UNIVERSITÉ DE DROIT, D’ÉCONOMIE ET DES SCIENCES D’AIX-MARSEILLE
INSTITUT D’ÉTUDES POLITIQUES

FEATURE
Master 2 « Journalisme politique à l’international »

BHOPAL, THE ENDLESS TRAGEDY

By Ms Valérie FOURGASSIE, Ms Maëlle BRUN, Mr Xavier MORONI and Mr Anthony RAYMOND.
Under English teacher Mr Gilles Hutchinson’s supervision, Aix-en-Provence 2005

In the early hours of December 3, 1984, a huge gas tank containing more than 35 tons of toxic gas exploded in a pesticide factory in Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh State, India), a factory owned by Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), a branch of the American multinational company Union Carbide Corporation (UCC). The gases released were composed of no less than 24 tons of highly reactive chemical components, known to be lethal when inhaled by humans. No security alarm went off. Poisonous clouds spread silently over the sleeping city.

During the next 2 or 3 days, 8,000 people died from burns and poisoning.


Old man from slum area with cataracts.
A lot more were seriously injured. Over the last twenty years, gas-linked diseases have caused around 15,000 deaths, turning the Indian tragedy into one of the biggest industrial and environmental disasters of modern times. 500,000 people of the first, second and third generation are today still suffering from severe after-effects, either through breathing diseases, neurological troubles, cancer, infertility, or malformations concerning children born after the disaster.

Bhopal inhabitants, condemned to drink contaminated water

« A second tragedy is happening, 20 years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, as toxic effluents left behind are poisoning drinking water in nearby areas » for Dominique Lapierre (refer to pictures), an international reporter for Paris


Woman living in slum area with cataracts.
Match and author of bestselling book “It was Five Past Midnight at Bhopal”. More than 20,000 people are still living near the infected site. Dangerous toxic waste is widespread and large zones are contaminated, both on and under the surface. The pesticide factory remains have polluted the subsoil and the water table. Toxic products can be detected in the water people are drinking, but also in riverside inhabitants’ blood or in maternal breast milk.

In 1997, 250 pumps in the vicinity of the factory were covered with new red signals indicating the water was improper for consumption. Heavy metals had been detected in it : zinc, copper, lead, nickel, mercury, sometimes six million times over the acceptable levels of ground occurrence. With no safe spring, most people from nearby communities have carried on drinking the water from the pumps. A 2004 Amnesty International report entitled “Clouds of injustice. Bhopal, twenty years later” quotes some testimonies : « We have to walk two kilometers at the minimum to find drinking water. My health is so bad that I just can’t go and find the water I need », declares Hasina Bi, who lives in Atal Ayub Nagar, nearby the Bhopal factory. For the past eighteen years, she has been drinking water she obtains near home with a head pump. Faujia, a 15 year old girl, who often goes to draw water from the pump, complains that «the water is red here and it smells... as if there was some medicine in it ». Munni Bi, another girl living in Bhopal, states that the water « is bitter... difficult to swallow ». Water is the cause of countless health problems : pains in the stomach, headaches, anemia, and gynecological problems. Since 1984, the water available in the vicinity of the factory has never been purified.
In May 2004, the Indian Supreme Court ordered the Madhya Pradesh State to provide drinking water for the populations whose water has been infected by the factory pollution . 1 000 litre tanks were set up throughout the affected areas. Which was not enough. According to NGO Sambavna Trust, responsible for a clinic in Bhopal, there is a lack of 80,000 litres a month required to meet the fundamental needs in the neighbourhoods concerned.



UCC and Dow positions reinforced by Indian authorities behaviour

Denying its responsibility in the 1984 accident, and shifting the blame onto its now closed Indian branch (UCIL), the UCC has always refused to clean up and decontaminate the factory site, where the disaster originated, almost 21 years ago. In February 2001, the UCC became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dow Chemical Company, the biggest chemical multinational in the world. The “Merger Agreement” between UCC and Dow recognized a transfer of liability in as much as the latter accepted approximately US$ 2 billions of UCC debt. In spite of that, Dow itself refused to pay in order to purify the Bhopal site, to purge the ground water of pollution


Young man with cataracts, living in slum area
around the Union Carbide plant.
and to get rid of all the toxic substances remaining in the ruins of the factory (refer to pictures), and more specificly the bags of Sevin, the latter being the pesticide produced by UCIL in Bhopal before the disaster. The commemoration of the tragedy’s 20th anniversary, in December 04, was to be the opportunity for many associations and key personalities to start pressurizing Dow into cleaning up the site again. Dominique Lapierre was one of the people who demanded the Indian government intensify efforts in order to force Dow Chemicals to clean up the hazardous chemicals left behind in the Union Carbide factory. But with no success.

For many observers and defenders of Bhopal victims, the refusals by UCC, and then Dow, were partly caused by the passivity of the Madhya Pradesh Government and the Indian State. But who could have predicted that, at the beginning of 2005, the Madhya Pradesh High Court would authorize a petition demanding the state government itself clean up the site? It fixed June 2005 as the deadline for the first stage of the cleanup. There’s no doubt about the fact that the projected cleanup by the Madhya Pradesh government, whose first phase started last June, has further strengthened Dow's recalcitrant position on Bhopal.

The first phase of the factory clean-up, entailing new sanitary and ecological problems !

Even worse is that the cleaning up operation, initiated by the Madhya Pradesh Pollution Control Board (MPPCB) and the Bhopal Gas Relief Cell, has had a contrary effect, provoking new sanitary and ecological problems, because of the laxity of the security rules. And now we have to add to the list of Bhopal victims the migrant labourers who have been exposed to the hazardous chemicals during the clean-up of the site. Indeed, these people were sent inside the factory for the clean-up without any protective clothing. Which explains the


Man with cataracts has his eye examined at
the Bhopal eye hospital. around the Union
Carbide plant.
International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal association’s action, entitled “Stop this so-called clean-up”. But it came too late. Seeing the bad results of this first cleaning up phase, it’s about time to assess the situation ! According to Satinath Sarangi of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, several hundreds of people have allegedly been affected by toxic dust raised due to the crude and unsafe methods deployed while cleaning up.

In Bhopal, the tragedy seems to be unfolding endlessly. With the infected water issue, the daily life of Bhopal inhabitants is contaminated, and unfortunately might be so for a long time, because of the long term consequences of the 1984 disaster. And that’s where the urgent necessity of a complete clean-up of the factory site and its surroundings comes in. After the first phase of cleaning up and its terrible consequences, it is vital for Dow to at


Old man at eye hospital, Bhopal.
last face its responsibility and to pay for the following phases. But is it realistic to hope that the multinational company will modify its position on the issue ? It’s easy to doubt about that, bearing in mind also that the Indian authorities are acting in such a way as to help the company shelve all responsibility. What remains clear is that a remediation plan, which should cover treatment of the chemical stockpiles, buildings and other structures in the factory as well as the treatment of contaminated soil, including solar evaporation ponds located outside the factory and ground water, could take several years and cost billions of dollars. Bhopal’s suffering inhabitants are far from having done yet with the harmful aftermath of this industrial disaster.

Finally, the main lesson Bhopal can teach the world is the necessary creation of a « universally admitted prescriptive mark, enabling to determine company responsibility when it comes to the effects of their activities on human rights », which is recommended by the human rights defence NGO, Amnesty International. Will it take another industrial disater, as serious as Bhopal, but maybe this time in a western country, to shame multinational companies into picking up the tag for their responsibilities ?