Poverty Battle in Heart of India Begins With Factories

Yards from the site of India’s worst industrial disaster, Majid Khan is welding a door grill in a shop on the narrow streets of Bhopal’s old city, where pigs forage for food amid the garbage.

For two decades after a 1984 chemical leak from Union Carbide Corp.’s plant killed more than 3,000 people, the capital of Madhya Pradesh struggled to throw off its image as a backwater in one of the nation’s poorest provinces. Now, the regional government has attracted industry and boosted agriculture with policies that have lifted the state’s economic growth to more than twice the national pace.