Remembering Bhopal: The World's Worst Industrial Disaster

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Hello and welcome to Remembering Bhopal: The World's Worst Industrial Disaster brought to you by the History Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University and the magazine, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm a Professor of History and Director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching, and I'll be your host and moderator today. Welcome to everyone and thank you so much for joining us.

Today we will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal Gas Disaster which took place December 2nd to 3rd, 1984 in Bhopal, India and this disaster was the world's worst industrial disaster. Dr. Madhumita Dutta will discuss this disaster, the immediate and ongoing health repercussions for the people of Bhopal, and their global, legal, and activist fight for justice and corporate accountability. Let's take a moment to get to know our speaker. Dr. Madhumita Dutta is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department at The Ohio State University. She is a specialist in the everyday politics of labor, life stories of workers, women, gender, and work and the politics of development especially in South Asia. She received her B.Sc. degree in 1992 from Dehli University in Delhi, India her M.Sc. in 1994 for Environmental Science from Jiwaji University and her Ph.D. in 2016 in Geography from the University of Durham in the UK. In addition to more than twenty articles and essays she is the author of Mobile Girls Koottam: Working Women Speak from University of Chicago Press in 2021 and co-editor of Workers' Movements and Strikes in the Twenty-First Century: A Global Perspective that came out in 2018. 

Now let me pass you over to Professor, Madhumita Dutta, over to you, Madhu.

Madhumita Dutta:
Thanks, Nick. Thank you very much to the Department of History, and especially Nick and Alex for putting this all together and inviting me to speak about Bhopal. This year is the 40th anniversary of the disaster of which I'm going to talk about, but also, I have been myself involved in working with the survivors of Bhopal for the past 20 years. So, it's a journey that I have made for the last two decades. So a lot of the things that I will share of course, comes from that work, not as a researcher, but you know, as a fellow traveler, as an activist, as somebody who is still very much connected with the struggles of the survivor, and also as a volunteer for international campaign for justice in Bhopal, about which perhaps I can speak more during the Q&A. Alright, so let me just share my screen so that I can show you. Alright. Can you all see it alright? You can see it right?

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Yes, indeed, looks great.

Madhumita Dutta:
Thank you, Nick. So, you know, often in our campaign, we had used this, little quote from Milan Kundera's book, "The struggle of man against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting," and this 40 years of struggle has been that struggle against forgetting and reminding the world that you know, the survivors of Bhopal exist, that the injustice still continues. As part of that continuing journey of memory and remembering, this summer, three women from Bhopal, a city in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. They were visiting the U.S. two of them were survivors of the Bhopal Gas Disaster, often referred to as the Hiroshima of the chemical industry, and one activist who has been working with the survivors for over two decades. They came. They came to the U.S. to tell the story of how for the past 40 years, the survivors have persisted with their fight to hold a US Corporation, Union, Carbide, and its current owner, Dow Chemical, guilty for killing and maiming 1000s of people in Bhopal. In their six-week tour of various cities, meeting with environmental justice groups, students and lawmakers, their message was clear, what happened to them should never happen again, and unless corporations are held accountable for their crimes, they will continue to sacrifice people's lives, at the altar of profit. Here you have a map of India with the red little thing in the center, that's where Madhya Pradesh is, that's where Bhopal is and there's a little schematic to show where the Union Carbide factory was, where the gas leak had happened.  So, what happened in Bhopal? And why is Bhopal still such a significant event for all of us to remember and our connections to it and why is it important for us on this 40th anniversary to bring the stories of Bhopal back to the world? I mean, we have been doing it for 40 years, but it's been 40 years, and these stories and the continuing travesty of justice that continues with it, why is it important for us to keep on bringing it back to the world? 

At midnight of December 2nd and 3rd, 1984 a Union Carbide chemical facility at Bhopal leaked 27 tons of highly toxic methyl isocyanate, a poison to make pesticide, which poisoned tens of thousands of people in the middle of night, most of whom were sleeping in their homes nearby. It is estimated that 10,000 people died instantly, and survivor organizations estimate that over 23 deaths had occurred until 2011 and unknown numbers of deaths have occurred in this past 13 years, more than 150,000 people are still suffering from the health problems caused by the gas leak and subsequent soil and water contamination. 

Now, one of the things that we always hear about, and it continues to sort of circulate in the world is that Bhopal was a disaster that was caused by a disgruntled worker, and this has been debunked over and over, and I will talk about it, the making of the disaster, and to claim that Bhopal was not an accident but that it was a deliberate disaster due to corporate shenanigans. But this is a lie that you hear over and over again, that it was caused because, you know, a disgruntled worker let water into this tank, which contained methyl isocyanate, which then led to a chain reaction leading to the, you know, gas leak, and that is not what had happened. So, it’s important to kind of set the record right, this was not a disgruntled worker. 

So, the claim that Bhopal was not an accident, to understand that, that it is actually a deliberate outcome of corporate double standards, negligence and cost cutting, one needs to kind of understand the history of it and how the Bhopal Union Carbide plant, came to be set up in Bhopal in the first place. Between the 1940s and 1960s, as the global production of food boomed, with a high yielding variety of seeds and intensified chemical inputs, this is the period that is often termed as Green Revolution. Union Carbide Corporation, which is a U.S. Corporation, used to make chemicals and still does was eager to reap profit from increased sales of pesticide, and it had decided to build a new pesticide formulation factory in India that would manufacture large quantities of pesticide called Sevin, which is a U.C.C product. Also, to remember, this is also a time when India became newly independent. In 1947 there were already massive issues of hunger and crisis, and you know, most of the post-colonial world, which was coming out of colonization, they were also looking at ways to increase their yield of food production as during, you know, hundreds of years of colonization, much of the food production bases had been destroyed. So it was this kind of convergence of multiple things that were happening in the world, and in that this corporation, you know, played a big role in terms of, you know, setting up this factory in Bhopal, in some ways, to understand the history of capitalism, it is good to kind of understand how these, you know, corporations actually operate in the world, and how that then shapes what continues to sort of influence and impact people's lives in different parts of the world. 

So anyway, coming back to Union Carbide, it decided to build this plant and in 1969 through its Indian subsidiary, it had already formed a subsidiary called the Union Carbide India Limited in 1938 but at that time it was not producing chemicals in India. In 1969 it decided to set up this plant in Bhopal and lease land from the state of Madhya Pradesh, and Sevin, this particular pesticide, which is used in agriculture it is manufactured through combining alpha naphthol with methyl isocyanate. When methyl isocyanate is a key critical ingredient, which Union Carbide had its, sort of trade secret, and it was there, you know, the whole process of manufacturing Sevin through this sort of formulation was their patented thing. When, they started operating this plant in Bhopal, they did not actually manufacture MIC in 1969 when they started in in Bhopal, it was actually imported from the U.S., and the final product Sevin was manufactured and formulated in Bhopal. But this was not very convenient for Union Carbide scaling up of operation for their profit, etc. and exactly 11 years before the disaster, Union Carbide and I'm just showing it, and I'm going to explain it to you, because it's important to understand this kind of corporate structure, because Union Carbide's claim that it was not responsible for what happened in Bhopal is through this kind of corporate restructuring that they did in 1973. 

In 1969 they were already starting to manufacture Sevin, they were importing MIC, it was not very profitable to do that so therefore, they wanted to set up a factory, an MIC plant in in Bhopal factory itself. In 1973 the Management Committee of Union Carbide Eastern, which was 100% owned by Union Carbide Corporation U.S., sort of came up with this whole plan about setting up this MIC plant in Bhopal and it was Union Carbide Eastern directly managing the Union Carbide India plant. The restructuring here is that Union Carbide Corporation owned over 50% of stakes in Union Carbide India Limited. But there was a change in Indian law in 1974 when India introduced the Foreign Equity Regulation Act, which meant that that no foreign equity can hold more than 40% of shares in companies operating in India, meaning U.C.C couldn’t, Union Carbide corporation could legally own no more than 40% of the shares. But this was, not something that U.C.C. wanted, and basically, they always maintained as part of their policy that, "it is the general policy of corporation to secure and maintain effective control of an affiliate." So for U.C.C. to lose this control of U.C.I.L. that is this Indian subsidiary was a big issue, and they did not want to lose control of that, therefore they made a proposal to the Indian government that it would start producing methyl isocyanate as an exclusive  U.C.C. specialty in Bhopal in return for exemption from this Foreign Equity Regulation Act on the grounds that MIC production would need high technology inputs, which is not available in India, and that it will really increase the production of this, pesticide and the exemption was granted to U.C.C to have 50.9% control over their India plant, so that exemption was granted to them by the setting up of this MIC plant. Now what that effectively meant was, that even relatively minor U.C.I.S. decisions were made, even the everyday, small decisions that were made in the Indian subsidiary that is in the factory in Bhopal were done in consultation with U.C.C America, every technical design, every process, every operating consent, construction, material,  basically, everything that happened in the Bhopal plant, including the reviews, etc., were directly handled by the engineers and the management and the bosses of U.C.C. U.S.A, that is Union Carbide Corporation, U.S.A. So it is important to make that very clear that even though the factory was set up in India and operating in India, the control of everything was in the hands of U.C.C. U.S.A. and one of the things they had said was that when they were setting up this plant in India that it would be the sister plant of what they already have in West Virginia at this place called Institute, where they said, we will have state of the art technology, which will be exactly as the West Virginia plant in India. However, that was not the case in fact, as early as 1972 an internal document of Union Carbide report noted that after studying the MIC unit at U.C.C plant in Institute in West Virginia that almost every item "had failed and been replaced since startup," and the report that is U.C.C.'s own internal report, stated, "if another facility is built to produce MIC based on the process used in Institute materials of construction at least as good as those presently used at in the facility at Institute will be required." 

So they already knew what needed to be done at this Bhopal plant, because they already knew that the plant in West Virginia needed a complete overhaul because it was not safe, so they created a state of the art facility, and that's what they promised that needed to happen in India, but that did not,  And Basically, the recipe for disaster was here you know, dealing with a very toxic chemical, we're dealing with methyl isocyanate, phosgene, which are all coming together in producing this, product and there are a lot of byproducts that come out of it but then the design and the management and the siting of the plant operation, all these kind of things came together, and finally the failure of the safety systems that then finally led to the disaster. But these were all already, in the making in 2002 for instance, almost two decades after the gas leak happened, Union Carbide internal documents revealed and these were documents that came out from court cases, it revealed that the technology used for manufacturing MIC and Carbon Monoxide at the Bhopal plant it was proven, that the company did not install the safety devices and protocols that had been tried and tested and known to be effective to prevent fatal accidents in plants in the US and Europe, because they were already, you know, they already had, in fact, some of the systems in place. 

In fact, a lot of the automated systems in West Virginia, also in France and other places where Union Carbide was doing similar production, they had systems which were automated, whereas, in the case of India, it was the workers nose and lungs that were used as the systems to detect leaks,  but why were those things not put in place? It was to cut cost through discovering documents, we've found that U.C.C. made an investment of 20 million to build the plant in Bhopal, while the original estimated cost was 28 million U.S. dollars, the company trimmed 8 million off their initial cost estimate which would have gone towards installing safety devices, costing up to 15% to 30% of the outlay of the plant's inspection, about three to six million and these are the kind of differences, if you see and the other things that they did there are lot of details. The key things to remember is how the automated safety systems were not put in place, there were minimal gauges and indicators that were put, if any device stopped working, they were not replaced. The indicators that were installed to measure only temperatures and flows, but it did not systematically record the critical parameters, such as sudden changes in temperatures. 

Therefore, on the night of the disaster, on December 2nd, 1984 when the evening work shift changed, the next operator on duty at the MIC plant did not know that the pressure in the MIC tank, that is 610, one of the tanks that stored this, deadly, toxic chemical, which had caused the gas leak, the pressure in the temperature and pressure in that tank had increased suddenly within 30 minutes, but because there was no continuous monitoring and recording of the parameters, the next operator who came at the night shift did not know this has happened. In addition, there were only eight shut down devices. If something like this happens, you have to have multiple shutdown and checks and balances in place, but there were only eight shut down devices. The safety valves were not working and there should be three times the number of safety devices that is what the other plants had in Europe and the U.S. In fact, the West Virginia plant at the Institute, the safety devices were automatically controlled through computer system with manual backup devices, and in case of Bhopal, it was  all manual and  also in Bhopal, unlike in West Virginia, there weren't any emergency plans in place, and local authorities knew nothing about the dangers of MIC and due to, you know, Union Carbide cost cutting and these kind of double standards, what we what we see, is that, the gas leak that happened that night, which is, you know, seen as a disaster, as an accident, a disgruntled worker, etc., is false, because these were the things that were already  put in motion. The disaster was put in motion because of all this double standard cost cutting. Also here, even if you think about the cost reductions that they did, even in terms of the number of workers who were needed to be there, for improvement, and safety trainings, etc., increasingly, those numbers were reduced. 

Also, what we see in these images from the 1970s at different points of time, different kinds of cost cutting was done. Especially there's this particular point of this acceptable business risk, there was an under investment, instead of 28 million the 8 million that was trimmed as part of  cost cutting, was an acceptable business risk, which was critical to the safety of the  plant, and another thing to remember is that workers were already because, as I was saying, that lot of the stuff that was happening in the Bhopal plant, it was not this automatic sensors, but often time it was the nose and lungs of workers who were actually reporting falling sick, and here you have, an image here, which is kind of talking about. That is, how workers were actually taking opportunities in 1982  when the bosses from Union Carbide Corporation U.S. visited the Bhopal factory, and there was a safety week that was organized, to complain about the unsafe ways in which the factory was operating, talking about the Faustian leak, talking about the fires, talking about the MIC burn. There were so many things that were going on. 

In fact, there were communities around the factory who were complaining of their cattle dying because of the chemical discharges. So, there was already, by 1982 things were known that there is a disaster that is going to happen, so that that night, what happened was the culmination of everything that is part of this corporate crime, knowingly killing people, knowingly maiming and knowingly causing disaster to happen.  Now, right after the disaster, of course, there are various kind of numbers, and we can talk about all those kinds of things later, you can also find more information on that. But basically, right after the disaster, there were all these numbers about how many people were killed, how many people were injured, etc. there was all these great debates. The Government of India took it upon itself to represent the Bhopal Gas victims, as they call them, the survivors, and they filed a case in the Indian Supreme Court seeking compensation from Union Carbide. Now that case went on, and in 1989 then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi did an out of court settlement with Union Carbide Corporation, and it was very much influenced by the U.S. government, and specifically Henry Kissinger, who saw to it that there was a settlement reached, and that Union Carbide won't be held liable, and that settlement amount was just 470 million dollars for,  not just thousands of deaths, but intergenerational impact that we are seeing on the health and the environmental impact. As you see, that settlement only cost Union, Carbide Corporation 43 cents per share when the settlement was announced, so it was all this kind of, you know, calculations to make profit, and so that that was a big block in the history of what the Indian government did in terms of letting down the Bhopal victims or Bhopal Gas survivors by doing this out of court settlement. 

Of course, later, the court, in 1991 the increase of the settlement amount and that case went on for some time, till a year back when the survivors sort of appealed the settlement because it is obviously inadequate, and I will talk about it in a bit, in terms of taking care of health, etc., the Supreme Court actually did not increase that settlement amount, but  more importantly, what one needs to remember that Bhopal is a story where you have the U.S. and Indian government, and you have this corporation which have converged together in this place to create something which, is kind of telling the story of corporations, of capitalism rather, but how profit is at the forefront of this disaster. So, you know, some of the biggest sort of travesties of this is that people, there were individuals who were involved in making those decisions of the siting of the plant. In fact, I forgot to mention that the plan was sited very close to the railway station, which was a violation of Indian law, and yet government of India allowed the government of Madhya Pradesh allowed Bhopal factory to be cited there. This is an area which is predominantly working class, Muslim dialect and migrant workers, a very highly populated area, even at that time it was congested but now more people live around this site, and of course, the biggest thing is that people who were responsible for the disaster to happen, including the Union Carbide's bosses of Indian Carbide, especially Warren Anderson, who was the then chairman of the company. 

We have now got lot of those telex messages, which is showing how the decisions for cutting down the costs of operation, design, etc., all that were exchanged between U.C.C. U.S. and Bhopal, where Warren Anderson and other top bosses had signed off but none of them ever were held responsible. The eight executives of U.C.C Indian subsidiary spent just a minute in jail. Warren Anderson was just sort of detained for a little bit after he landed in Bhopal immediately after the accident, and then he was, he was allowed to leave in a private jet by the government.   There was a lot of pressure from the U.S. government and in 2001 when Dow Corporation, which took over Union Carbide, has sheltered this fugitive because there are cases that are pending in the civil and criminal court in Bhopal, which has been summoning Dow and Union Carbide to appear, and now Dow to appear in the Court to face the charges, and they have not done so. 

So, there is so much of injustice, both in terms of legal cases, and also this kind of state, corporate sort of Nexus. The second disaster I just want to briefly mention, I know I don't have much time. I just wanted to mention because lot of people think that Bhopal is over, that accident happened and that's it, and people suffered, and maybe some people have died, etc., but what people do not know is that unconnected to the disaster, and as a consequence of Union Carbide, unsafe disposal of poisonous waste within its factory compound from 1969 onwards. Even before the disaster, they were pumping hazardous waste in wrongly designed solar evaporation ponds from 1979 and recklessly dumping the toxic sludge from the ponds outside. It has caused enormous environmental damages around that area, going into the, you know, groundwater, into the soil, into the bodies of people who live around that area. As per the Supreme Court of India, record, close to 100,000 residents of 48 communities which live around the five kilometer radius of the factory are affected by this contaminated water, and analysis of the groundwater by official scientific agencies have shown presence of toxic chemicals, pesticides, heavy metals, especially mercury, almost 6 million times higher than the allowable limits, which is causing damage to brains, lungs, liver, kidney, genetic material, one of the key concerns is the genetic damage that it has caused with generations of babies, third generations of baby being born deformed, and drinking water wells near the factory used by local people are heavily polluted by contaminants which are persistent organic pollutants or whatever foreign chemicals. Union Carbide, which merged with Dow Chemical in 2001 neither of these corporations ever took any liability or responsibility for Bhopal. In fact, when Dow was taking over Union Carbide, it took over the liabilities of health and environmental damages in the U.S. Union Carbide liabilities in the U.S.  when it was merging, but it did not take the liabilities of the Bhopal Factory, or what has happened in Bhopal, whereas it was taking the liabilities of Union Carbide in the U.S., it's discrimination. So, one of the things that Bhopal says is that Dow discriminates and here are the long-term health impacts. 

One of the main concerns is, of course, there are, there are cancers, there are deaths due to the exposure to the gas leak, and generations of babies born to people who were exposed, dying from, from those you know, genetic mutation and exposure to MIC, but also the ongoing contamination and exposure to this kind of persistent organic, chemicals  and these people are not compensated because they are not seen as the survivors of the disaster, they are seen as something that has happened after the disaster, even though Union Carbide own documents show that since they had started their operations, they had been dumping illegally and unsafely all these toxic chemicals that had gone into the water and soil, which is In the bodies of people. So a lot of new people also kind of moved around this factory area after the disaster, because the factory was shut down, it was abandoned, and all the chemicals were left there, and that also has leaked, in fact, that has leached into the groundwater. 

But then there was also, during the operation, all this toxic stuff, was coming into the water and soil, and these are all, as I said, working class neighborhoods. One of the critical concerns is that generations of babies which are being born, one due to exposure to the waste that is still there in the premises and around and seeping, and there have been multiple different things that has happened around the waste, we can talk about it. So, these are some of the key sort of kind of concerns, there are multiple studies which are going on.  Now, just to think about the demands of the Bhopal Gas survivors on this 40th anniversary, there are these multiple demands, and each demand is very complex because of how complex Bhopal is. One is the demand for criminal justice to get the Indian prosecutors to prosecute Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide. There's a whole question of compensation. We can talk about all this in details, and you can also go to our Bhopal website, and I'll give you that information to see more details of that, medical care and research, because there had been studies that were done independently, but there were also government sponsored  studies I.C.M.R, that is Indian Council for Medical Research, studies that were done and stopped, and whatever studies were done, they were not even shared, except for one study. So it requires long term care and research, economic and social rehabilitation that is very critical, because people, their bodies are ravaged by these chemicals, and they're very immunocompromised. They need economic and social rehabilitation because they have been exposed to these chemicals for generations, and so they're not able to do, you know, much of the regular manual, hard work. Again, the biggest thing is environmental remediation without remediating the toxic site, all the other things will not matter, because if you do not take the toxic out, it will keep on entering the environment and that's what Dow Chemical has been refusing to do. Just to sort of conclude, because I think I'm horribly out of time, is that one of the things to remember in Bhopal is that it is a story of witnessing and endurance and resistance and also of refusal to be forgotten. That is something that I have drawn my inspiration from and have been part of and many of the women I worked with have now passed away because of the chemicals that they have, you know, been exposed to. 

One of their things that they kind of have always said is that "we are not flowers to be sacrificed on the altar of profit. We are flames committed to conquering darkness, and we will continue to struggle."  That has been, that has been the key slogan that has kept the struggle alive, and just to conclude why Bhopal matters, and this is what the women who recently came this summer to share their stories with the communities here in the U.S. As they traveled around the U.S., meeting people from East Palestine to Cancer Alley, from Mossville to southwest Detroit to Houston to Charlottesville, East Houston, West Virginia.  They found that communities across the U.S. were experiencing their own slow and silent Bhopals and when they met these other communities here in the U.S., and they talked about how it's important to build that community, sharing knowledge, making connections and working in solidarity to fight corporate excesses and whole corporation guilty for the crime. Rashidapa, whom we call fondly, she is a survivor, and she lost members of her family to the disaster due to cancer, and she has said that we are aware that that the day we succeed in holding Dow Chemical liable for the continuing disaster in Bhopal, it will be good news for ordinary people of the world. From that day, chemical corporation will think twice before producing and peddling poisons and putting profits before the lives and health of people. Here is a link to International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal. And you will find lot of the information that I talked about today there, including fact sheets, etc. Thank you very much. Thanks, Nick.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Thank you so much, Madhu, for that really fascinating and tragic telling of the story. Let's turn to some questions that we have from the audience about Bhopal, and there's one that came in during registration that I wanted to follow up on. You mentioned the kind of different demands of the victims and their descendants, and kind of give us a link right at the end to an organization to kind of support them. But what are the ways in which you would suggest for those of us in the United States to be able to ensure that Bhopal and its victims remain in our consciousness, and that these people are able to attain some kind of justice at some point. What are the suggestions for things that we can do to kind of help in that way?

Madhumita Dutta: 
Yeah, I mean, you know, Bhopal campaign, what it has done or survivors, what they've done is they've reached out to, you know, campuses across the U.S. and communities and U.S. lawmakers to sort of their main demand has been to hold down chemical, you know, liable and Union Carbide, liable. One is the cleanup demand, and then compensation and healthcare and research demand. This has been consistent for all these years, and in fact, I must say that this is a little thing that's happening. Well, it's not really little. It's actually pretty big. On third of December, a resolution will be introduced in the Congress, both in the Senate and the house on Bhopal. It will be the National Chemical Disaster Awareness Day, commemorating Bhopal, but also saying that Bhopal cannot happen again, and how, without holding these corporations accountable, you cannot do that, and that that means is that one is to support the resolution by people and say, you know this is important and that we need to remember. So that's a, really, a very like, you know, the thing I was reading at the beginning the Milan Kundera, quote, "the struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory, against forgetting." Like, it is a big score on that, like that, you know, kind of putting it there, because this is where it happened. It was a U.S. Corporation. It was a U.S. government, of course, Indian government. But so, to the fact that corporations can go anywhere and do whatever they want and without them being held liable, that has been a big issue, and there are so many limited liability clauses in the way corporations operate, and also to make a connection for instance, in Ohio, we have East Palestine, you know, the train derailment. We have forgotten about it. The Bhopali's went there, and they met them, and you have to go back there and talk to the people and say, hey, because the EPA, everybody's saying things are fine, but things are not fine. We went there. We spoke to them. We have to bring those stories and what was in those trains, was vinyl and vinyl chloride is what Dow Chemical produces. Dow Corporation produces they're the biggest producer. Let me just also, just mention this we must remember that Dow Corporation has a very long history of this kind of environmental crimes, according to ProPublica, when they did this whole sort of data analysis from 2014 to 2018 of all the hazardous air pollution facilities across the U.S.  and mapped the cancer-causing chemicals they found, this, toxic hot spots and Dow is the single largest contributor to hot spots of toxic air pollution in the nation. This is a ProPublica report, and according to a University of Massachusetts report, which is from Amherst, a Political Economy Research, 2023, toxic 100 water polluters index, Dow chemical ranks first as the biggest emitter of, you know, as a toxic water polluter. You know, so holding this corporation accountable is one of the biggest things on our campuses. We can educate. We can make sure these corporations cannot do business without justice. You know, there are so many ways we need to kind of research. Are they present in our communities? How are they present? How do we hold them accountable for what has not just happened in Bhopal, but what they're doing in the U.S. So, there are so many different ways to do that and but to first is educate ourselves, you know.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
Kind of following up on that, are there particular strategies that you have used to kind of connect with students and ourselves, ultimately, in terms of, you know, to bring the Bhopal tragedy and resistance to light, does the fact that it's an environmental crisis open particular doors to connect in that way?

Madhumita Dutta:
Earlier there was a very strong sort of student campaigns all around Bhopal in different campuses so there were divestment campaigns, there were shareholder campaigns, where students had led those campaigns and had gone and asked questions of Dow and there had been also, of course, lot of ways in which you know of course, there are petitions and actions to put pressure, but one particular one I must sort of also mention is that since 2013 the Bhopal court has been issuing summons to Dow to appear in Bhopal court  in the toxic waste issue for remediation, and  they have been sending summons to them, and Dow has never appeared because Indian court cannot directly send summons to U.S. corporation. So, there is actually a multilateral treaty between U.S. and in India to cooperate in these matters. So, whenever these summonses were issued, there have been seven so far, it would go to the Department of Justice in the U.S., and Department of Justice was supposed to then deliver it to Dow to appear in the Indian court. It did not happen. Only last year, 12 members of Congress, led by Representative Rashida Talib and Pramila, Jayapal and Frank Polon, wrote to the D.O.J, saying, What are you doing? You're violating the treaty, and you know, this is the case. And so finally, they were served as someone, and they, for the first time, appeared in the Indian court last year. 

Of course, they denied the liability, but they came so there are so many ways, and there was already sort of pressure from students, pressure from community groups. On third of December, now there are multiple events happening across the U.S., making connections with environmental justice groups here and Bhopal, there is a press conference happening in Atlanta, Georgia, where there has been recent gas leak, where people are coming together and talking like how Bhopal should not happen again, and it's happening even now. There were so many legislative changes that. Happen in the U.S., post Bhopal, which like Toxic Release Inventory Right to Information, because to avoid all this, you know what happened in Bhopal. All those things happen in the U.S. But what we are seeing is lot of that is getting undone. So, I think there's a lot we can do.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
One of the folks that's with us today is curious to learn more about any ongoing epidemiological studies of the health effects and genetic mutations of the ongoing disaster of environmental contamination and the gas disaster events. Are there ongoing epidemiological studies? Who's conducting them? What are they finding?

Madhumita Dutta:
There were some large-scale studies that were earlier being done by the I.C.M.R, that is Indian Council for medical research. There had since been some studies that the state of Madhya Pradesh has done. I know there are some researchers from Johns Hopkins University who have been doing some bits of research, and I can get more of that information if people want, but there are smaller studies that are going on.  I must mention here that because of the lack of corporation and the state to to kind of take care of the health of the survivors, or kind of address the health you know of the survivors, a clinic run by a non-profit, it's called Sambhavna Trust, which came about due to Bhopal medical appeal. It is all individual donations that people make to this medical appeal in the UK, and which then supports the work of Sambhavna Trust They had been working in the community, and they have been conducting long term, you know, studies which are showing much of what we now know in terms of multi-generational health impact, mental health impacts. You know, genetic mutation, all those so Sambhavna Trust clinic, and you can find that information more in this Bhopal medical appeal website, all the studies that are ongoing. So, there are government ones, but there are a lot of it which is led by the survivors and nonprofits which are doing this kind of study. So, if anybody's interested, I can share those links with them.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
That'd be great. Those are the links that we could perhaps send out with the email that will come out after this this event to everybody.  You were mentioning kind of government response, the presentation focused particularly on the lack of response and disinterest, and, frankly, kind of criminal activity of the of the corporation itself. Could you tell a little bit more about what has been the response of different levels of government in India to the Bhopal Disaster? 

Madhumita Dutta:
Yeah, and this is a disaster in itself. Every political party which has been in power in India, at the federal level and at the state level, have let the Bhopalis down in the sense they have never fully addressed. It has always been this kind of political game, and in fact, multiple times, Bhopalis in 1985 Bhopal women led a whole march from Bhopal all the way to Delhi, 800 kilometers, 33 days of marching just to tell government of India, like, what's going on and what they need to do and at that time, you know, they did not sort of address those issues. In 2006- 2008 again, those marches happened, but basically at every level. I mean, starting with the settlement that we talked about, it was an out of court settlement. It was nothing and the fact that Dow can still do business in India, that Union Carbide products can still be sold in India, which is illegal, like, how does that happen without that complicity?

The fact that Dow wanted to, Dow was given approval for manufacturing Dursban, a pesticide which is banned in the U.S., in India, like all this, comes through government approvals, right? The fact that whole the whole remediation, all that the whole foot dragging that is going on in courts and also the biggest one is that all the big studies, epidemiological studies, that I.C.M.R, the Indian Research Institute did, they were never made public, except for one study, you know. So, there are so many ways, and also one thing in 2008 we found out as we were, accessing government documents through public right to know. We found these sort of exchanges between the highest offices of India, that is the Prime Minister's office, and the CEO of Dow, Andrew Liveris, at that time now, there's a different CEO where, through the Planning Commission of India, where they were exchanging this whole thing that Dow will invest $1 billion in the US in exchange for letting off the liability of Bhopal. I mean, clearly these documents are there. We have them. We have exposed them. So, you know, you can see that complicity here and the role of the Indian government.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
One quick last question, given that this is the result of kind of decisions related to maintenance activities and kind of process control and the structures of the plants and this sort of thing have engineers in India, or, frankly, around the world, gained new perspectives in terms of how to prevent these kinds of future disasters? Do you think there's been any learning on the kind of engineering or structural end?

Madhumita Dutta:
I hope so. But you know, Art Johan, who was an operator in the MIC plant, who was technical, you know, he has written his book, and he's talked about it like how the whole engineering and the technical failure, but as I was mentioning in mentioning in my talk, that whatever at that time was state of the art in terms of safety, in terms of, you know, all the detectors, etc., Whatever was put in place in in West Virginia in fact, they had to redo the entire, even the construction material of West Virginia because it proved to be unsafe so that. 

So, they had already gone through the process and came up at that time with what they considered to be state of the art, even that was not put in place. So, it is not so much about engineering and technology. I mean, those things will keep on developing. The question is that, will that, then where does it land, like, for instance, with Bhopal kind of place still get it? Or will, you know, Cancer Alley still, you know. I think yes, I'm sure engineers have learned, you know, there are laws that has been changed, but how unevenly is that all applied? Right? I think this is a question of corporate crime and discrimination. That's what we what we learn from Bhopal, and why Bhopal matters, why we keep on talking about Bhopal and the survivors struggle so that it doesn't happen again. So, I’m sure technologically and another thing is that MIC's own toxicity, which was studies that Union Carbide had done. They had that research. They never shared it. They never made it public. So, you know, it's not, it’s the politics of it, it's not just about just the, you know, the technology and research. In

Nicholas Breyfogle:
In some ways, that's a very good place to end as a reminder of the of the very real lessons about politics and, you know, and how we treat people around the world, and how we approach different people around the world, that those are the real lessons we need to take here and the lesson that we should all be out pushing for, for justice in this particular case.

Madhumita Dutta:
Can I make one quick announcement Nick? On December 3rd (2024), the South Asian graduate students are going to do an event on the Oval, and we can share that information, it will be a tabling event. So if people are here from Columbus, from OSU, please come and we can share that information. Maybe Nick can. I can send information to Nick, and they can share that. Yeah, come.

Nicholas Breyfogle:
That'd be great. Thank you all for coming and joining us today and for your excellent questions, I'm really grateful to Dr. Madhumita Dutta for sharing her expertise and the story of the Bhopal Disaster and its long term challenges to the people in the area. Please join me in giving her a virtual round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you'd like to learn more, I will send out an email very soon with more information about the disaster and 40th anniversary events, and with a link to the recording of this particular webinar. We'd like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Alex Stacklane, the Department of History, the Clio Society, the Goldberg Center and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective for their support. Thank you again all for coming today. Stay safe and healthy and we'll see you all next time, thanks so much. Thanks. Bye.