Twenty-six years is a terribly long time for a court verdict to be handed out, as has happened in the case of the Bhopal gas tragedy. The only positive takeaway is that these years have taught Indian corporates and government bodies to incorporate industrial disaster contingencies into their plans. Consider that the key clauses in the Civil Nuclear Liability Bill being debated in Parliament have set a quantum to damages from such disasters. The socialist Indian state of the 1980s had not factored in such possibilities, which post-liberalisation India has fortunately internalised.
The deadly gases that spread from Bhopal?s Union Carbide plant on the early morning of December 3, 1984, triggered India?s worst industrial disaster. But they also spread a lesson that we needed to teach ourselves, about the necessity of town planning to mitigate urban blight. Until then, India had only seen massive human losses in disasters that occurred in countrysides or in wars. Cities were safe, which is why a massive shanty town developed along the walls of the plant in Bhopal?maximum casualties were reported from this shanty town. Therefore, the big experience is not the court verdict, important though it is.
Growing up in Bhopal after the gas tragedy, its impact was visible all over the place to this correspondent. The overstretched local administration had no clue how to handle the lakhs of claims that were being filed day after day. Those claims continued for several years and spawned a massive non-governmental network that lived only to make compensations available. In a city with few employment opportunities, this was an attractive source of sustenance. As the 1980s ended and the economy entered a new era, that line of ?business? gradually dried up.
As a student of a school in the vicinity, I was asked to fill out a claim form for damages, for which there were no instructions. I remember a doddering old lady in front of me who filled out a demand for compensation of Rs 1 crore. She had no clue why she had penned this figure except that the sum appealed to her. When I filled up that form, it was the last time anybody from the municipal department approached me on the topic.
Activists claim that the low quantum of sentence and the fact that Warren Anderson has not yet been formally charged speaks of the callous manner in which one of the world?s biggest industrial disasters has been handled by successive governments, both at the Centre and state levels. But they themselves spawned an industry that lived on the poverty of the victims, and made distinguishing fact from fiction difficult. Many groups claiming to work for the welfare of victims existed only on paper.
Even as the Bhopal gas tragedy brought with it untold tragedies for the immediate victims, an inexperienced Indian government settled for an out-of-court damage settlement of $470 million?as against the original claim of $3.3 billion?in a US court. But the more difficult issue was distributing the compensation among those affected. Compare the handling of this case with the diligence with which the government handled the Enron fallout?even taking the erstwhile company to the International Court of Justice for arbitration.
Since 1992, only a part of the $470 million has been distributed among the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy. And questions remain about whether all the genuine victims are being covered. On the other hand, there have also been many instances of people faking resident-status or showing additional family members just to claim money.
We still remain ignorant about much of what happened on that December night and about many of the factors that spawned the disaster. We don?t know how a factory that was known to use lethal gas was allowed to set up right in the middle of heavily populated localities. We don?t know who the people responsible for this negligence were or whether the authorities concerned were even aware that such a factory could be disastrous for the local residents. We don?t fully know what safety measures were adopted in this factory. Even the death toll remains a matter of conjecture. There has been no comprehensive tracking of victims that manifested tragic symptoms of exposure to toxic gases after the event. Worse, Bhopal?s people continue to battle the long-term impact of the disaster as its poisonous residue is still lying around. Toxins continue to seep into surrounding soil and water, with everyone from government agencies to Dow Chemicals?that now owns Union Carbide?trying to pass on the cleanup buck.
sanjeeb.mukherjee@expressindia.com