Environmental Audits in Dombivli MIDC Phase I, Kalyan-Dombivli.

Phase I plots change hands more often than they used to. A buyer or lender looking at a chemical shed asks which products were made in it, what may have soaked into the floor and soil, and which liabilities pass to a new owner. We go back through the consent history, inspect the plot on foot, and, where the record points that way, sample the soil and the groundwater. The audit states plainly what was found, the rough cost of a clean-up, and what is still unknown.

Phase I is the older half of the MIDC estate in Dombivli East, laid out when paddy fields and open ground still surrounded it. Its plots hold chemical, dye, textile processing and engineering units, most of them owner-run, with reactor sheds, drum yards and boiler chimneys set close together. The estate was planned with its own residential zone, and that housing has since filled in and grown upward, so apartment blocks now overlook working plants across a single road. Its units send their wastewater on to a shared plant for final treatment. Several older units have shut or changed hands, and their sheds have found new occupiers.