Introduction:

Around four years ago, the most spoken news was about rejoicing a 23-year struggle against a
polluting industry ended successfully, though at a great human cost, Sterlite, the copper smelting
industry situated in Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu. But before all the victory, I had a chance to see
the struggles faced by the residents near this industry, through my father’s NGO. I got an
opportunity to interact with the affected ones. Mostly the affected ones were school children who
were facing great weight loss and were also mostly stunted. So as a IB student, the first thing that
got to my mind was this incident, so I dug into which element present in the sludge released into
the waterbodies neighboring that industry, which was responsible was this cause. And got to
know it was lead, iron, fluoride, cadmium and nickel.
Then I dug deeper into which particular toxic is responsible for such as “great weight loss” and “stunt”, and found that the toxic,
Lead has a major role in these causes. So I searched even deeper

Background Research