In the 1950s, film director Satyajit Ray's lyrical Apu trilogy portrayed a rural Indian family's trials, including the daughter's death to a monsoon fever, the family's migration to the pilgrim city of Varanasi, and the father's death after drinking from the sacred Ganges. In these elements, the films encapsulate key health problems that India still faces today.
Home to the world's tenth largest economy and second largest population, India defies swift generalization. It encompasses a vast range of developmental circumstances, cultures, languages, and climates. The country remains predominantly rural, with just 26% of its people living in cities. Yet in 1995 it had over 30 cities of one million or more residents, including three of the world's 20 largest cities--Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi--according to United Nations estimates. In the southern state of Kerala, the infant mortality rate (IMR) of 13 per 1,000 births is comparable to New York City's; in northern states such as Uttar Pradesh, however, IMR ranges between 98 and 114, about the same as for Bangladesh or Haiti.
Urban Growth
Rapid urban growth and industrialization have brought tremendous changes. The city of Bhopal, for example, has grown from a Mogul fortress and city-state to a thriving industrial hub, with industries for manufacturing textiles, processed food, and electrical equipment. Bhopal became a global symbol of industrial dangers to health when, in the early hours of 3 December 1984, a reaction triggered by water leaking into a tank of methyl isocyanate (MIC) at a Union Carbide pesticide plant released 30-40 tons of the toxic gas over the city. The result remains the worst industrial disaster ever.
MIC gas spread over 75 square kilometers (km2), causing an estimated 600,000 people to suffer from choking and burning eyes and skin, and killing many in distant fields. The official death toll was 2,500 but estimates based on the sale of shrouds and wood for cremations range from 7,000 to 8,000, according to Madhusree Mukerjee, writing in the June and July 1995 issues of Scientific American.
"Little has been reliably learned of [MIC's] effects on the people of Bhopal," noted Mukerjee. MIC's long-term health effects appear to be at least as serious as the disaster's immediate toll. Three months after the accident, 39% of people examined suffered respiratory impairment. Many suffered pains in the gastrointestinal tract, liver, and kidneys. Women pregnant at the time of the disaster showed high rates of miscarriage and infant mortality, as well as reproductive disorders such as abnormal uterine bleeding. Recent studies suggest that MIC exposure also causes neuromuscular effects and neurological effects, such as intermittent loss of memory. Unpublished government studies and newspaper accounts support estimates that "one person is dying every two days from effects of the gas," according to Mukerjee.
In the confusion of the explosion's aftermath, the Indian government withheld information on the effects of MIC and the health consequences for the people of Bhopal. The government, in its attempt to mediate between the victims and Union Carbide, trapped itself between concerns for public health and economic growth.
"There was a clear conflict of interest between the demands for justice for the victims, and the need of the Indian government for foreign capital," noted Indira Jaising and C. Sathyamala at an international workshop on women, environment, and health held in Bangalore in 1991. Jaising and Sathyamala charged that the government held back on performing epidemiological studies of the Bhopal accident's effects so as not to discourage foreign investment in Indian industry. Not until five years after the accident did a new Indian administration release findings by the Indian Council of Medical Research and other research organizations on the effects of the accident.
The Bhopal disaster placed a glaring spotlight on the lack of knowledge about many industrial chemicals. "One of the main fallouts of Bhopal," observes S. Ramachandran, a visiting scholar at NIH's Fogarty International Center in Bethesda, Maryland and formerly secretary in the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Government of India, "is that every project is required to have a plan for disaster management." Companies now must have a plan not just for averting accidents, but one that includes steps to take in the event of a calamity.
In 1986, India complemented and stiffened earlier pollution control laws governing water and air (enacted in 1974 and 1981, respectively) with passage of the Environmental Protection Act. The new law aims to regulate hazardous wastes using the threat of shutdowns and criminal proceedings against companies that fail to comply. It requires companies to provide the government with inventories of toxic materials and to be available for inspection. During the 1980s, government agencies also emerged for the purpose of environmental monitoring, starting with the central Department of Environment (now the Department of Environment and Forests) in 1980, and led to state-level environment departments and pollution control boards.
Tighter standards have prompted many industries to install pollution reduction facilities, but enforcement lags behind. "As in many other countries, the enthusiasm for enactment of legislation and enforcement are vastly different," notes Philip E. Schambra, director of the Fogarty Center and formerly science attaché in the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. A huge backlog of litigation in India's courts blunts the legal instrument's effectiveness. Just over one-fourth of the 5,600 cases filed under the air and water acts by early 1993 had been adjudicated by mid-1994, according to Robert Repetto of the World Resources Institute (WRI), in his 1994 study entitled The Second India Revisited: Population, Poverty, and Environmental Stress Over Two Decades.
Aside from institutional capacity for enforcement, there is the question of political will. The problem of managing chemical industries "is a problem for developing countries," observes Schambra, "where you have efforts to industrialize with foreign and domestic investment, but little infrastructure" like that of more industrialized countries, which put a premium on control of effluents and protection of human health. "Instead, the emphasis is on economic growth, and less effort is devoted to pollution control," he said.
While many point to the Union Carbide accident to make the case against careless foreign technologies and interests, studies suggest that the risks are greater for outdated technologies in domestic industries that grew under India's policy of import substitution from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Water
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Sacred and polluted. Failed efforts to clean up the Ganges River are typical of India's water woes.
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Behind the headlines commanded by Bhopal loom more widespread and basic health problems. The most serious environmental health problems in India relate to water, which Ramachandran summarizes as "too much water, too little water, and too bad water," often occurring in the same area over time.
"India lives and dies on the amount of monsoon rain," says Schambra. In daily weather reports, the progress of the seasonal monsoon is mapped "like an advancing battle line," so important is it to people's lives.
In the last 40 years, efforts to boost agricultural production through irrigation projects have created an intricate system of surface canals and tubewells. Even so, Indian farmers cultivate just 43% of the country's potential irrigable land area. Furthermore, improper irrigation has waterlogged or salinized millions of hectares of farmland, and has caused water tables to fall, according to Repetto. Such schemes have also created increased breeding sites for vectors and parasites of diseases such as dengue and malaria.
Falling groundwater levels are particularly critical in arid portions of India, such as Rajasthan, where water tables over broad areas have dropped by more than 5 meters, and in some places more than 10 meters, according to Marcus Moench, senior staff scientist with the Natural History Institute in San Francisco. In parts of Gujarat, pressurized aquifers have fallen "as much as 500 feet in some locations since the 1950s," he says. According to Moench, overpumping of water under cities is a hazard of rapid urban growth, and sustainable groundwater management and groundwater quality are likely to become major issues in the near future.
Intense public campaigns against the critical problem of scarce potable water have made impressive progress. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), access to potable water increased between 1980 and 1991 from 77% to 87% in cities and more dramatically from 31% to 84% in rural areas. Yet the goal of an adequate supply remains elusive with rapid population growth, particularly in cities like Madras, where authorities have had to limit hours of water availability. Water treatment facilities have sprouted up but distribution quickly falls behind need due to uncontrolled urban expansion. Some facilities can provide only a small fraction of the water supply needed for their area, according to Ramachandran.
The difficulties in improving water quality are evident in the failure of efforts to clean up the Ganges, the northern river considered holy by Hindus. "The conditions of the river at Kanpur are a disaster, there is no question about it," India's former Environment Minister, Kamal Nath, admitted to the New York Times in October 1994, almost 10 years after the government launched a campaign to clean up the river. The river feeds farmland irrigation and industry across its 2,400 km course. This includes 175 leather tanneries at Kanpur, a city of 2 million located roughly halfway between Delhi and Varanasi. Drinking water at pumps in Kanpur emerges green from high chrome content. At points, the river's colliform bacteria count registered nearly 20 times India's permissible limit, according to the Times. Irrigation schemes have slowed the river's course and reduced its ability to cleanse itself, and marine life has dropped sharply. State-level politicians have shown little commitment to the national plan, which has languished amid charges of lack of accountability, corrupt contracting, and poor public education.
An outbreak of what was reported to be pneumonic plague erupted in Surat, a town outside Bombay, in October 1994. Intense media attention from the international press fueled a proposal for water reform. "Plague has acted as a spotlight on the appalling sanitary conditions in which people live in India," observed T. Jacob John, a virologist at the Christian Medical College in the city of Vellore. In a commentary in the October 1994 issue of The Lancet, John criticized local and city governments for not shouldering their responsibilities for sanitation services and accused public health agencies of not providing the public with "timely, truthful, and authoritative information" about the disease and public risks. In April 1995, India's Health Ministry put forth a national program to improve urban waste water management and solid waste treatment.
In contrast to the strides made in water supply, sanitation has stubbornly lagged behind. Of the 3,000 cities in India with more than 100,000 people, only 200 have basic sewage treatment facilities. Rural sanitation remains almost nonexistent, and barely one-half of urban populations had access to adequate sanitation in 1991, according to WHO. Various reasons are given for this record. While some like John cite a failure of will by local governments, those like Schambra maintain "it's a matter of running just to keep up with the urban population explosion, as people burden the city environment with more waste and sewage." Others point to the intractable caste system and its assignment of waste removal chores to lower castes as a part of the problem.
Migration to cities has outpaced economic and industrial growth, causing a steep rise in numbers of urban poor. Nearly one-third of the people in India's largest 23 cities live in squatter settlements on sites that are flood-prone or vulnerable to industrial pollution, according to the WRI study. The crowded conditions are ideal for the spread of communicable diseases. The most critical of these include tuberculosis, leprosy, cholera, shigellosis, polio, and parasitic diseases, according to Ramachandran. Diarrhea claims up to 300,000 children's lives each year; WHO estimates that water-related and sanitary problems cause 75% of all illnesses and 80% of child mortality.
Intensive immunization programs have made good progress against diseases such as polio. Despite continuing problems, life expectancies in India have risen over the past two decades, and the WRI study notes "signs that India is entering the 'epidemiological transition,'" a change in disease pattern from infectious to chronic/degenerative, due to improved child nutrition, immunization, and improved access to primary health care.
Occupational Hazards
Against these broad improvements, workers in many sectors face sharply defined hazards due to obsolete technology and lax pollution controls. The country's miners and ceramics workers show high rates of silicosis. More than half of pesticide factory workers exhibit symptoms of poisoning, according to one study. A primary offender is the tanning industry, which relies on outdated traditional processes and many small firms. Tannery workers face serious dangers from toxic sulphides, chlorine dioxide, lime, and hydrogen sulphide, and suffer high rates of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments.
Women and the poor are the most exposed to occupational hazards because they are often forced into the most dangerous and unhealthy occupations (see sidebar). These sectoral risks reinforce the need for government policy to balance economic growth with a concern for workers' healthy environment, says Ramachandran.
Air Pollution
Like nearly all other industrializing countries, India has experienced hazardous levels of air pollution in its cities. Before the Bhopal accident, the Taj Mahal focused attention on pollution concerns when studies found that industrial emissions were causing the monument's marble to deteriorate. Public outcry forced the closure of several nearby foundries and refineries.
Still, little has slowed the pollution caused by the country's reliance on its extensive coal reserves and the tremendous rise in vehicular traffic. India's coal contains high concentrations of ash, which introduces heavy particulate matter and sulfur into the atmosphere and causes acid rain. In the past two decades, the number of vehicles on India's roads has increased 10-fold, and all of them use leaded gasoline.
Heavy use of fuel wood, mainly for cooking, contributes to the high levels of airborne particulate matter and has depleted forest cover around most Indian cities. The Hindu custom of cremating the dead using wood exacerbates this situation. Women and children are especially vulnerable to heavy concentrations of smoke in unventilated cooking areas from both wood and dung used as fuel; the WRI study cites smoke concentrations of 25,000 micrograms per cubic meter in Ahmedabad households. Besides chronic eye irritation, more serious consequences include bronchitis and respiratory infections. For young children suffering from malnutrition, these problems are magnified by urban crowding and poor sanitation.
For people in India, these immediate health risks are more urgent than the consequences of global warming, according to Anil Agarwal, founder of the Center for Science and Environment in New Delhi and a prominent environmental journalist. The effect of global warming on health "isn't a major concern," says Agarwal, although it could have important implications if it were to affect monsoon patterns and, therefore, nutrition. But at this stage, global warming models cannot determine these monsoon effects, or reliably predict regional patterns.
In the Countryside
Despite the swift increase in urban pollution and crowding, Indians still have better chances for employment, higher per capita incomes, and better access to health services in the cities than in the countryside. For people of lower castes forced into menial occupations, the anonymity of city life can offer a degree of freedom from the barriers of village life, note social scientists Leela Visaria and Pravin Visaria of the Gujarat Institute of Development Research.
Furthermore, certain health risks in rural life have worsened in the past few decades, including vulnerability to droughts and floods and poisoning from agricultural chemicals. As in the cities, lack of safe drinking water is a main health concern for rural households.
Indian farmers today use 60% more fertilizer per hectare than farmers in the United States, according to Repetto, and pesticide use has more than tripled in 20 years. The Green Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s, during which agricultural techniques from developed countries were introduced to India, brought heavy chemical inputs along with high-yielding crop varieties. This movement, which has spread beyond large farms to small landholdings, has drawn criticism for encouraging dependence by poor farmers on expensive pesticides and fertilizers to support exotic cultivated varieties of rice and wheat. The intense use of chemicals on irrigated lands has increased yields but also problems of nutrient runoff and toxic residue. Over two-thirds of the pesticides used in India (including DDT, aldrin, methyl parathion, and BHC) are banned or tightly controlled for health reasons in other countries. In Punjab, the most agricultural state, studies have found excessive DDT residue in dairy products and even mothers' milk--up to 24 times acceptable levels. Here again, the cumulative effects are more serious for malnourished children of poor families.
Besides the direct effect on people, wide pesticide use has endangered wildlife, including species of falcons, hawks, osprey, and lammergeier. Plant species and habitats have been threatened by forest cutting throughout the country. This is driven by the growing demand for fuel and the undermining of traditional rules for forest use by the colonial legacy of state claims of forest ownership. In the foothills of the Himalayas, considered by Hindus to be home to the gods, deforestation has reportedly caused erosion and siltation of irrigation systems and dam reservoirs.
Village groups in some areas have countered this trend by reasserting their control over communal lands. "The most dramatic environmental work in India has involved local communities in resource management," says Agarwal. In the early 1990s, the national government revised its forest policy, recognizing the failure of centralized control and the potential of local initiatives. Under the new policy of joint forest management, community groups and state forest agencies cooperate in management and reforestation activities, and share controlled harvests of wood and other forest products like animal fodder.
Dams and their environmental health effects have come under increasing scrutiny by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). A large World Bank-funded project to dam the Narmada River in central India came under fire for its displacement of whole tribal communities, the potential effects on groundwater and the spread of malaria, and the submersion of forests. In the re-evaluation, says Ramachandran, "nongovernmental organizations are major factors in making the government sharpen its attention."
Population
At the heart of many of India's environmental problems is the juggernaut of population growth. "Population growth and distribution is the number one fundamental problem for India," says Schambra.
"India is poised to surpass China as the world's most populous country before the middle of the twenty-first century," wrote Visaria and Visaria in India's Population in Transition, a study published in October 1995 by the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, DC. And despite the signs of a demographic transition to lower fertility, absolute growth will continue to rise steadily. India currently grows by 17 million people each year; by 2010 this may reach as high as 20 million.
The rate of growth is far from uniform. In the 1980s, states in the more populous north grew by around 25%, while the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala grew by a relatively slow 15%, according to Visaria and Visaria. The signs of fertility decline lie in these regional differences and in a shift toward an older population (due in part to falling mortality rates).
"India appears to be in the midst of a fundamental transition to lower fertility and mortality," claim Visaria and Visaria. In this, "fertility has declined much faster than population experts at the U.N., World Bank, and other organizations expected even a few years ago," they said. The authors cite declining trends in total fertility rate and mortality, gradual increases in the average age at marriage, and a 1993 dip in Kerala and Goa fertility to replacement level (a total fertility rate of 2.0 children per woman, thereby "replacing" both parents for a net growth of zero). The downturn appears to be due to delayed marriages, higher literacy, urbanization, and revolutions in communications and technology, as well as India's long-running family-planning campaign.
The Role of Women
The case of Kerala, which appears to be 25 years ahead of the rest of India in this demographic transition, illustrates the importance of women's status in reducing population growth. Where women enjoy more equal status and access to education, as in Kerala, they enter child-bearing years later and use family planning methods more effectively. Repetto notes that in Kerala, "women historically enjoyed high status as artists, philosophers, and poets," and power and inheritance are passed matrilineally, unlike elsewhere in India. In Travancore, part of Kerala, the female ruler of Kerala in 1917 decreed free and compulsory education for both girls and boys.
Elsewhere in India, however, a strong cultural bias favors sons over daughters. Female children frequently suffer neglect in terms of health care. A study of male bias in health care in the Pune district of Maharashtra in the west, published in a 1994 WHO bulletin, revealed that boys received health care more often than girls, and the average amount spent on treatment was also significantly higher for boys.
Beyond lowering fertility, the status of women is also crucial for improved health in broader terms. Women bear the brunt of the worsening fuel crisis, as they are forced to walk further to collect firewood for cooking. The added work makes for chronic fatigue and anemia among women, and thus may also affect the health of newborn children.
Other Factors in Change
The social and cultural environment play other roles in India's attempts to grapple with public health concerns. Nationwide, primary education is not compulsory, and government support is focused on tertiary education, which skews the benefits toward wealthier families. In rural areas, just 75% of boys and 50% of girls receive any primary education at all. Although progress has been made in removing the worst effects of the caste system, its barriers remain in place for many.
Technological breakthroughs are making compliance with environmental standards more feasible for companies. Industries, which have often claimed that they are scapegoats in the public debate on India's environment, are exploring new technologies as a way to ease the cost of compliance with new environmental regulations. One example is a reverse osmosis plant commissioned by a fertilizer manufacturer near Madras. Designed to refine water out of sewage, the plant is expected to reduce the firm's drain on the city's scarce water supply by more than 2 million gallons a day.
In the search for cleaner, cost-effective technologies, the government's easing of restrictions on foreign investment appears to help. The experience of privatization in some Southeast Asian countries supports this, says Agarwal. Foreign investment brings updated environmental technologies, and privatization helps clarify the responsibilities of government agencies as regulators. Private-sector solutions to environmental problems are the focus of exchanges coordinated by the U.S.-Asia Environmental Partnership, a program of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
NGOs have made important initiatives in rural resource-related problems, but the complexities of urban issues have blocked their progress in many cities. NGOs lack the technical capacity to tackle the greater environmental threats like pollution and fuel quality, says Agarwal. Unlike forest management issues, few people understand problems like air-quality monitoring. In this vacuum, says Agarwal, "one saving grace has been the activist role of the courts." In a ruling on mining in the Dehra Dun hills in the mid-1980s, India's Supreme Court opened the way for public interest litigation against polluters. Recently, the court has ordered closings of many factories violating environmental codes, including hundreds of tanneries around Delhi and Tamil Nadu.
India also shows signs of moving away from the centralized planning that caused the deterioration of urban services. "Evidence shows that success must be built upon local community organization and initiative," observed Repetto. "Devolving responsibilities and resources to local government and nongovernmental organizations, as India has begun to do, acts on this principle."
Modern communications are poised to play a larger educational role. The number of television sets has mushroomed from 25,000 in 1971 to about 4.7 million in early 1994, reaching over 90% of India's people. Television spots on contraception techniques, hygiene, and family planning can bypass the barriers of illiteracy and isolation. An emphasis on entertainment programming, however, has kept both public and private broadcasts from fulfilling this potential, says Agarwal. There are early signs of both enforcement and education, but it is still too soon to tell if India will come to terms with its tremendous challenges without another prod from tragedy.
"Bhopal was a watershed event" in creating environmental health awareness, says Schambra. It made clear that industrialization can involve unwarranted risks. Greater control over the process of development, he said, "requires that people be educated as to the risks, and that government be diligent in enforcing environmental regulations."
David Taylor
The Plight of India's Women Workers
Women are part and parcel of the labor force of the most menial and often dangerous occupations in India. As such, they are at a high risk of developing various occupational and environmental diseases. Higher mortality and lower life expectancy have been observed among Indian women in many different occupations. According to the 1991 census of India, out of the total population of 838.6 million, 403.4 million were women. Approximately 23% of women work outside the home. Of these, 34.6% work in cultivation, 44.2% in agricultural labour, 5.9% in household industries, and 15.3% in other professions. According to the Indian Ministry of Labor, in 1994 about 497,000 women worked in factories, 56,000 worked in mines, and 558,000 worked in plantation industries. Some of the occupational hazards women face in major Indian industries are described below:
Matchbox and firework industry. This industry, which is concentrated around the southern Indian town of Sivakasi, employs over 100,000 workers, 80% of which are women. Working conditions in these factories are extremely hazardous. In addition to fires and accidents, dust and vapors from raw materials including potassium chloride, tetraphosphorous trisulfide, lead tetraoxide, and sand and glass powder are highly toxic and cause health effects such as eye irritation, sore throat, headache, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
Bidi making. Bidi, a type of rolled tobacco, is made by women and children in Indian slums to supplement their incomes. Major health problems associated with bidi making are respiratory ailments such as bronchitis and asthma from tobacco dusts and nicotine, burning eyes, conjunctivitis, occupational dermatitis, and "green tobacco sickness" caused by absorption of nicotine by the skin. In addition, irregular menstruation, miscarriages, and significant neonatal deaths are common complaints of these workers and may be related to tobacco exposure. A recent study showed that bidi rollers in Maharashtra have higher nicotine content in their bloodstreams than smokers. Nicotine metabolites are also found in livers of these women at levels over eight times higher than in tobacco smokers.
Agate and slate industry. The agate industry, a household industry in the Khambhat region of Gujarat and its surrounding villages, employs over 30,000 people, many of whom are women. Agate stones are made into beads by heating, chipping, grinding, drilling, and polishing them for use in jewelry and other decorative items. Mineral dust, especially silica produced during the stone grinding, causes pneumoconiodis tuberculosis, bronchitis, emplysema, pneumonitis, and other respiratory effects. Slate making is a traditional village occupation. Mining and cutting of stone produces silica dusts and prolonged exposure causes silicosis in slate workers.
Coffee and tea industries. India is a leading producer of coffee and tea and employs large numbers of women, primarily in the application of fertilizer and pesticides, and in harvesting tea leaves and coffee beans. These activities are most often performed without protective clothing. Harvesting tea leaves results in development of criss-cross patterns of fissures in the palms and fingers of women's hands. Workers also suffer from other dermatological effects such as photosensitivity, callouses at the root of fingers, and fissuring of the palm.
Brick industry. This industry employs rural women who are exposed to dust while preparing raw bricks from thick mud paste. Bricks are fired in kilns using wood, dried leaves, cow dung, kerosene, and other gases as fuel. These women suffer from respiratory diseases and lung cancers, musculoskeletal and joint diseases (from sqatting for 10- to 12-hour periods), gynecological problems, ear, nose, and throat ailments, fungal infections, and allergic contact dermatitis.
Construction industry. According to the 1993 census, 6.5 million people are employed in construction, 15% of which are women who are employed mostly as unskilled laborers to carry concrete and bricks. Due to lower levels of mechanization in India, such workers endure great physical stress including numbness of hands and fingers and back injuries. These workers also suffer from hearing loss, intestinal problems, respiratory diseases, and skin allergies. As a result of the heavy labor, women are prone to menstrual disorders, spontaneous miscarriage, and there is a high rate of infant mortality among their children.
Agriculture. Agriculture is the major occupation of India. Women perform jobs such as tilling, weeding, transplanting, harvesting, threshing, storing grain, tending to animals, and providing fuel and water. Workers are found to suffer from a variety of respiratory ailments and cancers. Exposure of these women to a variety of pesticides has been associated with spontaneous abortion, premature births, low birth weights, and birth defects.
Jute and coir industry. Jute is the main trade of southern India and the ropes and twines made there are prized around the world. Women in this industry suffer from dermatologic allergies, malaria, filaria, other vector borne diseases, and chronic respiratory diseases such as byssinosis from exposure to jute dusts and fibers.
Electronics industry. The electronics industry employs a large number of women of all age groups including those of reproductive age. Hazards in the electronics industry are due to exposure to ionizing radiation, organic solvents, heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, and reproductive toxicants like arsine and phosphine. These women are shown to experience greater than normal rates of spontaneous abortion, premature deliveries, and intrauterine growth. Their children suffer from low birthweights, mental retardation, and birth defects.
Spice industry. India is a world leader in the production of spices. It produces 2 million metric tons of spices annually including chili, coriander, black pepper, paprika, cinnamon, and parsley. It is one of the oldest trades employing women. Respiratory ailments prevail in these women, and allergic reactions to the spices include dermatological, gastrointestinal, and neurological problems.
Sweepers and scavengers. Women sweepers and scavengers are the lowest in India's social castes and the most neglected. These "untouchable" women go door to door daily carrying bamboo buckets to haul away garbage and excreta. In addition to the ills created by extreme poverty, these women suffer from anemia, viral infections, and vectorborne diseases.
The Government of India has begun to formulate policies and laws to address the problems of women and children in the work environment. A special cell within the Ministry of Labor seeks to improve working conditions, wages, and skills of women. Under the Equal Remuneration Act, state committees advise the central government on women's employment. In addition, the Department of Women and Child Development has issued a national perspective plan to address issues through the year 2000, and the Department of Science and Technology is supporting research to improve protective measures against occupational hazards.
Qamar Rahman
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Last Update: May 15, 1997