In the early hours of December 3 1984, 27 tonnes of toxic gas methyl isocyanate leaked from a storage tank at Union Carbide Corporation’s pesticide plant on the outskirts of the central Indian city of Bhopal. Amnesty International estimates that more than 22,000 people have died as a result of the leak and more than half a million people suffer permanent injury.
What would become the “world’s worst industrial disaster” continues to devastate lives 40 years on. The water of 200,000 people in 71 surrounding villages in Madhya Pradesh state is contaminated by tonnes of toxic waste. Children with birth defects and other medical conditions are still being born. The disaster has imposed hefty medical costs on people who were already poor, which is particularly difficult and cruel for families whose breadwinners died as a result of that night.
Union Carbide was accused of negligence and cutting costs in the build-up to the disaster. In 2008, eight former plant employees, all Indian, were the first company staff to be convicted of negligence since the incident. Former CEO Warren Anderson, an American citizen, was released hours after his arrest by Indian authorities under pressure by US officials in 1984. He died in 2014, at the age of 92, in a nursing home in Florida.
