{"id":20238,"date":"2009-12-12T19:45:56","date_gmt":"2009-12-13T00:45:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=20238"},"modified":"2009-12-13T12:32:22","modified_gmt":"2009-12-13T17:32:22","slug":"indian-government-had-22-stake-in-bhopal-plant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/indian-government-had-22-stake-in-bhopal-plant\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian government had 22% stake in Bhopal plant"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note<\/strong>: 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<\/strong><\/a>. — efc<\/em><\/p>\n

\"<\/a><\/strong><\/em>
Photo by Ramesh Lalwani. See introduction for link to caption and credit.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Gauri<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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,\u00a0residents 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> by Kim Furton.<\/p>\n

The plant was designed to manufacture Sevin, which is also called Carbarul<\/a> (or 1-naphthyl methylcarbamate). The chemical methyl isocyanate<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Due to lax regulations in India, the plant never adhered to the same industry safety standards in Bhopal as in their plants in US. Pesticide tank leakage alarms had not worked for four years prior to the accident. The vent gas scrubber, a safety device meant to neutralize toxic discharge from the chemical system, had also been turned off three weeks before the accident. And a cooling system for the methyl isocyanate storage tank had not functioned for years.<\/p>\n

By the early to mid 1980s, the plant was no longer profitable for any of it’s shareholders. The famine and drought that hit the Indian subcontinent during that time had burdened the local farmers and agriculture and the industry was seriously suffering. Demand for pesticides was reduced and the plant was producing Sevin at barely a quarter of it’s capacity. In fact Union Carbide had plans to shut down the plant altogether, and local managers were notified in July 1984 to prepare for it’s sale. When the company could not find any buyers for the plant, they decided to dismantle their production units and ship them to other parts of the world. Yet before they could do that, just six months after the plant closure notice, the disaster happened.<\/p>\n

In 1985, a year after the accident, the Indian government passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Act that gave the government the sole right to represent the victims of the disaster in and out of India in legal matters. In February 1989, to the chagrin of the Indian people and especially the Bhopal victims, the government reached a settlement with Union Carbide via mediation, without any participation by the victims; this, despite an application that had been filed in the Supreme Court to involve the victims in any negotiations regarding settlement.<\/p>\n

The Indian government\u00a0accepted $470 million in compensation in exchange for Union Carbide accepting ‘moral responsibility’ and the company was relieved of all civil and criminal liabilities.\u00a0Even a quarter of a century later, no one has been prosecuted for this ‘accident’.<\/p>\n

The payment of $470 million is nowhere near adequate to address the long term cost of caring for people with serious lifelong disabilities. Most experts agree that a just and fair settlement, had one been negotiated and enforced by the government, would have been in the range of billions of US dollars.\u00a0Worse, the government has not even distributed the entire amount of settlement yet to the victims. The 2004 Amnesty International report states that as of mid 2004, $327.5 million still remained deposited in the Reserve Bank of India, which should have been distributed to the victims.<\/p>\n

Neither Union Carbide nor Dow Chemical, the company that purchased it in 2001, nor the Indian government, has remediated the site. Multiple independent investigations have confirmed that even today the site is heavily contaminated with toxins. Groundwater and soil samples have consistently shown dangerous levels of mercury, organochlorines and heavy metals. Even breast milk samples in that area test positive for mercury, lead, chloroform and other poisonous substances associated with the plant.<\/p>\n

Union Carbide and the Indian government,\u00a0both claimed until 1994 (when the International Medical Commission on Bhopal met) that there were no long-term health effects from exposure to the pesticide, when in fact more than 100,000 people still suffer from serious, debilitating illnesses like respiratory distress, corneal irritations, cataracts, impaired immunity, neurological damage, etc.<\/p>\n

To this date Union Carbide has not disclosed the findings of their own research into this incident & the human effects of exposure to methyl isocyanate, nor have they shared with the world what exactly was in the gas cloud. The Indian Council for Medical Research was heading research studying the long term epidemiological effects. However in 1994, the Indian government, for inexplicable reasons, abruptly discontinued all research by the council on Bhopal.<\/p>\n

This whole saga highlights for us what happens when the economic interests of any government conflict with those of the people it’s supposed to serve. The greed of large corporations merging with that of any government, is a recipe for disaster. We will never know for sure but we will always wonder had the Indian government not been a part owner in UCIL, the local subsidiaray of Union Carbide. Would a half a million people still have been exposed to a toxic gas?<\/p>\n

On April 18, 2010, Dow will sponsor the ‘Dow Live Earth Run for Water’ to highlight their ‘commitment to global water issues’. Yet the people of Bhopal will continue to drink water contaminated with lethal toxins, mothers will continue to breastfeed their infants with milk saturated with mercury and lead, and\u00a0the Indian government will continue to negotiate with Dow about setting up the company’s global research and development in India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20238"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}