THE DARK SIDE OF INDIAN DRUG-MAKING

IT’S RARE FOR A STREAM near a public road to smell as if it’s a cocktail of industrial chemicals. But this is what water smells like in a stream next to a pharmaceutical plant in Patancheru, a rural area near Hyderabad, India’s main production base for pharmaceutical chemicals. “Tankers dump effluents randomly near the villages around here,” asserts Lakshmir Narayanah, the owner of a small grocery shop who heads a water-users association in Patancheru. “The pipes in our wells corrode, the water smells bad, and we can’t even use it for washing ourselves.” In 2007, Patancheru gained international notoriety after a study by Swedish researchers showed that water in the area was heavily contaminated by antibiotics. The state and national governments quickly promised to look into the problem and fix it, but there is little evidence so far that officials have made substantial changes, other than to ban new plants from setting up in the ...