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  3. Everyone in Nawab Colony can point to victims. Twenty-year-old Annisa, for in

Everyone in Nawab Colony can point to victims. Twenty-year-old Annisa, for in

游客2024-01-02  30
问题    Everyone 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 paralyzed, 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 bora 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 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 waste water 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.
   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 Center 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.
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答案     在纳瓦卜殖民地(Nawab Colony)生活的每个人都对这些受害者了如指掌。比如20岁的安尼萨(Annisa)长着一张宝莱坞的明星脸，但四肢却萎缩到无法行走；13岁的拉杰(Raj)身形干瘪，几近瘫痪，只能像大玩偶似的被父亲抱着；还有一个十几岁的男孩孤独地坐在门阶上，他叫夏阿姆拉尔(Shyamlal)，轻度麻痹症患者，至少他还能开口讲话，也不流口水；在穿过铁轨不远处，有个看似婴儿的孩子正趴在母亲的肩头，她其实已经三岁，头上长着秃斑，发育极其不良，虚弱到连头都抬不起来。
    这只是钦加里信托基金会(the Chingari Trust)接手的961个案例中的几例。钦加里信托基金会是一个当地慈善组织，它为这起史上最严重的工业事故中的儿童受害者提供服务。1984年，约40吨的异氰酸甲酯气体从美国联合碳化物公司(Union Carbide)位于当地的农药厂大量泄露，造成4000至16000人死亡，但在当时，这些孩子并没有出生。造成他们残疾的原因可能既不是气体，也不是气体对其父母的影响，而是当地水井里的水吸收了化工厂自1969年以来倾倒的所有毒素。化工厂被很快废弃之后，在等待清理工作开展的同时，毒素渗入地下。直在2014年法院责令，纳瓦卜殖民地才有了自来水，但供应常常中断，所以很多人不得不一直用旧式手动压水泵来取水。
    生活在博帕尔(Bhopal)一带的十万人，大部分是穷人，政府对他们置之不理，这在很大程度上可以说明印度政府在解决污染问题上的巨大失败。政府位于大都市德里(Delhi)，那里的居民每天相当于吸半包烟，如果遇到更糟糕的天气则相当于吸入两包烟。印度高科技中心班加罗尔(Bangalore)郊区的湖泊和航道不是泛着泡沫，就是火光冲天。一月份，5000名军人花了七个小时才扑灭了贝兰多尔湖(Bellandur Lake)上的大火，导致这座城市东南部严重缺水。在印度的医药中心海德拉巴(Hyderabad)，抗生素不断渗进河水中，加速了抗药微生物的生长。在整个印度，超过三分之二的城市废水未经处理直接排放。
    污染不仅使城市遭殃，在广袤的、农作物密集的恒河平原(Gangetic plain)上空，也同德里一样弥漫着柴油和煤烟的气味，天空变得灰暗。神圣的恒河(River Ganges)全长2500千米，却再也不适合人们沐浴或饮用。在印度中心地带，高强度采煤毁掉了森林，大量的煤灰喷涌而出。从长远来看，农民会付出更大的代价：全球变暖已经对每年重要的季风造成了影响，引发了当地山洪暴发和突如其来的干旱等极端灾害。
    印度政府并没有完全袖手旁观，早在1986年，它就已经启动了清理恒河的计划。大约20年之前，德里率先提出公共交通工具改用天然气为燃料。本届政府也加速收紧国家排放标准，增加了对可再生能源的投资，加大激励力度使农民不再焚烧清田。本月，在波兰召开的气候变化大会，旨在监测各国在减缓气候变化方面的成效。会上，印度称其将在2030年最后期限之前实现2015年《巴黎气候协议》中设定的目标。
    德里智库科学与环境中心(the Center for Science and the Environment)的主任苏尼塔-纳拉因(Sunita Narain)说历届政府所设定的目标都很有价值，但往往缺乏效力。“我们有各种各样的机构和正确的法律，但是真正解决问题的能力、干实事的部门人员和有效的工具到底在哪儿呢?”比如，几十年以来，位于印度最南边杜蒂戈林(Tuticorin)的斯特莱特(Sterlite)铜冶炼厂一直是环境投诉的主要对象。5月份，该厂计划扩大规模，令当地居民愤怒不己，组织了一场大规模的抗议活动。警察开枪射击，导致13人死亡，之后处境尴尬的州政府只能关闭这家工厂。如果政府能够合理治污，而非对其睁一只眼闭一只眼或令其完全停产的话，那么5000名工人或许还能保住自己的饭碗。
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