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TIRUVANANTAPURAM, India, (Apr. 1) IPS - India's longest running environmental crusade is against a rayon and pulp factory on the Chaliyar river in southern Kerala state that recently claimed the life of an activist who died of cancer.

K. Abdul Rahman who had led a people's movement for more than three decades succumbed to the disease caused by the poisoned waters of the Chaliyar, once the lifeline of six serene, paddy and coconut growing hamlets including his Vazhakkad Village.

Grasim Industries Ltd., owned by one of India's top business houses -- the Birlas, was commissioned at Mavoor on the Chaliyar in 1963 to produce rayon and pulp for their textile units in north India.

Within months toxic effluents including heavy metals like mercury that were discharged untreated into the river had caused fish to die in the hundreds in the river.

Young Rahman led a massive rally against the factory the same year, India's first environmental action against pollution, forcing the company to the negotiating table.

It assured the Chaliyar Action Committee, which represents the 300,000 people living around the factory, that it would demolish a barrage to pump water to the factory and lay a 20-km pipeline to discharge the effluents directly into the sea by 1966.

But as the villagers and activists were to discover, this was the first of many assurances the Grasim management would go back on, made to the people, the state government and the Pollution Control Board.

"From day one we felt betrayed," Rahman had said in an interview, shortly before his death on Jan. 11 this year, of the bellicose management's ability to pull invisible threads and get away scot-free after every round of protest action.

Forced by swelling public anger, the state government appointed committees to investigate Grasim in 1968, 1973, 1977, and 1982. But each time the company prevaricated on implementing the recommendations.

Tired of waiting the movement turned militant in 1978 when thousands of people partly demolished a barrage constructed by Grasim to prevent contaminated water - a cesspool of stinking, black water, activists recall - from flowing back into the plant.

A state minister who visited the area soon after ordered the company to complete the effluent pipeline it had promised to build in 1966. Instead Grasim closed the unit for a few months citing labour problems as a reason.

It was the first of many lockouts ordered to split the movement between affected villagers and plant workers for whom the factory was a source of survival.

For instance in July 1985 the company stopped work following a labour strike. For the villages on the Chaliyar it was a period of reprieve, but for Grasim workers it was a loss of livelihood.

Thirteen workers committed suicide demanding the factory be reopened, forcing the government to intervene and agree to very favourable terms for the management's reopening the plant.

While Grasim trade unions promised to desist from strikes for the next five years, the government agreed to keep the factory supplied with raw material - bamboo and soft wood.

Grasim, activists say, is responsible for the denudation of vast swathes of lush forests in north Kerala. It has devoured 1.8 million tonnes of wood every year, provided by the government at the ridiculously cheap rate of never higher than 560 rupees per tonne (one dollar is equivalent to 42 rupees at present).

Successive state governments in Kerala - ruled alternatively by the Communist parties and the centrist Congress - have justified the cheap raw material supplies to the factory saying it provided jobs to people.

But the Chaliyar Action Committee points out that for every job it has provided Grasim has taken away the livelihood of villagers along the river. People there were traditionally farmers, bamboo weavers or fishworkers.

Worse, they are being poisoned to death by the polluting plant which has poisoned the ground water, air and the river that is dying a slow death.

Justice K.K. Narendran of the Kerala High Court observed in a 1982 case filed by Grasim that "the banks of the Chaliyar, once a health resort, have virtually become hell on earth. At least for one decade the people there are suffering. The petitioner company has liberally contributed to this."

A health survey conducted in Vazhakkad, which faces the brunt of air pollution, revealed that 199 persons had died of cancer between 1989 and 1994. Villagers are dying of cancer, asthma, cardiac arrest and chronic bronchitis around the plant, it said.

Shortly after activist Rahman succumbed to cancer, 10 persons were hospitalised after a sulphur dioxide leak from the factory.

Thirty years of protests have only yielded false promises. But the villagers are not giving up. They are now demanding the closure of the factory, and rights groups in the state have called for a boycott of Grasim products.