HOPE AND FUTILITY:March 16, 2008. Padyatris rest at a school in Farah, after a 28 kilometer trek from Agra. The marchers are aged between 11 and 82 THERE IS a face of our democracy that you only see when you follow a 60-year-old woman marching 800 kilometres on swollen knees. That is the distance fromBhopal to Delhi, and she hopes that if she walks for a month, instead of taking the overnight train, she will remind Delhi about something in Bhopal. Not that the gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory on December 2, 1984, killed 15,000 people. That is world history; that is not why she is marching. Some people remember that the five lakh Bhopalis who survived that night had their bodies ruined. This explains her swollen knees, her painful lungs, the sudden dizziness that occasionally drops her onto the roadside. Fewer people heard that after being denied a hearing in court, after being denied a humane compensation, the gas peedith are spending their lives being denied medical care they were supposed to receive, being denied jobs they were trained to do, being denied justice. But there is another reason she is marching. Almost nobody ever heard that the factory which leaked poison into the air in 1984 [see box: The Story of that Night] has been leaking it, constantly, into the soil and water ever since. For 23 years, the chemicals that went into Carbide's pesticide process have been ignored, left to leach into the groundwater. That groundwater feeds tubewells and handpumps from which 25,000 people in neighbouring areas drink. Most of these people were nowhere near the gas leak on December 2. They belong to a new category of victims, the paani peedith, and every year their numbers and their toxicity symptoms increase. Their existence is being denied altoget her. Everyone knows the Union Carbide gas leak killed more than 15,000 people. Almost nobody has heard that the killing never stopped. That is why the woman is marching. AS YOU READ this, 50 padyatris between the ages of 11 and 82 will be entering New Delhi. For a month, they have been hitting the highway at 5 am, marching until the sun burns the neck like a rash, breaking for a nap, then marching again until Delhi is 25 km nearer. They've been sleeping in school houses, wedding halls, open fields. Most are in ill-health from exposure to toxic gas or water: what keeps them going is sweet tea in the morning, painkillers at night and a fierce desire to hold their Prime Minister to account. This is not the first time they have made the padyatra: it is a Bhopal survivors' tradition. In 2006, a group marched to Delhi and presented their demands to Manmohan Singh. In essence, the demands were: provide support to the survivors. Clean up the toxic waste at the plant. Give water to the communities whose water it has poisoned. Take legal action against Dow Chemicals, which bought over Union Carbide in 2001. They say the Prime Minister nodded as they read out the first three, and when they reached the fourth, he placed his hands over his ears. He would not endorse any bans or any arrangements for the special prosecution of Dow. Many of the padyatris from 2006 are marching again this year, to remind him of those promises. There has been a little progress on the first three demands