BY RAJ JUGERNAUTH

We will not follow Bérenger in saying that the minister of Environment, Anil Bachoo, is ?intellectually limited?. But there is a harsh reality, which is hard to swallow. Bachoo's re-election does not depend on his successes and policies in environmental protection.

He knows he can manage to get re-elected in any party he might stand candidate for, despite the most mediocre ministerial performance. So environmental protection might not be his priority. True it is that Minister Bachoo some sort of invaded the ethanol production plant at Rose-Belle in a group of almost half a dozen ministers.

This ministerial invasion rings another bell in the public's mind. Suffocated children and old persons being rushed to hospitals is not a new scenario in the vicinity of the ethanol-producing plant Alcodis. The whole saga started some years ago, under the past regime.

The then minister of Environment sent a mobile laboratory on the spot. The tests made indicated that the air quality was good. Always good, it said. As the equipment placed at the entrance of Port-Louis, near the highway in the vicinity of Royal College. Good air quality, when any layman will tell you that high temperature and bright sunshine will turn exhaust emission coming from congestion into a high level of ozone on the ground. Meaning high level of poison for the two schools and the inhabitants of the vicinity. This brings to a stark reality. Mauritius is deprived of the basic equipment to control and monitor the food, air and water quality of its population.

It is scandalous to note that health inspectors ? Bachoo is not responsible on this score ? do not even have a professional meat thermometer in a situation when small shops and some big supermarkets are turning off freezers at night and during week- ends to cut electricity expenses. So cutting cold chain and poisoning the population will go on unpunished. A meat thermometer costs only Rs 1,000.

When such cheap equipment cannot be bought, can we expect this government to invest in high-tech and sophisticated equipment to protect the population? Time and again, foreign experts have alleged that our water and soft drinks producers are selling water with high bromate content. Mauritius has no facility to detect bromate level in our water. One analysis made abroad by health inspectors gave rise to a stop production order. But there has not been any systematic follow-up in a country where innocent people are using bottled water to prepare infant milk.

We shudder that very soon an incinerator will be put up on the island. Near a reservoir and in the vicinity of cattle a pig rearing farms.

Amazing! Has Anil Bachoo ever heard of dioxine? This country has no equipment to monitor dioxine emission. Who then will monitor the coming incinerator emission? Minister Bachoo has not yet failed. He has time left to react, to start thinking out of the box. He should realise that this country needs a set of new standards and means to monitor, control and see to it that these standards on air, food and water quality are enforced. He should go to the extent of monitoring the water quality of our lagoon for bathing. Many of these lagoons are infested with i-coli.

The population needs this new set of standards. The economy also. How can we expect to attract millionaires when the air he will breathe is full of ozone or dioxine? Ozone formed by heat and bright sunshine during traffic congestion is carried 150 kilometres away.

So, Anil Bachoo has a chance of going down in history as an intellectually advanced minister if he makes that decisive move to equip his ministry and show the will to better protect the population. Before we have another Bhopal caused by ?human error? on the island.