By Neville Lazarus, Sky News India Producer
It's nine o'clock at night and 39-year-old Sukha and his family are waiting to board the 339 Abohar train, infamously called the Cancer Express. Sukha's wife and mother suffer from the disease.
The family is not alone on this journey. Scores of patients board the Cancer Express every night from Punjab.
Locals tell us there are about 50 to 60 patients every day and on a Sunday the train is packed. They are all headed to the government hospital, 200 miles away in Bikaner, Rajasthan.
Navdeep, 25, is taking his grandmother for her monthly check-up. He tells Sky News: "The pesticides and chemicals used on crops has infected the food and that's why so many people are getting the disease."
It's early morning now and the Acharya Tulsi Regional Cancer Treatment and Research Center (RCC) in Bikaner hospital is overflowing.
Some wait outside on the side walk. The hospital provides all medication free of charge to those who are too poor to pay.
Many cancer patients have to travel 200 miles for treatment Dr Ajay Sharma, director of the centre, has been working here for over two decades. He has since seen a steep increase in the number of patients and says the 8,000 fresh cases are a worry.
Though he attributes the numbers to an increasing population and change in lifestyle, he tells Sky News: "Nowadays everything is polluted. People use insecticides and injections to grow more and bigger vegetables."
The cancer centre deals with almost 400 patients a day. Last year 80,000 patients walked through the doors and a large number from the Malwa region of Punjab.
Records at the Health Department of the Government of Punjab show 34,430 people died due to cancer in the last five years - 20 deaths each day.
In the 1960s there was concern that India would be unable to feed its growing population.
It embarked on the green revolution - increasing agricultural output with the use of modern farming, hybrid seeds chemicals, fertilisers and pesticides. Punjab led this revolution and became the breadbasket.
The use of pesticides has been blamed for the high cancer rate Sky News travelled to the cancer belt of the Malwa region. The village of Jajjhar has an unusually high rate of cases and deaths. The disease carries a stigma and no one wants to talk about it.
The headman, Baba Gyan Das, says the village is in disrepute, and that no outsider wants to marry into the community. He shows us file after file of young and old people who have died.
"It's been disastrous for us. Pesticides have killed young men, women and the elderly and the government is doing nothing."
Umendra Dutt, of the Kheti Virasat Mission, wants farmers to switch to organic farming. He believes the indiscriminate and unscientific use of chemicals on the land has made it medically and environmentally unsustainable.
"Punjab is a victim of intensive agriculture based on mechanisation and chemicalisation, and due to this Punjab has a cancer crisis, reproductive health crisis, farmer suicides, debt and water crisis," he tells Sky News.
Punjab is one of the most prosperous states in India, but this prosperity is not without a price.
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