City Corporate & Business Plan - Municipal

Annexure Final Report: Ambur Municipality
History of Ambur Cluster
Annexure III: Performance of Ambur Leather Cluster
The emergence of Madras as a major trading center for leather during the British
rule inspired the people in the trade to put up tanneries. Since tanning required
plenty of water, the river system nearer to Madras, namely, the Palar River basin was
the natural choice. It had copious flow of clean water. The next requirement was
transport to Madras, which was the gate way port for export of leather ñ a
distinction that the port holds even today after more than a century. Vaniyambadi,
Ambur, Pernambut and Ranipet, which fulfilled the basic requirements, attracted
the leather men. Vaniyambadi was the first center, followed by Ambur and in both
places the business is more than 100 years old.
Slow growth due to traditional processing
The process of evolution of leather tanning into mechanized industry has rather
been slow in India and Ambur was no exception. For more than 50 years, tanning
was essentially a manual operation. The process was known as vegetable tanning
and the method was bark tanning. The transformation from household activity to
mass production methods in separate premises engaging a group of workers took
place in the forties. It was in the fifties that mechanically driven drum was
introduced and tanning with wattle extract was extensively used. The vegetable
tanning otherwise popularly known as East India (E.I) tanning, dominated the Ambur
leather industry for the next 25 to 30 years. The phase of mechanization gained
momentum in the seventies and eighties with the introduction of chrome tanning,
necessitated by the increasing demand for chrome tanned leather in international
markets.
Pollution due to tannery effluent
Environmental degradation caused by effluents let out by tanneries in Tamil Nadu
was worrying the State Government even when vegetable tanning was done. In
1939 itself, the then Provincial Government constituted a committee to suggest ways
and means to treat the effluents let out by the tanneries. Since then a series of
committees have been constituted by the State Government and time and again
the tanneries were told to put up effluent treatment plants.
As the flow of water dwindled in Palar river due to construction of check dams in
upstream by Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh through which the river flows before
entering TamilNadu, the level of pollution in Palar basin increased, affecting drinking
water supply to a number of villages. Alarmed by this development, the Vellore
Citizens Forum filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in 1991.
Tanneries left with no other alternative but to put up ETPs or CETPs not only in Vellore
district but also in other parts of Tamil Nadu, to put up individual or common effluent
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