E VERYONE IN NAWAB COLONY can point to victims. Twenty-year-old Annisa, for instance, has the face of a Bollywood starlet, but limbs so withered she cannot walk. Raj, 13, shrunken and largely paralysed, is carried by his father like a large doll. Another teenage boy, Shyamlal, sits alone on a doorstep. He suffers milder palsy; at least he can speak and does not drool. A few steps away across some railroad tracks, what looks like a baby slumped on her mother’s shoulder turns out to be a patchily bald, terribly stunted three-year-old, who cannot hold her head up.

All are among some 961 cases taken up by the Chingari Trust, a local charity working with child victims of the worst industrial accident in history. Yet none of them was even born when some 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate gas spewed out of the Union Carbide pesticide plant here, killing between 4,000 and 16,000 people. That was in 1984. The likely cause of their disabilities is not the gas, or its effect on their parents, but water from local wells soaking up the toxins that the factory began dumping in 1969. Abandoned abruptly, the plant has been awaiting clean-up ever since, leaching poisons into the ground. Only in 2014, on a judge’s orders, did Nawab Colony get piped water. But supply is often cut, so many still rely on the old hand pumps.

Official indifference to the 100,000 mostly poor people who live in this part of Bhopal says much about India’s wider failure to tackle pollution. The national government resides in a metropolis, Delhi, where residents inhale the equivalent of half a pack of cigarettes on an ordinary day, and two packs on a bad one. Suburban lakes and waterways in Bangalore, India’s high-tech hub, alternately foam with toxic suds (pictured above) or burst aflame: in January 5,000 soldiers took seven hours to douse Bellandur Lake, which drains the south-eastern part of the city. In Hyderabad, India’s pharmaceuticals capital, antibiotics are leaking into rivers, accelerating the development of drug-resistant microbes. Across India, more than two-thirds of urban wastewater goes untreated.

Nor is pollution just an urban blight. Skies across the vast, intensively farmed Gangetic plain are dimmed by the same mix of diesel and coal fumes as Delhi. The sacred River Ganges itself is unfit for bathing or drinking along its whole 2,500km length. Intensive coal mining has ripped out forests and spewed black dust across a swathe of central India. And in the long run farmers will pay even more dearly: global warming already affects the vital annual monsoon, generating local extremes of flash floods and sudden droughts.

Little and late

The Indian state has not been entirely asleep. It launched a plan to clean up the Ganges way back in 1986. Almost 20 years ago Delhi pioneered a switch by public transport to natural gas. The current government has accelerated the tightening of national emissions standards, boosted investment in renewable energy and increased incentives to stop farmers clearing fields with fire. At a meeting in Poland this month to monitor progress towards slowing climate change, India claimed it would meet the goals it set in the 2015 Paris accord ahead of the deadline of 2030.

Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and the Environment, a think-tank in Delhi, says the worthy goals adopted by successive governments tend to lack teeth. “We have all the institutions and a lot of the right laws,” she says, “but where is the actual capacity, the personnel, the tools?” One example: the giant Sterlite copper smelter at Tuticorin in India’s far south, the subject of environmental complaints for decades. In May, outraged by a planned expansion of the plant, local residents mounted a mass protest. Police opened fire, killing 13. The embarrassed state government shut the plant. Had it been capable of properly regulating pollution, rather than winking at it or stopping production altogether, 5,000 workers might still have a job.