And the dust does who-knows-what to the lungs of the 250 people who live there. We will never know the extent of harm, since no one can afford to travel to, let alone see, a specialist. One building closest to the plant is a nursery school.

Until recently, Bogribail had been asking IRB and government officials for compensation for these problems, and had gotten nothing. Villagers did not ask IRB or the government to stop or diminish the pollution, because they didn’t know that the factory’s practices violated numerous regulations.

Then Maruti Gouda took the case.

He’s the opposite of a superlawyer. (He’s also no relation to Ravi Gouda; many people in the area have that family name.) He is 29 and not a lawyer at all, actually — he attended college but didn’t graduate. Like his father and most of the people in his nearby village, he’s a clam harvester.

Since 2014, though, his employer has been Namati, a nonprofit organization that works in several Asian and African countries and the United States to democratize law. Around the world, four billion people lack basic access to justice, said Vivek Maru, the American lawyer who founded the group in 2011. (Disclosure: Namati gets some funding from the Open Society Foundations and had early support from its Justice Initiative, where my husband works.)

The movement has taken a cue from the rise of community health workers, one of the most important developments in global health. India, Ethiopia, Ghana and other countries are training thousands and thousands of villagers to provide basic medical care where doctors are scarce — a practice that began in China’s Cultural Revolution, when rural peasants were trained to give health care and teach preventive health practices.