The 20th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster
has come and gone - but, as Neil Hodge reports, its impact
on at least half a million lives continues unabated.
Bhopal, India | 01-02-05
The
legacy of Bhopal
The
20th anniversary of the world's worst industrial disaster
has come and gone - but,
as Neil Hodge reports, its impact
on at least half a million
lives continues
unabated.
The Bhopal disaster is a sorry tale of inefficiency, ineptitude, corruption and a lack of accountability right through from the world’s largest chemicals company to the Indian Government.
On 6 January 2004 this year Anil Kumar Gupta, the chief judicial magistrate of Bhopal, accepted an application made by the Bhopal Group for Information and Action to summon Dow Chemical to appear in his court. The survivors’ group wants the chemicals giant to explain why it has not produced its 100 per cent subsidiary Union Carbide Corporation for trial before the court, where it is charged with the culpable homicide of 20,000 people. Dow has until 15 February to respond to the application.
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For the past 13 years Union Carbide and its former Chairman Warren Anderson have ignored the court’s rulings and applications, claiming that it has no jurisdiction. Anderson and Carbide have since been declared ‘absconders from justice’. Anderson was arrested as soon as he stepped off the plane days after the gas leak, but was allowed to return to the US after the US Embassy intervened.
Survivors have warned Dow that in acquiring Carbide's plants, products, people, patents and profits, it would also acquire its liabilities. And Dow did indeed pay out on Carbide's US asbestos liabilities, a $800 million blow that sent its share price reeling two years ago. However, Dow has always refused to accept that it has inherited Carbide's outstanding Indian liabilities, or that any existed. In 2003 Dow CEO William Stavropoulos told investors at the company's annual general meeting that there were no criminal charges outstanding against Carbide in India, a statement he was later forced to retract (he claimed he ‘mis-spoke’).
Twenty years on from the world’s largest industrial accident, over half a million people – most living in poverty – are still waiting for their compensation claims to be settled. The money – around $327 million – has been lying in the Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank, for 15 years due to bureaucratic bungling and legal tangles surrounding who should receive the funds.
The state government of Madhya Pradesh (of which Bhopal is the capital), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the state’s ruling party, the hospital trust set up through the Union Carbide settlement to provide free treatment to those deemed gas-affected, as well as the victims themselves, have been vying for the funds for a decade. It was only in August last year that the Indian Supreme Court decided in favour of the victims – all 572,000 of them. The Welfare Commission for Bhopal Gas Victims, set up by the state government to deal with compensation claims, hopes to disperse the remaining cash by April 2005.
Paltry compensation
But no-one – with the exception of moneylenders and corrupt officials – is
going to get rich from the payouts. Averaging between just $500 to $700 depending
on whether those eligible for the funds survived or died as a result of the
leak, many Bhopalis have already spent their compensation awards several times
over on private medical care, legal fees, bribes, usury and just day-to-day
living. Equalling a paltry $2 a month per month since the disaster took place,
the compensation award approved by the Indian Government does not even address
the most basic economic and medical rehabilitation needed by sufferers. It
is inconceivable that any company would get away with such a pay award if it
had killed over 10,000 people in the US or Britain and affected over 500,000
others.
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Shortly after midnight on 2-3 December 1984 around 43 tonnes of poisonous gases, including methyl isocyanate (MIC), phosgene (mustard gas), hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide escaped from the Carbide plant after water entered a MIC storage tank and caused a violent chemical reaction. Safety measures which could have prevented the leak were either not in operation or failed completely.
Carbide maintains that the leak was an act of sabotage by a disgruntled employee – a version of events that has few supporters outside the company’s boardroom. Official estimates place the death toll within the first weeks of the disaster at around 3,000-4,000: activists say the real figure is two or three times that, with 100,000 people still seriously ill.
Union Carbide was merged into Dow Chemical, the world’s largest chemicals firm, in February 2001. Dow has denied all responsibility for an act it says was committed by a company it did not own or operate at the time. Dow’s net income for the third quarter of 2004 was $617 million, an 86 per-cent increase on the same period last year.
Union Carbide medical experts insisted at the time of the leak that MIC could only cause superficial injury, and that it does not enter the bloodstream or cross the lung barrier. However, later blood and tissue analysis revealed evidence of methyl carbamylation in the blood of victims who had died, and MIC trimer, a chemical found in the residues in Tank 610 which is known to be the source of the gas leak.
The Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) found that 96 per cent of men and women in the severely affected areas reported respiratory system damage immediately after the leak. A medical survey conducted by a non-governmental organization in March 1985 found that 94.6 per cent of people living between a half and two kilometres away from the factory had symptoms such as coughs and chest pain, and 104 days after the accident, 79.7 per cent still complained of respiratory illness. Five years later, a survey found that 70 per cent of the sample from the severely affected area reported breathlessness. Ten years later, a study found persistent obstruction of the small airways in survivors.
More poisonous
Yet even more poisonous than the gas leak itself is the settlement that was
concluded between Union Carbide and the Indian Government in 1989. The settlement
provided that Union Carbide in the US would pay $420 million in compensation,
with the Indian subsidiary contributing a further $50 million in rupees to
the disaster fund in return for any criminal charges against the company
being dropped.
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In October 1991 the Supreme Court of India upheld the civil settlement. But the Court also required the Government of India to purchase, out of the settlement fund, a group medical insurance policy to cover 100,000 persons who may later develop symptoms. It also required the Indian Government to make up any shortfall in the settlement fund. Moreover, Carbide contends that Eveready Industries India Ltd (EIIC), the renamed Union Carbide India Ltd which took over the site as a separate corporate entity, is liable for any further clean up and environmental remediation. Therefore, a substantial part of the settlement is the responsibility of the Indian Government, which has consistently failed to act on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of gas-affected people.
As is now abundantly clear, the Indian Government agreed a settlement that woefully underestimated the numbers of people affected by the gas at the time of the leak, as well as the numbers of children that would be subsequently affected. The state government of Madhya Pradesh also botched the way in which it would determine which people were deemed ‘gas-affected’. The Bhopal authorities decided that the wind might have blown the gas across 36 of the city’s 56 wards, so all inhabitants within those boundaries were automatically deemed eligible for compensation and healthcare treatment. The other 20 wards – comprising around 334,000 people as of December 1984 – were declared safe. Doctors and campaigners say that there could easily be tens of thousands of people that have subsequently been denied free medical treatment purely because their address falls outside of those perimeters.
Even those people living within the 36 gas-affected wards have been denied the proper healthcare to which they are entitled. The hospital set up by the Carbide settlement – an impressive and modern 350-bed facility called the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC), which its director-general calls ‘the only good thing to come out of the settlement’ – did not open its doors until July 2000, 16 years after the disaster. The hospital’s first outreach centre only began treating people in 1998. Before that, victims were either treated at the local general hospitals, which had neither the skills nor the medication adequately to care for the tens of thousands of seriously sick people, or sufferers paid for private treatment – if they bothered at all.
Worryingly, the hospital set up to offer life-long support to victims could be facing a potential budgeting crisis just four years after its launch. According to its director-general, Professor Indraneel Mittra, the BMHRC exists on an annual budget of around $6.3 million financed purely by an interest rate of around 13 per cent on the capital set aside for the future running of the hospital. But in the past year the interest rate has halved to just over 6 per cent, potentially slashing half of the hospital’s spending, and forcing the hospital to dip into its settlement money. Furthermore, says Professor Mittra, the number of gas-affected patients claiming treatment is likely to rise from the 280,000 already registered to more than 500,000 in the wake of the new round of compensation payouts and the Supreme Court’s decision that there are nearly 600,000 eligible for gas-affected status and free medical treatment. A suspected black market in patient entitlement cards at the hospital may also result in greater numbers of people being treated than actual victims.
Poor treatment
Moreover, the standard of healthcare provision is seriously handicapped by
the fact that doctors admit that they have no ability adequately to assess
whether the treatments they prescribe help or hinder patients. Although there
are over a dozen dispensaries and hospitals set up in the wake of the leak,
there has been no effective research for finding a mechanism to counter the
long-term health ramifications of the gas consumption. This is because Union
Carbide has consistently refused to release any details or health studies
associated with MIC on the grounds that the formula is a ‘trade secret’.
Hampered by the lack of disclosure, doctors are providing purely symptomatic
treatments.
Dr Shyam Agrawal, director of Bhopal’s Navodaya Oncology Centre, a private clinic, estimates that around 50 per cent of the BMHRC’s annual budget on medicines and treatments is wasted. He says that patients complaining of respiratory difficulties or headaches are routinely given aspirin and eye and nose drops. His view is supported by what little research has been carried out on the gas-affected people since 1984. In a July 2000 study of 101 prescriptions issued by a clinic of the BMHRC, Dr Atanu Sarkar, a New Delhi-based programme officer of the Catholic Health Association of India, found that 26.3 per cent of the drugs prescribed were harmful, 48.5 per cent useless and 7.6 per cent both harmful and useless.
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The Indian Council of Medical Research carried out 24 research projects in the early years after the leak to document victims’ health problems, including respiratory, ocular, reproductive, genetic, psychological and neurological damage, but they were wound up in 1994. None of the reports were ever made public, although the doctors I interviewed agreed that incidences of cancer, pulmonary edemas, tuberculosis, depression, cataracts, genito-urinary complaints, as well as cardio-vascular ailments had risen, quite possibly as a result of MIC exposure. They also agreed that the average life expectancy of Bhopalis, particularly men, is falling.
In a sparsely-populated ward for pulmonary diseased patients 43-year-old Rajendra Kumar is dying. Hooked up to a ventilator his emaciated frame is propped upright by pillows and the help of his wife. Permanently frail, he writes short answers to my questions for his wife to read and explain to my interpreter because he can no longer speak. By a bed is a jar of his phlegm that he regularly coughs up.
At the time of the gas leak, Rajendra was one of the many thousands living in the railway colony less than a quarter of a mile away from the Union Carbide plant. His parents died within two days of the leak. Rajendra has been in and out of hospital since 1985 receiving treatment to help his breathing. Both his lungs are shot to pieces, but they have somehow managed to enable him to work until June 2003. Four daughters still depend on him, but he can never work again. He received 25,000 rupees 10 years ago as compensation, but none of the money is left. He has no idea whether he is eligible for more, or whether he will live to receive it.
Raja Ram, based in the same ward, is a 54-year-old textile worker though he looks at least 10 years older. His bedside table and drawers are littered with bottles of pills and inhalers. When he opens the drawer for me to look, two or three cockroaches dart back into the darkness. Back in December 1984, Raja and his family lived just over a mile away from the plant, but the distance made little difference. Within 18 months both his parents were dead and his children – aged 11, 7 and 1 years old – are all deemed ‘gas affected’ and suffer from gastroenteritis and pulmonary disorders. Despite their chronic illnesses, the two elder children are forced to work as labourers because Raja’s breathlessness has stopped him from working since 1992. For the last two years, Raja has been a permanent resident of the hospital.
Rise in illness
The rise in illness is not limited to adults. Dr Kirti Kumar Shah, professor
and head of the eye department at BMHRC, is certain that there has been a
significant growth in the number of cases of congenital cataract and retinopathy
of prematurity in premature babies, a condition that can result in blindness
if not treated early. Dr Shah believes that the proportion of premature babies
requiring corrective laser treatment is substantially higher in Bhopal than
anywhere else in India.
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Birth and congenital defects are likely to continue. This is because the site has still not been cleaned up. Sacks of chemical compounds labeled ‘poison’ lie opened and rotting in an open shed, just a few hundred yards from the nearest shanty town. The contaminated site continues to pollute the groundwater, the sole source of water for those around the plant, with toxins. Union Carbide, Dow and the state government have done nothing to remediate the site to a safe level in 20 years.
In May, June and July 1989 UCC conducted ‘preliminary’ tests on solid and liquid samples drawn from ‘land-fill areas and effluent treatment pits inside the plant’. Both liquid and solid samples were toxic to fish. The solid samples contained naphthol or naphthalene in substantial quantities, the liquid samples contained ‘naphthol and/or Sevin in quantities far more than permitted by the Indian Standards Institution (ISI) standards for onland disposal’.
In November 1999 Greenpeace released a report on Bhopal that concluded that the site and immediate surroundings were contaminated with chemicals arising from routine processes, spillages and accidents at the plant, or from dumped and stored materials on the site. Greenpeace found areas of severe contamination with heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants and that residue on remaining plant fixtures had not been cleaned. The chemicals found included carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, trichloroethene, tetrachloroethene and dichlorobenzene. These chemicals were found in concentrations ranging from five to more than 600 times the limits recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency. All are toxic, most probably carcinogenic.
A January 2002 report by Shrishti and Toxics Link, a Delhi-based environmental non-governmental organization, found not only contamination in vegetables grown around the plant site, but also a bio-concentration of contaminants in breast milk samples taken from women in the surrounding areas.
In May 2004, based on a report by the state government’s Waste Monitoring Committee, the Supreme Court of India observed that ‘due to indiscriminate dumping of hazardous waste due to non-existent or negligent practices together with lack of enforcement by the authorities, the groundwater, and, therefore, drinking water supplies’ have been damaged.
The Supreme Court passed an order instructing the Madhya Pradesh government to supply fresh drinking water through tankers to people whose potable water supplies were contaminated by pollutants from the plant. But the local people are still waiting: it’s something they are used to.
Neil Hodge is
a freelance journalist based in the UK.
He can be contacted at neil@neilhodge.co.uk
See also: 12/7/02 - Bhopal, India | A letter from Indra Sinha, pleading for justice for the victims of the Union Carbide gas disaster in India.
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