In June 2025, an Italian court sentenced 11 former executives of Miteni S.p.A., a chemical manufacturer based in Trissino, Italy, to a combined 141 years in prison for poisoning the drinking water of 350,000 people in the Veneto region with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) – a large group of synthetic, man-made chemicals used in industry and consumer products, also known as ‘forever chemicals’. It was a landmark verdict, the first time in Europe that corporate executives were held criminally liable for industrial-scale chemical contamination. What the court could not sentence, however, was what happened next: the plant’s machinery, patents and technical blueprints had already been auctioned off, shipped in over 300 containers, and reassembled in Lote Parashuram, Maharashtra, where a protest has been brewing over the quiet resumption of PFAS production under a different flag with an almost entirely absent regulatory framework.India’s exposure to PFAS is not simply the story of one factory’s relocation, it is the product of a structural mismatch: treaty commitments exist on paper while the domestic monitoring, standards, and enforcement infrastructure needed to act on them do not. That mismatch is precisely what allows industries expelled from regulated markets to treat a weakly governed one as a release valve. Essentially, the regulatory vacuum of an emerging economy becomes a business opportunity for industries expelled from the developed world. A treaty India signed but did not fully implementIndia is a party to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, the landmark global treaty designed to eliminate or restrict chemicals that persist in the environment, bioaccumulate in living tissue, and travel across borders. The Convention has progressively listed PFAS compounds: PFOS was restricted in 2009, PFOA eliminated in 2019, PFHxS added in 2022, and long-chain perfluorocarboxylic acids listed as recently as 2025. India has ratified the Convention itself in 2006 but has not yet fully ratified the 2019 amendments covering PFOA placing it alongside a small group of parties still operating under older obligations. A 2024 global analysis in Nature Geoscience, drawing on over 45,000 water samples worldwide, found that a substantial fraction of global surface and groundwaters already exceeds PFAS drinking-water guidance values (Ackerman Grunfeld et al., 2024).More critically, ratification has not translated into domestic regulation. At the time Miteni’s equipment was installed in Ratnagiri, India had no enforceable standards governing PFAS in industrial emissions, no maximum contaminant levels for PFAS in drinking water, and no national monitoring programme capable of detecting the compounds in surface water or groundwater. The gap between treaty commitment and domestic implementation is structurally common among emerging economies navigating the tension between industrial development ambitions and environmental obligations. However, that gap has consequences that are no longer theoretical.What’s already in the waterA study published in Environment International in early 2026, reviewed by Down to Earth, analysed sediment samples from 14 locations along a 58-kilometre stretch of the Ganga between Rishikesh and Roorkee. Conventional targeted analysis detected only 16 known PFAS compounds, with concentrations of 0.02-5.3 nanograms per gram of sediment. Total extractable organic fluorine concentrations, however, ran between 180-780 nanograms per gram meaning current methods could identify only approximately 1% of the fluorinated chemicals present. The lead author called this the “fluorine gap”: a large share of what is in the riverbed is neither named nor regulated, because current testing was never built to see it. This is in the Ganga river that runs through several states in India and supports roughly 7% of the global population. We are not measuring the problem. We are measuring our ability to see it.The picture is no better elsewhere. An IIT Madras study published in Environmental Sciences Europe in 2024 detected PFAS in Chennai’s Adyar river, Buckingham Canal and Chembarambakkam lake with concentrations of all eight target PFAS higher in treated water at the city’s water treatment plant than in the raw water entering it. Conventional treatment does not remove these compounds (Koulini & Nambi, 2024). A 2024 study on Kamrup, Assam detected PFOS and PFNA in groundwater used directly for drinking, identifying children as the highest-risk group (Sharma et al., 2024). Short and long-chain PFAS have now been documented in the Ganges, Yamuna, Cauvery and Krishna – India’s four most significant river systems.India currently lacks both the laboratory infrastructure and the regulatory mandate to conduct systematic PFAS surveillance. The Bureau of Indian Standards BIS 10500, India’s primary drinking water benchmark contains no limits for any PFAS compound, while the US EPA set enforceable maximum contaminant levels for six PFAS in April 2024, some as low as 4 parts per trillion. What makes this harder to excuse is that India’s own institutions have raised the alarm. IIT Madras submitted a strategic approach to PFAS management to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) in June 2022 – a roadmap that has since gathered dust. In December 2024, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) directed MoEF&CC and CPCB to prescribe drinking water standards for forever chemicals “as soon as possible”. That directive remains unimplemented. The Bureau of Indian Standards has only agreed to consider the question as part of a routine review of IS 10500, with no committed timeline.The cost of delay: a European warningEurope’s experience offers a precise measure of what regulatory inaction accumulates into. A 2026 European Commission-backed analysis estimated the annual cost of PFAS soil remediation and drinking-water treatment at up to €80 billion, with associated health costs running as high as €39.5 billion a year through 2050 depending on how much preventive action is taken now. A separate academic estimate put the ‘emerging’ remediation scenario – one that also addresses short-chain PFAS – at roughly €100 billion a year across the EU (Chemistry World, 2026). A 2024 study linking PFAS in drinking water to cancer incidence across the United States found associations with cancers of the oral cavity, lung, digestive system, brain, urinary system, soft tissue, and thyroid. A global study in Science of the Total Environment mapped PFAS exposure across more than 600 wildlife species, documenting suppressed immunity, reproductive failure, and endocrine disruption from Arctic seabirds to American alligators. PFAS travel on wind and tide; they have been detected in Himalayan water samples and Antarctic rainwater. A regulatory framework that governs only point sources misses the distributed, persistent nature of the threat entirely.The regulatory arbitrage problemThe Miteni case is not an aberration; it is a structural consequence of uneven global chemical governance. A cross-border investigative journalism consortium documented step by step how core Miteni production units were sold during bankruptcy proceedings, reinstalled in India, and are now actively supplying Miteni’s former European customer base.As Europe moves toward restricting over 10,000 PFAS compounds under its REACH system, regulatory pressure does not eliminate production, it relocates it. Laxmi Organic Industries is technically compliant with Indian law. That is not a defence of Laxmi Organic. It is an indictment of Indian law.Anticipatory governanceThe term ‘anticipatory governance’ describes regulation that acts ahead of demonstrated harm, that builds institutional capacity before crisis forces it. The EU’s own posture is instructive here, not because it has solved the problem, but because its restriction-first approach shows what acting before full certainty looks like in practice: a single class-based restriction proposal covering over 10,000 PFAS compounds, rather than a chemical-by-chemical fight after contamination is found. India does not need to replicate the EU’s exact instrument, but it does need the same sequencing logic – standards and monitoring in place before, not after, production expands. For India, this means four specific interventions that are neither prohibitively expensive nor industrially disruptive if implemented now but will become both if deferred.Standard-setting: First, India must fully ratify and domestically transpose the Stockholm Convention’s PFAS-related amendments into enforceable production, use, and discharge standards. Second, the Bureau of Indian Standards must develop enforceable PFAS parameters for drinking water surveillance and mandate monitoring across urban water utilities and industrial discharge zones, rather than leaving the question to a routine, undated committee review. Institutional capacity: The government must invest in laboratory accreditation infrastructure capable of non-targeted PFAS screening; without it, monitoring frameworks have no analytical foundation. Fourth, MoEF&CC must create a dedicated chemical registration and early warning mechanism under the Environment Protection Act, requiring disclosure of PFAS-related compounds before environmental clearance is granted, not after contamination is detected.None of these measures requires India to forego industrial development. They require that industrial development not proceed by externalising its costs onto public health and water systems that communities downstream cannot afford to remediate.The question of environmental justiceThe protests outside the Ratnagiri factory gate have reached India’s parliament, where lawmakers are questioning the country’s lack of comprehensive PFAS regulations and the risk of India becoming a destination for polluting industries expelled from wealthier nations. The Stockholm Convention was designed precisely to prevent this and to ensure that global chemical governance is genuinely global, not merely a system that shifts pollution rather than reduces it.The Ganga does not recognise the difference between a compound listed under the Stockholm Convention in Geneva and one still awaiting domestic transposition in New Delhi. The IIT Madras report has been with MoEF&CC since 2022. The NGT directive has been outstanding since December 2024. The factory in Ratnagiri is operational. The question is no longer whether India needs anticipatory chemical governance. The question is how much longer it will take to act as though it does.Satyajeet Gupta is a senior advisor at the Center of Excellence in Chemical Ecology (CECE), UAS-GKVK, Bangalore, and a consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru. Shatarupa Sarkar is a final year doctoral student at the Department of Forest Genetics and Physiology, Czech University of Life Sciences (CULS), Prague, Czechia. She is also a freelance science writer.Vartika Jain is a first-year doctoral researcher in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Bath.