Twenty years after the world's worst-ever industrial disaster, a tale of David versus Goliath is still being played out in the slums of Bhopal, writes Rajeshree Sisodia At around midnight on 2 December 1984, more than 40 tonnes of a lethal cocktail of gases, including methyl isocyanate (MIC), hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide, leaked out of a faulty tank at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal. The toxic load spilled into the heart of the community, killing thousands of people in the immediate aftermath, and causing thousands more to endure agonising deaths in the years that were to follow. Yet although the Bhopal disaster created an international scandal at the time, few realise that the toxic legacy of the plant continues to poison many hundreds of thousands of lives to this day. The refusal of its American owners to take responsibility for what happened on that fateful night means that conditions on the ground today are little better than they were some 20 years ago. Twenty years on, 550,000 people still live in the worse affected areas near the derelict factory, in Old Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh (MP), where they continue to be poisoned by toxic chemicals. Sufferers claim that poisoning by MIC on the night of the disaster, together with ongoing exposure to contaminated water from a solar evaporation pond, used by UCIL to dump waste, mean they still suffer a whole catalogue of debilitating health conditions, including repeated headaches and nausea, as well as skin, stomach and gynecological complaints. The legacy of the gas leak lives on in the everyday life of mother-of-four Lilabee Devi, 54, from Sunder Nagar, a slum in Old Bhopal less than 15 minutes walk from the derelict plant. Her husband, Babu Singh, worked there as a casual labourer. He was 48 when he died in 1993, after suffering nine years of severe respiratory, lung and kidney ailments. Lilabee's mother-in-law Nanibai died of TB in 1997, brought on, Lilabee believes, by exposure to MIC. Lilabee's 17-year-old daughter Preeti has gynecological problems she believes were caused by drinking water contaminated with toxic chemicals which seeped from the evaporation pond into the water system. The people who live in these slums have little choice about the water they drink. Most of them use the water pumps scattered through the area, even though they are marked with red paint as a warning they should only be used for washing. Water tanks provided by the MP government are only refilled every two to three days. The Devi family spend between 400 and 500 Indian rupees [$9 to $11] a month treating Preeti's problems -- around half the family's income. Preeti herself speaks of the dread that fills her when she thinks that this treatment may continue for decades, and that she may never be able to be a mother. "I feel angry Union Carbide dumped these toxic chemicals here," she says. "They should come and see the kind of problems [we have]. Then they would know what kind of help we need and they would take responsibility." Her mother remembers the night of the disaster vividly. The neighbourhood was in the midst of celebrations for a wedding. "My younger son felt some itching in his eyes, so my husband told me to take him outside," Lilabee recalls. "I saw many people running away and I could not understand why. They were running because of the gas leak." Lilabee fled Bhopal that night, taking her son by train to a town 60 kilometres away. She returned the following morning to discover that her husband had been admitted to hospital with severe respiratory problems. Less than a decade later, after suffering total paralysis of his left side, he was dead. "What is her future?" demands Lilabee, motioning towards her daughter. "I worry about the future. She does not have a father. In 2000, Lilabee received 25,000 Indian rupees [around $560] in compensation from UCIL and its parent company, US- based Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), in 2000, as part of a $470 million "no- fault" compensation package negotiated between the corporation and the Indian government. Lilabee also got another 25,000 rupees after her mother-in-law died, and 25,000 for her son Niraj who suffered liver and respiratory problems. This month (November), she was due to receive, along with the 550,000 other officially recognised victims, the residual amount owing under the compensation deal, which until now had been held by the Indian government. This "final" payment should be worth between 25,000 and 100,000 rupees [between $560 and $2,240: see also box ]. This compensation relates only to the initial catastrophe. Like the other families in Old Bhopal, Liliabee has not received any compensation for continuing exposure to contaminated drinking water. Independent research by a panel of experts, commissioned by environmental group Greenpeace, revealed the ground water around the disused factory to be unsafe for human consumption. The findings, published in 1999, showed that the water contained "high concentrations" of poisonous chemicals, including Sevin and mercury. Water samples taken from wells near the plant also revealed the presence of carbon tetrachloride which the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry says can cause damage to the liver, kidney and nervous system, and which according to the US Environmental Protection Agency is a probable human carcinogen. Levels of carbon tetrachloride found were more than 1,700 times above the World Health Organisation limit for safe drinking water. In a neighbouring slum, incongruously named the "Blue Moon Colony", Hasina Bee sits outside her shack shelling peas. The skeleton of the former factory with its rusted towers looms above her in the afternoon heat. "Our last option is to drink the dirty water," says the 30-year-old. "It causes skin problems and abdominal pain. You can't even really wash or bathe with the contaminated water, because it causes your skin to scratch until you bleed and mucus comes out. Union Carbide or the government should clean the area up." Politicians at the Municipal Corporation of Bhopal responsible for supplying water to local communities say they provide around half the 550,000 people in Old Bhopal with safe pipelined drinking water, while the remainder have access to potable water brought in by tankers. Asked if all the slums' residents will one day be able to get safe drinking water from a pipeline, administrator Rashmi Arun Shami is optimistic: "We are trying to work out the resources, and we are hoping that we will be able to supply piped water in those areas in a little while," he says. "We have new projects coming up. I'm not at liberty to discuss the time frame, but we are providing them with tanked water that is potable, and we make sure that the tanks are filled on time." The disaster 20 years ago left barely a single home in Old Bhopal untouched. Campaigners for the sufferers claim around 8,000 people died in the hours immediately after the disaster. One thing is certain: more than 7,000 funeral shrouds were sold in the 24 hours following the tragedy. Lorry drivers spoke of dumping "hundreds" of people in unmarked graves nearby. Another 12,000 men, women and children have since died as a result of gas-exposure related illnesses, campaigners say. According to an Indian Council of Medical Research report published in 2001, between 120,000 and 150,000 people in Bhopal were still suffering from symptoms relating to gas exposure. A tatty sign emblazoned with the message "Safety is everybody's business" still hangs on the wall of one of the monitoring rooms in the derelict UCIL plant. "Safety is everybody's business, except Union Carbide's," says Tota Ram Chouhan, a 49-year-old father-of-four, who was a plant operator at the factory for 10 years until the disaster. He says chemical leaks happened with alarming frequency in the decade he worked at the factory, but were hushed up by the plant's senior management and UCC officials. "We were exposed to MIC so many times [before 1984]," he explains. "There were many leaks there. Sometimes I had physical contact with MIC and I suffered from eye irritation and vomiting. We complained through the [trade] unions and our managers, and work would stop for a bit." He adds: "We were worried about the MIC plant before the [1984] leak because in the classroom [in training], we were told that MIC was highly dangerous. We were told this gas plant would be highly- sophisticated and fully-equipped, but when we actually worked at the plants, we saw people were handling MIC as if it was water." In 1998, UCIL handed over control of the factory to the MP state government. Broken windows and discarded chemical bottles litter the plant site, which now serves as an 87-acre improvised playground where children come to play football and fly kites. The factory was originally built in the 1970s to make pesticides and insecticides. Though it employed around 1,200 people, most positions required staff with skills that could not be found in the surrounding area. On 2 December 1984, faulty valves allowed water to leak into a tank containing around 40 tonnes of MIC. The deadly cocktail reacted, causing an uncontrollable "runaway reaction" which culminated in the catastrophic gas leak. The source of Bhopal's misery -- the "killer tank", as Chouhan calls it -- can still be seen on the site. It sits like a rusted old steam locomotive, surrounded by overgrown creepers, at the spot a few yards away from its original position where it was moved by factory officials and has been left to rot ever since. The plant has been ravaged by 20 years of neglect; rusting machinery, pipes and debris have transformed it from a site once heralded as a symbol of major foreign investment into an empty hulk -- an ominous, and still poisonous, relic. Droplets of mercury litter the ground, gleaming silver slivers of danger which the children who play there are oblivious to. Security measures, other than the fenced-off entrance complete with a lone guard, are conspicuous by their absence. Stockpiles of toxic waste and chemical material are strewn carelessly across the ground. The whole place reeks with an acrid chemical smell that burns the nostrils. Akash Vasudev, 12, from the nearby Anu Nagar slum, climbs over the small rubble wall separating his home from the plant to fly his kite in the factory grounds. His movements are barely hindered by the plastic tube doctors inserted between his throat and his lungs to try and solve his breathing problems, According to Chouhan, the lack of any clean-up of the site reflects UCC and UCIL's total abdication of responsibility both before and after 1984. The companies failed to provide sufficient training to workers. They did not furnish the factory with the right equipment, and they never warned the community of the possible dangers should a leak occur. Criminal proceedings against UCIL, UCC, and UCC Eastern in Hong Kong, rage on. The trial in Bhopal of directors and staff from UCIL, who face charges of Rash Negligent Acts, opened in 1996 and is set to continue for at least another three years. Former UCC Chairman Warren Anderson and UCC Eastern have been branded "absconders" by the Indian courts for failing to appear to face charges of manslaughter. Campaigners have also filed an application with the Bhopal courts to have Dow, which merged with UCC in 2001, face charges of manslaughter. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, legal battles to pinpoint who should be held responsible for cleaning up the site are currently being fought out in the US courts, with UCC and Dow attempting to distance themselves from culpability. The New York District Court is currently deciding whether UCC should be forced to clean up the factory site after the Indian and MP governments wrote to the court on June 28 this year directing the court to order UCC to pay for decontamination of the site. The Indian government and campaigners for the victims say UCC must clean up the factory and surrounding areas because India and the United States both recognise the "polluter pays" principle, an international environmental guideline which means that those who contaminate sites should foot the bill for clean-up work, and not the Indian taxpayer via the MP government. UCC, however, maintains responsibility for decontamination of the factory now lies with the MP government since it assumed control of the plant in 1998. "Union Carbide has nothing but the highest respect and compassion for the people of Bhopal, but Union Carbide retains no interest in or liability for the Bhopal site," says UCC spokesman Tomm F Sprick, citing the fact that UCIL spent more than $2 million on cleaning up the site in 1994. Sprick also claims that following a study of water sources around the factory in 1998, the MP government stated that none of the chemicals found in local water sources could be linked to the chemicals used in the factory. Dow meanwhile has maintained its stance that it had no involvement in the disaster. So, while the parties involved continue to try and pass the buck to someone else, the people of Bhopal continue to live out their remaining days in one of the most toxic environments in the world. Clouded justice While Dow Chemicals still refuses to accept responsibility for the clean-up of the UCI plant in Bhopal, controversy also rages over the Indian Supreme Court's 1989 decision to grant UCC sweeping civil and criminal immunity for the disaster in return for a court-endorsed settlement based on a very conservative estimate of both the number of victims and the damage they had suffered, writes Frederick Bowie. A report by Amnesty International entitled Clouds of Injustice published last week in time for the 20th anniversary of the catastrophe, as well as detailing UCC/UCI's long history of negligence and evasion, also charges the Indian government with having failed in its duty to protect the interests of the Bhopal community against the depredations of the American-based multinational. Not only was the sum of the settlement inadequate to meet all the claims for compensation lodged by Bhopal residents, but the Indian government, having claimed it was best to reach a deal quickly in order to be able to provide relief to the victims, proceeded to sit on most of the monies received for the next 15 years. Of claims presented, 30 per cent were rejected by the government, and 16,000 are still outstanding. Most of the successful applicants have received sums so paltry they barely cover their ongoing medical expenses. In September 2004, $330 million of the original $470 million settlement was still being held by the Reserve Bank of India. Moreover, in 1994 all Indian government research on the medical consequences of the Bhopal disaster was halted without explanation, and the results prior to that date have never been published in full. This is of particular importance since UCC has always refused to provide information on the gases released in the leak, thus making it difficult if not impossible for doctors to find appropriate antidotes in time. The Indian government had initially demanded $3 billion in compensation. The sum of $470 million agreed on was equal to what UCI was able to claim under its insurance policy, plus interest. The Indian Supreme Court later overturned its earlier ruling, and declared the terms of the original settlement illegal, thus opening the way to a new round of legal proceedings against UCI and its successor corporations. But perhaps the most significant charge in Amnesty's report is the following, which remains just as relevant today as it was in the 1970s: despite repeated scares in the years preceding the disaster, and complaints by workers' unions, Amnesty's researchers were "unable to find evidence that the central or state governments took adequate steps to assess the risk to local communities or the environment, or to press Union Carbide to review safety mechanisms." Estimates by different civil society organisations of the number of residents medically affected by the Bhopal disaster and/or the other health hazards of the site, including the contamination of ground water which dates back to the factory's opening in 1970, range between 100,000 and 200,000. The full text of Clouds of Injustice: Bhopal 20 years on can be downloaded free of charge from www.amnesty.org.
