ast week marked the 38^th anniversary of one of the worst industrial tragedies in the world. Shortly after midnight, on December 3, 1984, residents of Bhopal, a city in Madhya Pradesh in central India, woke up in excruciating pain, coughing, eyes stinging and noses watering. They could smell something like burning chilies and rushed outside their homes to see a stampede of people, cows and dogs running for safety. The Union Carbide factory that housed the dangerous chemical methyl isocyanate, used to make pesticides, had exploded releasing 40 tonnes of the deadly gas into the night.

There was no alarm system or evacuation plan for the possibility of such a disaster and when the people who could make it to the hospital arrived blinded, choking and frothing at the mouth, doctors did not know what the protocol for treating them was. More than 3,000 people had died instantly from the explosion and over 17,000 perished in the following days — countless animals died in the streets and plants turned black from the contamination.

As with most industrial disasters, for years prior to the catastrophe, employees of Union Carbide and journalists had been raising alarm bells about unsafe industrial practices and storage facilities for the dangerous chemicals and gasses at the factory. The chemicals stored in Union Carbide were left there to leach into groundwater. Rain from decades of monsoon seasons washed them into the ground and into the water supply. Half a million or more people were affected and to this day, around 100,000 survivors live with excruciating pain and some form of debilitation. Thousands are still struggling in courts to receive compensation, medical attention and fix criminal responsibility for the disaster on the management of the company rather than the workers. The occurrence and aftermath of the Bhopal tragedy is emblematic of how environmental justice operates in spectacular tragedies, often eluding the ones most affected by it. And yet, as the residents of Lahore grapple with the effects of an annual smog season and contamination of groundwater, respite from the slow violence of endemic environmental pollution remains a distant dream for those who encounter it the most.

Located along the north end of the Lahore Ring Road, the industrial neighbourhood of Sharifpura lies across the road from Mehmood Booti, a now defunct landfill which environmental lawyer Rafay Alam describes as an active methane volcano. The low-income neighbourhood houses mostly factory workers and small traders as well as hundreds of steel re-rolling mills in a 10 km radius that have, for years, burned old rubber tires for fuel. On bad days, residents say, concentrations of fine particulate matter can be seen suspended in air.

In 2021, satellites spotted a large plume of methane over Lahore city. Most methane leaks come from oil and gas infrastructure but this one came from mostly landfills. In Sharifpura, Mehmood Booti releases carbon dioxide, methane and organic compounds that react with other pollutants in the air to generate ozone which is linked to a host of health conditions. The greenhouse gas is potent and contributes massively to global warming as well as the atmosphere of its surrounding areas. Waqas Butt, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who has been working on waste infrastructure in Lahore for many years, says that methane leaks are linked to almost a million premature deaths each year. The gas contributes to the unhealthy air quality in Mehmood Booti and more broadly to the smog in Lahore city and its environs.

Since 2015, the Punjab government has been announcing annual smog emergencies. Beginning in October, a thick blanket of smog caused by a temperature inversion traps emissions from vehicles and factories, burning crops, and dust from Lahore to Delhi for up to six months in a year. According to a 2019 Air Quality Life Index report, the annual smog in Lahore is reducing the average Pakistani’s life by more than two years.

Poor air vis-à-vis health quality

For a city that consistently leads the world in poor air quality, you would think the health of Lahore’s residents would be the top priority for the government. Yet, the case of how and why Sharifpura’s residents are condemned to live in toxic conditions reveals the apathy and abandonment that form the basis of people’s relationship to their government.

In December 2021, a team of young doctors and activists from Haqooq-i-Khalq Movement held medical camps in Sharifpura after being approached by factory workers. Dr Alia Haider, one of the organisers of the camp, recalls that almost every child brought to her at the camp had severe anemia and suffered from stunted growth. On Twitter, the activists shared that 81 percent of the children and 52 percent of the women had symptoms of hypochromic microcytic anemia that is caused by lead poisoning. The doctors shared their concerns with Dr Nosheen Zaidi, a microbiologist at the Punjab University, who along with her team of doctoral students arrived in Sharifpura to collect blood samples to run various tests.

Their tests revealed that 80 percent of the children had severe anemia, 54 percent of adult women had it, and 36 six percent of the women had miscarried at some point or delivered a child pre-term. Naila, a doctoral student of microbiology who was a part of this activity, said all the children had symptoms of lead poisoning but there were no tests in the country to prove that. After several weeks of figuring out a solution to the problem, finally Chughtai Labs came through and offered to send six blood samples abroad to an affiliated laboratory.

Advocate Rafay Alam says that leachate from Mehmood Booti is quite harmful, especially since it is located on a river floodplain with relatively porous soil. Decades of waste piled on top of the unlined soil has allowed the leachate to enter Lahore’s aquifer in the north.

According to the WHO: “There is no known safe blood lead concentration; even blood lead concentrations as low as 5µg/dL may be associated with decreased intelligence in children, behavioral difficulties, and learning problems. As lead exposure increases, the range and severity of symptoms and effects also increase.”

When the test results came back, it was learnt that the lead levels in the blood averaged 17 micrograms per deciliter. Since then, Dr Zaidi’s team has been working, along with several labs including Cancer Research Lab at PU and Hormone Lab near Jinnah Hospital, to test water samples in various working-class neighbourhoods of Lahore. She recently shared the results of tests run on water from Charar Pind, a low-income neighbourhood surrounded by the DHA, showing that all the water samples were severely contaminated with fecal bacteria. In Chungi Amer Sidhu, 40 percent of the water samples collected by her team showed presence of fecal bacteria and toxins.

According to Dr Zaidi and her team members, their efforts to engage the government in taking meaningful action in this case have been met with denials of responsibility and jurisdiction over Sharifpura’s water supply.

Lawyer Rafay Alam says that the leachate from Mehmood Booti is quite harmful, especially since it is located on a river floodplain with relatively porous soil. Decades of waste piled on top of the unlined soil have allowed the leachate to enter Lahore’s aquifer in the north. The Mehmood Booti landfill was decommissioned around 2016 and moved 3 km away to Lakhodair where the landfill has provisions to collect and store leachate. Both landfills continue to emit methane into the atmosphere despite there being gas vents for this purpose at the sites.

Response to contamination concerns

One of the lasting takeaways from advocacy and activism in the aftermath of the Bhopal tragedy is the limitation of using litigation as a means to reach a definite end to an environmental disaster. Shortly after the factory explosion in ‘84, the factory CEO Warren Anderson was arrested and charged with manslaughter in India. He was later released on an INR 25,000 bail promising to return. He never did and died unpunished at the age of 92 in 2014.

Instead, the punitive logic of environmental justice, at least the way it comes to be codified and practiced, often hurts those already most vulnerable to the effects of environmental pollution. To crack down on vehicular emissions, the Lahore DC announced the formation of eight anti-smog squads that would impound vehicles found to be releasing excessive smoke. Various newspapers have also reported that patwaris (revenue officials) had been enlisted to report stubble burning during smog season.

It is rare for the law to step in as a guarantor of rights or means to receive any form of care. With factory closures, workers suffer when they don’t get paid. Similarly, farmers are punished for burning crop stubble when there are no safer alternatives provided by the government. Why must the logic of clean environment clash with the interests of the poorest?

Anthropologist Waqas Butt says these interventions present clear issues with labour politics and for farmers. “We would need capital-intensive investments in technology and machinery to deal with crop stubble and so on, but if we see court documents on smog emissions it’s really about the quality of fuel,” he says.

Petroleum products high in sulfur content burned to run millions of cars in Lahore are the largest contributor to smog and also the least talked about. To do something about it, the government would have to stop using Euro 2 oil and move to Euro 5, Butt says.

In the long term, the cars need to be removed from the roads and the only way to do that is to invest in public transport.

Advocating for those most affected

An environmental politics that criminalises livelihoods and practices farmers have relied on for hundreds of years would only increase the suffering of the poorest among us. In recent years, the residents of Lahore have come to rely on citizen-led initiatives of installing air quality monitors to develop an understanding of pollution patterns. Not surprisingly, industrial neighbourhoods such as Kot Lakhpat have an AQI reading that is five times higher than the AQI in the DHA, or the area around the US Consulate.

These statistics are shared by users over social media in the form of posts and Tiktok reels dedicated to raising awareness about living in a polluted city and so on.

The unequal distribution of smog and contaminated water in the city has also become a rallying point for activists demanding justice for communities that continue to manage the effects of water and air pollution. In this context, WhatsApp groups and online communities like Climate Action Pakistan (CAP) and War on Smog (WOS) are not only important sources of information about environmental pollution but also a means to mobilise groups for action. As the case of Sharifpura reveals, disparate teams of doctors and scientists working with activists and journalists are shaping a different ethic of environmentalism — one that begins by advocating for Lahoris whose lives and livelihoods are increasingly being shaped by changes to the environment.

The writer is a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and tweets at @SarahEleazar