The incompetence in Bhopal

On the night of December 2, 1984, a colourless gas escaped from a tank of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal. The plant was owned by America’s Dow Chemicals (which in 2009 had sales of $45 billion). The gas was methyl isocyanate, and the tank contained 40,000 kilogrammes of it. The gas was supposed to be refrigerated to a temperature of under five degrees, and kept under pressure but the system had broken down. As the gas escaped into the night air it immediately killed 3,000 people in their sleep and estimates suggest that more than another 15,000 were poisoned over a period of time. The numbers of those blinded by the acrid gas, those who suffered abortions and organ failure, and also brain damage is in the hundreds of thousands.

A court in Bhopal pronounced judgment on the case on Monday, and it sentenced seven of the company’s executives to two years in jail for negligence. This was the maximum sentence permissible under the law and the men were out on bail by evening. The chief executive of the firm in America had been arrested after the accident and was bailed out in four days, never returning to India after that.

India’s media is upset that the sentences were not harsher and newspapers blame the Supreme Court for watering down the charge against the men from culpable homicide to negligence. Homicide means deliberate killing. Was the Supreme Court right in striking down the local police’s enthusiasm for homicide? Of course it was. It would have been difficult to prove that Union Carbide deliberately wanted thousands of people killed. The issue was not that the wrong charge had been dropped, but that the sentence for the right one, negligence, was too little. And that is inescapable in India where negligence is pervasive.

The real problem lay in two places. The first is the casual attitude to safety that all Indians have (which will be demonstrated in the offices of the media houses). Industrial accidents through negligence will continue to happen in India in the future. Dow was not directly running the plant in Bhopal. It was being run by its Indian affiliate, which operated on Indian safety standards (that is to say, no standards at all).

The second problem is that the victims were not given proper compensation because of the incompetence of the state. This is again something that is inherent to the state in India and will repeat in the future.

Have a look at how much compensation Union Carbide was ordered to pay. The total sum was fixed at Rs7.13 billion. However, the government had no idea of the number of deaths, and the initial figure of 3,000 rose to 20,000 whilst the number of those injured went up four times. In the end, a dead person’s family got Rs12,410. This is where true negligence lay. And given that many poor victims would have died for lack of proper access to healthcare, this was also culpable homicide. Dow Chemicals should have been made to pay for its casual attitude to safety in India and given the fact that it would have worried about its image abroad it would have been open to higher compensation.

Now the call goes out for vengeance through culpable homicide, when the opportunity for justice through compensation has long been lost.

Published in the Express Tribune, June 9^th, 2010.