The Bhopal incident and its follow-up over the last 26 years is prime example of how inexcusably everything related to government in this country is broken - including not only the judiciary, but also the central government, state governments, CBI, government's scientific departments, industrial control organizations, regulators, district administration, emergency response units, medical facilities, development and rehabilitation organizations etc etc. It also demonstrates how mainstream media in India is full of pandering idiots.
I’ve been reading up on this saga for the past few days, and here are a few facts about the Bhopal disaster that would make any rational mind seethe in rage at the criminally callous behavior of Indian authorities:
- In 1989 (5 years after the incident), the Indian government reached a settlement with Union Carbide and UC India Limited to extract $470M from them towards victim compensation and recovery efforts. UC and UCIL paid this in hard cash within 10 days flat. Believe it or not, 21 years later, today a vast majority of that money has still not been distributed to victims or applied towards any rehabilitation, and is still unaccounted for. Needless to say this money could have been used to improve the lot of survivors and victims' families manifold
- Right after the disaster, the government sealed the Union Carbide factory, confiscated all documents and logs, and restricted access to factory workers to any third parties. It solely mandated its arms CSIR and CBI to conduct the investigations. CSIR and CBI didn’t release their investigation reports to the public till literally decades after the incident. The theory these organization finally propagated goes as follows –run-off water from a pipe cleaning operation ran into a tank full of a sensitive chemical, causing the massive gas buildup and leak. This pipe run-off theory couldn’t be validated in large scale simulations conducted by CSIR themselves (and their report accepts this), or through any other concrete evidence. Moreover, this theory doesn’t explain how thousands of liters of water can run off from a pipe cleaning operation into a sealed tank.
On the other hand, here is a report on an investigation conducted by consultancy firm Arthur D Little during a brief window of limited access that the government provided them many months later (this was done at behest of Union Carbide, so there is reason to be skeptical here too), and written by an Indian with a MIT PhD:
http://www.bhopal.com/pdfs/casestdy.pdf. I don’t know what the real truth is, but just compare the quality of analysis in this report with that in any of the Indian government/judiciary reports. Why didn’t the Indian government machinery in its infinite wisdom ever get to the bottom of the matter, and come up with a more convincing explanation and report? I think the answer lies in the government’s incentive to find scapegoats, and there is no scapegoat as electorally lucrative as a foreign hand
- For a moment, let’s believe the government’s position that the accident was caused solely by poor industrial processes and extreme criminal negligence by union carbide’s senior management, and that it (government) did not know dangerous pesticides were being manufactured within city limits in a densely populated area. That itself raises many questions. Why were there insufficient controls on such a dangerous plant? Why was it not checked frequently by government safety inspectors? Why was it in the middle of a city? Why did they not even know that this plant was manufacturing pesticides using a very dangerous chemical? Who gave all the necessary permission to setup and operate such a plant in the middle of a city?
- Over the last 26 years, many entities, including the Indian government and media, have been clamoring for the blood of Warren Anderson (then global CEO of Union Carbide). Here is the opinion of Solee Sorabjee on this issue (Indian Attorney General at the time of writing):
http://www.bhopal.com/opinion.htm, which clearly indicates extraditing Anderson was untenable. Exactly. Do you think a global Fortune 50 CEO has much knowledge about each of its tens/hundreds of factories in remote corners of the world, let alone make day-to-day operational decisions for processes, materials and quality of labor used in each of them? So why has government/media continued to bark up the wrong tree, wasting precious resources and time trying to extradite Anderson on a charge that effectively imputes that he had prior knowledge of poor processes within the Bhopal factory AND intentionally didn’t do anything to improve them with the aim of causing deaths?
Why waste so many years on such an untenable argument? And here is more, Anderson actually took the first flight from US to India in Dec 1984 after the accident, and was arrested at the airport on arrival. He was then released on bail within a few hours and escorted out of the country by the Indian government itself. So why this dual attitude now? If this was the guy really responsible for the whole thing, why let him go away after arresting him?
The above clearly shows that Indian authorities didn’t miss this enormous tragedy to turn it into their usual business of going after
scapegoats, votes and notes.
Here are some issues that Indian journalists should be investigating, but aren’t:
• A step by step account of what exactly went wrong on the night of Dec 3, 1984 (rather than copy-pasting from Wikipedia to the front page of TOI or ET), and where is one comprehensive government report on how the accident unfolded, with well reasoned evidence, and what the learings from that accident are?
• What exactly happened to the $470M provided by Union Carbide in 1989 – how much of it reached victims’ families and survivors? What happened to the rest of it? Why wasn’t the entire money deployed for compensation and rehabilitation?
• Why hasn’t any government safety inspector or the guy who gave the permission to manufacture pesticides in the middle of Bhopal, or anyone else from government administration; or any worker from the Bhopal factory been implicated in this whole saga? Can such an accident be blamed entirely on senior management of a company? Just take a look at any construction/manufacturing work going on around you in India, and you’ll know the level of utmost laxity that pervades work ethic in this country – especially government machinery and unskilled/semi-skilled workers.
Such large disasters are caused by a sequence of untoward oversights and events, and surely there must have been a worker who forgot to shut a valve, connected a wrong pipe, didn’t follow instructions, forgot to raise an alarm, didn’t repair a malfunctioning part, ignored warning indicators etc, and there must have been at least one government official who forgot to or chose to overlook his responsibilities of oversight?
• What checks and balances have been executed across the country in terms of more stringent industrial safety norms, frequent external inspections, and to ensure that dangerous units are removed from within city limits?
• What emergency response readiness measures have since been implemented at Industrial units, and in surrounding districts?
Like everything else in India, truth and reason have fallen by the wayside as entities have acted solely out of their own selfish incentives: Politicians’ incentives for votes, money, and finding prominent scapegoats; Media’s incentive to pander to public, without having to do any actual work; and Judiciary’s incentive to avoid wrath of government and public by not make any critical decisions for decades.
