Editor’s Note: Last week was the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster in India. A reader named Gauri has been researching the issue, and contacted me about doing an article. Gauri is a competent astrologer, though we made the decision to leave astrology out of this article. We will come back to the chart another time. If there is reader interest, we will post the data in the comment area. The photo is by Ramesh Lalwani. — efc
By Gauri
The Indian government was part owner of the Union Carbide pesticide plant that poisoned and killed tens of thousands of people in Bhopal, India 25 years ago last week. On Dec. 3, 1984, residents of a vast metropolitan area were exposed to forty tons of methyl isocyanate gas released from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal. Within hours, streets of the city were littered with human corpses.
Amnesty International has reported that between 7,000 to 10,000 died within the the first three days of the gas leak, and that another 15,000 to 20,000 died over the next decades. Hundreds of thousands suffer blindness, respiratory issues and every conceivable health effect. The night of the toxic release, many of the city’s residents were sleeping in tents and had no shelter from the toxic fumes.
How did the Indian government become involved in the venture? In the early 1970s, the Indian government approached and persuaded Union Carbide to open a plant in India to manufacture Sevin, a common pesticide, and it insisted that local shareholders had significant stake in the investment. Union Carbide had a 50.9% stake in the new company, while Indian investors held the remaining 49.1%. Those ‘local’ investors included the Indian government itself, which had a 22% stake — a fact left out of nearly every news article about this issue. It was first revealed in the 2001 book Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders by Kim Furton.
The plant was designed to manufacture Sevin, which is also called Carbarul (or 1-naphthyl methylcarbamate). The chemical methyl isocyanate is an essential constituent in Sevin. The permit for making Sevin was granted on the grounds that methyl isocyanate not be manufactured in Bhopal, nor stored there in large quantities.