An hour’s drive from Marina beach, Ennore is a dystopian landscape of fishing villages wedged between industry and the sea. Once famous for its kabbadi champions, residents now battle the fallout of pollution wrought by the excesses of Tamil Nadu’s power generation.
Srinivasan, a kabbadi coach and an inland fisherman has been taking on Chennai’s biggest polluters at great personal risk for the next generation’s right to breathe.
Mahul is Mumbai’s toxic, industrial armpit that houses petroleum refineries and chemical factories. It is also where families who lived next to the city’s water pipeline have been relocated. "The companies have surrounded this area and they just dumped people in here. Where’s the light? Of course, people will die," an angry Anita Dhole, of the Ghar Bachao Ghar Banao Andolan, tells the Breathless project. "Jao, ab maro (go forth and die), this is what the corporation representatives tell us. If there’s a blast here, Mumbai ka poora khel khatam (game is up)."
"The privileged assume that the poor can live anywhere. But we’re not immune. It’s getting to us," Chandrasekhar tells VICE. The protest in Mahul is one of the most powerful ones in the country, in which the survivors are fighting back against the big polluters
With eight power plants in a 10 km radius and some of the country’s biggest coal mines, Korba is a district in Chhattisgarh that keep India’s lights on. In 2009, it was ranked India’s fifth most polluted industrial cluster. The state still doesn’t have a single, real-time air quality monitor recording pollution data in the public domain.
A man cycles past a board for Kusmunda Project in Korba, Chhattisgarh, where villagers have protested against the coal mining.
"We also wanted to portray stories in which people are empowered even if they are confronted with great amount of pollution," Chandrasekhar tells VICE. This photo was taken in Bengaluru, which has gone from being called the 'Garden City' to 'Electronic City'.
From the day Atul [Jain] fell ill, school took a backseat for his son Samyakk Jain (right), who scraped through his last year with barely 50 percent attendance. Within the Jain community, where sons typically follow in the father’s business, it would not be surprising if he dropped out of school entirely. It would still be years too soon.
Atul Jain in Delhi