Twenty years after the world's worst industrial disaster at a central Indian factory, toxic waste is still poisoning local water supplies, reports David Orr in Bhopal.
One might expect many things of Bhopal, but not that the city - whose name has become a byword for industrial catastrophe and corporate iniquity - should be among the most beautifully situated in India. From the lakeside, looking north, you can see the outline of old mosques and crumbling 19th-century palaces. Located in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, this was once a royal city, famed for its art and poetry.
Two decades ago, on December 3rd, 1984, an event took place that brought Bhopal another kind of notoriety. In the small hours of that morning, some 40 tonnes of lethal methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of the Union Carbide pesticide factory in the poor, northern suburbs. Borne aloft on a light breeze, the deadly cloud wafted over a patch of open ground towards the sleeping city. Among its first and worst affected victims were the workers and their families in the shanty town surrounding the plant.
Bhagwan Singh and his family are among the many survivors who still live in the shadow of that nightmare. Their little house lies only a stone's throw from the factory that caused the leak and that continues to pollute the ground and water table with toxic chemicals stored at the site. Their medical problems are a constant reminder of the tragedy that claimed the lives of their baby son and thousands of others who lived nearby.
"None of us can ever escape what happened that night," says Singh, who worked as a labourer at the plant that was run and owned by an Indian subsidiary of Union Carbide Corporation. "We used to be healthy but now I suffer from breathlessness and eye problems. My wife Kasturi is constantly ill with headaches, stomach ache, respiratory difficulties and sore eyes. Our eldest son Lalith also has breathing problems and can't do heavy work."
Singh had just returned home from a late shift when he realised something was amiss. His eyes started stinging and he heard his father coughing in the courtyard where he slept. No alarm siren could be heard, but he had worked long enough at the factory to recognise the origin of their discomfort. He quickly summoned the family members and, along with thousands of others from the slum that had grown up around the plant, they started running towards the railway station.
"We could hardly breathe or see where we were going because our eyes were closing up," he recalls, his delivery punctuated by rasping coughs. "There were people collapsing all around us but we held hands so none of us would get separated and pressed on. I was carrying Jogendra, our two-year-old son. Eventually we reached a dairy where we stopped. I knew something was terribly wrong with the little one. He became silent and his eyes were closed. They never reopened."
When they returned to the slum the following morning, they saw corpses scattered all along the road. There was an eerie silence, punctuated by sobs and screams. Soldiers from the nearby barracks were collecting bodies and taking stricken victims to hospital.
In the immediate aftermath of the leak, some 3,000 people suffered the same agonising deaths as soldiers from the first World War when chemical weapons were first used on the battlefield. It took an average of three minutes for the victims to die as their lungs filled with burning fluid and their air passages constricted. Some succumbed in their beds, others huddled in doorways trying to shield young children from the enveloping cloud of gas.
"Those few days afterwards were terrible," remembers Sister Christopher, an Irish nun and the founder of the Miriam School for the Mentally Handicapped in Bhopal. "We went to the Hamidia College Hospital to look after the victims. There was bedlam, with patients lying on the ground three and four abreast. Some were dead or unconscious, others were blind and vomiting. From the descriptions we gave them of what people were wearing, women were able to tell if it was their husband or their own children who had died."
Campaigners claim nearly 20,000 others have since died from the effects of the disaster and that 150,000 continue to suffer from symptoms related to chemical poisoning. They say these include cancer, anaemia, infertility and birth defects. Sister Christopher, who still lives and works in Bhopal, says that although her school was not particularly near the site, her lungs were damaged and she continues to suffer from respiratory problems.
THOUGH COMPENSATION HAS been awarded for what happened in Bhopal, many feel the behaviour of Union Carbide has been a scandal. Corporate memos reveal a number of lesser leaks occurred at the plant prior to the disaster of 1984, yet little or no action was taken. In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Union Carbide withheld crucial information about the gas and its effect on humans.
The multinational giant argued every step of the way about the extent of compensation due and quibbled over the amount it should pay towards a hospital for the victims. It is evident that, had the accident happened in the West, a different kind of justice would have prevailed.
Four years after the disaster, Union Carbide settled a civil suit, agreeing to pay victims and their dependants a total of $470 million (€358 million) on condition that all charges against the company and the then chairman, Warren Anderson, be dropped. While much of the award had been paid out by the mid-1990s, legal wrangles meant that it was not until earlier this month that the state government of Madhya Pradesh began disbursing what it called "the final settlement" to victims of the gas leak.
In 1991, the Indian Supreme Court reinstated criminal charges, including culpable homicide, but few believe that Union Carbide's top officials will ever be brought to book. In 1994, the company severed its ties with the Indian subsidiary that operated the Bhopal plant and this was subsequently sold to an Indian battery manufacturer. To complicate matters, Union Carbide was taken over by Dow Chemical Company in 2001, and Dow insists it has no further liability in the matter.
"Our fight must and will continue," says activist Champa Devi Shukla, this year's winner of a prestigious international Goldman Environmental Prize. "The Indian authorities must pursue criminal charges against Dow's subsidiary, Union Carbide. And Dow must clean up the pollution and look after those who need long-term medical care."
A partial clean-up of the site was carried out by Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary but environmental groups such as Greenpeace claim that thousands of tonnes of toxic waste still remain. They say these are seeping into the soil and contaminating the ground water with lethal carcinogens.
A BBC team recently collected water samples from wells around the plant and sent them for testing to two laboratories in the UK. The samples revealed contamination levels 500 times higher than the maximum levels recommended by the World Health Organisation. Scientists say people who drink this water every day are exposing themselves to a substantial chemical hazard, which may in time result in liver and kidney damage.
Dow Chemical disputes such findings, saying that when Union Carbide left the site, it "found no evidence of ground-water contamination".
TODAY UNDER THE control of the state government of Madhya Pradesh, the site lies abandoned and closed to the public. From the roof of a railway signal box, the rusting remains of the pesticide plant can be seen beyond the shacks of the shanty town. Though residents try to use water that is piped in or delivered in tankers, they say the municipal supply is inadequate.
Every day, people can be seen drawing stinking water from condemned wells and some admit to drinking it.
For victims such as Bhagwan Singh and his family, life goes on. He still picks up odd jobs around the town and his older son gets occasional clerical work.
The family has been able to build a tiny four-room house with the compensation they received from the Union Carbide fund. This amounted to 100,000 rupees (€1,694) for the death of their son and 50,000 rupees (€847) for each family member. They expect to receive a further 50,000 rupees each from the same fund in coming months and the money will come in useful.
But Singh says that nothing can compensate them for the death of their child and the loss of their health. He would like to be given a job but he has few expectations left. They are just poor people, he adds, and must accept what fate hands them.