“Thanks for the post, EW. I was in India shortly after the Bhopal disaster occurred (amazing to realize that it’s been that long ago) and am saddened but unsurprised at this verdict. Union Carbide – back then in India – was doing more or less what BP is doing right now in the States. And so, as they say: how LOW the mighty have fallen (no offense to any citizens of Mother India)… and so: on it goes…”

I too was in India shortly after Bhopal, and followed the story for a number of years. While in India, I met a woman OBGYN who had been sent into Bhopal just after the event, simply to do abortions. Apparently the Government of India decided to offer them to all pregnant women, and my informant had done more than a thousand, she said, in the few weeks after the events. Apparently there are multiple birth defects, but such a policy sure saves the Government of India’s need to pay out damage claims.

There actually was another suit in US courts, that was settled out of court within a few years of the Bhopal Gassing. The Government of India hired the Kaplan Law Firm in Minneapolis to represent it as plaintiff’s attorney against Union Carbide, essentially to recover expenses of the Government of India for responding to the events, and in addition, the Kaplan firm also represented plaintiff’s from the state government in India, the city of Bhopal, and some thousands of individual litigants. The settlement was close to the limit of the insurance carried, and the funds were given in trust to the Indian Government (national and state) for distribution — leading to massive corruption in who was eventually hired to pass out the funds. By the time the politicians paid off themselves and their buddies, there was little left for the guys that got gassed. A good DFL friend of mine, who sadly died of Cancer a few years back, worked on the case in the Kaplan firm for years — she had a marvelous trail of Bhopal stories illustrating how “wrong” things can go if that is the direction they are headed.

Fairly early on it was confirmed that the reason the plant went out of control was because the spare tank of coolant (a Gas that begins with F and once was used in air conditioners, but was removed from the market because it was causing the hole in the upper atmosphere at the south pole) was empty. It seems some of the workers and supervisors had allowed blatters of it to be stolen for sale to Indians who needed to fix their airconditioners, machines that could not use the replacement gas for F. The guages had been “fixed” so as to not reflect the theft. Apparently everyone with access to the spare tanks of F was in on getting a cut on the sale of F — and no one of course reported it. Thus when it was needed, it wasn’t there — oh yea, now I remember, F is Freon.

Union Carbide of India was owned 49% by the Indian Government, and 51% by Union Carbide. It was the first international contract India had entered into since independence that did not require the majority share to be owned by the Government of India, and the contract dates back to the Nixon Administration. The State Department had “sponsored” the contract, if I remember rightly, gave some foreign aid to support it, because it was a key element in green revolution technology (then rice and wheat) as the pesticide vastly decreased the amount of the harvest of the new strains of wheat and rice that were not lost to pests. (Before Green Revolution pest loss was between 20 and 30% of the harvest). The whole point of India’s engagement with Green Revolution efforts was to make India self sufficient in small grains as opposed to an importer — thus technology that increased the total marketable production was all part of the Green Revolution package. But by 1984, when the leak occurred, Indian Agriculture was experimenting with other pest control products, and thus the demand for Union Carbide’s product was decreasing year by year. As a result the plant was not operating at full capacity, and Government of India had cut budget for plant maintence which was it’s responsibility under the contract. In fact when the leak occurred, Government of India and Union Carbide were in negotiations to expand the plant’s product line to other purposes — Negotiations that stopped with the leak.

Being in India just after the events meant that in those pre-internet days I had access to Indian Investigative Journalism (which is very live wire) in ways one would not have if you were not there and able to collect magazines and newspapers off the racks at train stations (I have a huge pile of them…in fact the Kaplan Lawyers through my friend, copied a mass of them for their files.) In India, in 1984, the whole Environmental Activist thing was quite new — Bhopal gave it a good kick in the ass — but reporters were just beginning to dig into some of the potential major stories. For instance, when I was there another big issue was nuclear waste — at the time, liquid nuclear waste was just dumped on waste ground around factories, meaning it quickly got into the water table. It is this mix of potentially dangerous yet “modern” high technology with an everyday public culture not at all designed to deal with it, that hits you in the face day after day in India. For instance, the computer biz was new then too — and as one knows, print-out’s of data consume much paper, but in India you haul the waste paper away from the International Style office park in an ox-cart. You are just constantly confronted with such ancient and modern contradictions.