Bhopal in slow motion.

• Author: Cox, Stan
• Position: Biodevastation

Nagamani slaps a wet shirt against a rock. "Oh, no, I only wash clothes in this stream," she says. "If you bathe in it, you get a rash."

She pulls more clothes from her bucket. It's a quiet, peaceful scene, typical of rural India--if you don't get too close to the dark brown stream water with its strange odor, and if you turn your back to the dark plumes rising from a half-dozen smokestacks on the horizon.

Outside his home in the nearby village of Gandigudem, a farmer named Janardhan points to his abandoned plow, his junked rice mill and his idle irrigation well and pump. "Around here, if we have good water, we can survive," he says. "Now, without good water, we're finished. If this pump still worked, the water would be coming out of the ground that color." He points to my bright green shirt.

"Look at the trailer I use to haul soil and sand. It's completely rusted out. I bought it new, on ..." He writes the date in the palm of his hand: 26/11/98. "If our soil and water does that to steel in six years, imagine what it's doing to our bodies?" He opens his shirt and points to a rash on his neck and chest. "I walk a few steps, and I'm out of breath. I'm only 39 years old!"

A neighbor, Rekha, says that her subsidized rice ration never lasts till the end of the month. "Before the pollution, we grew our own rice. Now I can't grow crops, four of my water buffalo have died, and we're forced to depend on the government."

Two miles upstream from Gandigudem is the notorious Kazipally industrial area, home to an assortment of chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Behind one factory, identified by a sign as belonging to SMS Pharmaceuticals, tar-like water dribbles over a concrete dam, runs down a deep gully, and meanders through a barren field beyond.

A second sign in front of the plant, erected by court order, lists some of the chemicals being used: toluene, methyl isothiocyanate, DMSO, chloroform. It's nearly impossible to breathe anywhere within a hundred yards of the plant, and it's hard not to retch.

Poisonous history

Kazipally lies in the drainage of the Nakkavagu rivulet in the state of Andhra Pradesh. This was once good farm country. The watershed, about 10 miles by 25 miles, was crisscrossed by intermittent streams, their water conserved in a chain of 14 small, picturesque reservoirs called cherus that provided irrigation water during the long dry season.

But by the 1970s, the area's good water, wide open spaces and proximity to Hyderabad...