively capture was the precise trigger of the fish collapse that fishermen had already witnessed.
The company maintained that its discharges were within permissible limits. Government findings were mixed. Yet for those who lived there, the connection was undeniable.
In the aftermath, India enacted the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act of 1974. Effluent treatment systems were introduced. Waste handling improved. Direct discharge was reduced.
But the deeper lesson was never fully absorbed. Because that episode was not just about pollution. It was about choices.
The land on which the plant stood had been leased from Sancoale communidade during the tenure of chief minister Bahusaheb Bandodkar, with the promise of jobs and development. And jobs did come. Many of our friends worked there. Families prospered. Ancillary industries grew. But alongside this came something else, unplanned settlements, pressure on infrastructure, and the beginnings of a pattern in which economic gain outpaced environmental foresight.
Looking back, it was an early warning, one that revealed how fragile water systems become when industrial ambition runs ahead of safeguards.
That was more than five decades ago.
NEW POLLUTION
Today, the signs feel uncomfortably familiar.
I watched my phone in disbelief when a video from my schoolmate showed him pouring water onto the pavement and setting it alight.
A well at the Church of Our Lady of Good Health in Sancoale had reportedly been contaminated by petroleum. This was a place where people drank water in the heat of summer and washed their hands after funerals.
The source remains unclear. But the damage is unmistakable. A place once considered safe was compromised again. This time, the contaminant was different. Yet, as in the 1970s, petroleum announced its arrival the same way, through smell, first noticed by the Parish Priest.
A similar episode in neighbouring Dabolim a few years ago, where petroleum seepage contaminated well water.
Today, many of the most dangerous contaminants do not announce themselves at all. Coliform bacteria, pathogens, heavy metals from failing sewage systems, these arrive silently. They carry no odour, no visible trace. They move invisibly through soil and aquifers. By the time they are detected, they may already be inside human and animal bodies.
We saw this recently in Dabolim, where a failure in a sewage treatment system at a residential complex led to widespread illness. It was a stark reminder of how quickly infrastructure failures become public health crises.
Water systems are interconnected. What enters the ground does not remain contained. It moves, through aquifers, wells, rivers, and eventually the sea, carrying the imprint of every upstream decision.
The contamination of a single well is never a single event. It is a signal.
And today, those signals are multiplying.
Large-scale developments, often undertaken without adequate environmental assessment or elevation mapping, are altering drainage patterns and creating new pathways for contamination. These are not isolated incidents. They are warnings.
The risks are no longer theoretical. They are cumulative, interconnected, and accelerating.
What has changed is not the nature of the problem, but its reach. Then, we cycled up the plateau or to the beach to witness it. Now, it has come home, to wells, to churches, to fields, to places of memory.
This is not only an environmental issue. It is a moral one.
Because when water is polluted, the damage is grave. But when contamination reaches a village well beside a centuries-old church, something deeper is lost—trust, continuity, the assurance that some things remain protected.
The lesson from the ZACL episode was never fully absorbed. Regulation improved, but enforcement faltered. Development accelerated, but safeguards did not keep pace.
What we are seeing now is not a new crisis. It is the continuation of an old one.
The science is clearer. The evidence is broader. The consequences are closer.
What we witnessed as schoolchildren was an early warning. What we are seeing now is what happens when such warnings are not heeded.
And this time, because so much of the damage is invisible, waiting for the smell to alert us may already be too late.
