Bhopal Gas Victims
“We will surely get our rights... I am ready to sacrifice
myself, but for the sake of the movement And my
poor people, I will not give up the struggle until my
last breath, until my pulse stops beating, I will not
back down from the fight." -
Rampyari Bai, Bhopal gas leak survivor and activist, March 2012.
THE LEGAL ACTION IN INDIA AND SETTLEMENT
Following dismissal of the US proceedings, on 5 September 1986, the government of India filed a claim
against UCC for US$3.3 billion in the Bhopal District Court. It advanced the same arguments about
UCC’s liability as it had done in the US claim. Every one of these arguments was refuted by UCC. UCC
repeatedly claimed that it was purely a US-based corporation and denied that it had operations in India
or elsewhere outside the US,228 a claim that was completely at contradictory to internal documents
on UCC’s integrated management approach and its involvement in the Bhopal plant.
On 17 December 1987, the Bhopal District Court ordered UCC to pay INR3.5 billion (about
US$270 million) as “interim relief” in order to “act in aid of justice to distressed gas victims to move
ahead towards amelioration”. UCC appealed the decision and, for the next three years, the issue
worked its way up from the Bhopal District Court, to the Madhya Pradesh High Court and ultimately
to the Supreme Court of India.
The Madhya Pradesh High Court took the view that UCC was liable to pay interim relief, finding that:
it was the defendant-UCC which had real control over the enterprise which was engaged in
carrying on the particular hazardous and inherently dangerous industry at the Bhopal plant
and as such it was absolutely liable (without any exceptions) to pay damages/compensation
to the multitude of gas victims.229
However, UCC never paid interim compensation. Out-of-court settlement negotiations between
the government of India and UCC/UCIL were by now underway. On 14 February 1989, India’s
Supreme Court approved a settlement between the two parties that ended all past, present and
future claims against UCC/UCIL and quashed pending criminal proceedings (this condition was later
revoked).230 This agreement also brought to an end the pending question of interim relief.
The settlement bestowed sweeping civil and criminal immunity on UCC and UCIL. The Supreme
Court ordered UCC and UCIL to pay US$470 million in compensation:
to the Union of India as claimant and for the benefit of all victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster
under the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Registration and Processing of Claims) Scheme, 1985,
and not as fines, penalties or punitive damages.231
The settlement capped UCC’s liability at US$470 million, even though claims had not yet been
fully categorized, and the full extent of damages had not yet been estimated. By the time of the
settlement, more than 600,000 compensation claims had been filed, but fewer than 29,000
had actually been processed to confirm the nature and extent of injury.232 The government of
India gave no explanation as to how its initial claim of US$3.3 billion had been reduced to
US$470 million (less than 15 per cent of that the initial amount), and why this should be regarded
as acceptable.
Despite its far-reaching consequences for the rights of Bhopal victims, including their right to
remedy, the settlement was negotiated without their participation. Survivors, civil society groups
48 Injustice Incorporated
and others overwhelmingly rejected this settlement as utterly inadequate. Victims’ lawyers
challenged the settlement in a review petition but, in a final decision in 1991, the Supreme Court
upheld its validity, taking the view that it was a “reasonable and pragmatic solution to a difficult and
complex situation.”233 The Supreme Court also ruled that, if the settlement proved insufficient to
meet the costs of personal injuries and compensation, the government of India would make up the
shortfall. As a consequence of the settlement, the merits of the case were never examined and the
issue of where liability rested was never fully decided.
Importantly, the settlement did not take into account damages for environmental pollution
generated by the plant’s operations. As a result, the award was not calculated to cover or
compensate for damage to the environment, life, health or property resulting from plant site
contamination. In a letter to the Federal District Court in New York , the government of India was
very clear about this:
it is the official position of the Union of India that the previous settlement of claims concerning
the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster between Union Carbide and Union of India has no legal bearing
on or relation whatsoever to the environmental contamination issues raised in the case at bar.234
InadequaTe compensaTIon and economIc rehaBIlITaTIon
The US$470 million settlement was far less than most estimates of the damage at the time. An
intervention filed on behalf of the victims before India’s Supreme Court in 1988 had claimed that
INR10 billion (around US$628 million) were needed as interim relief alone.235 The estimates of
independent experts were also far higher than the amount finally settled for by the government.
Professor Alfred de Grazia, author of A Cloud Over Bhopal, had estimated up to US$1.3 billion in
1985 for economic losses alone.236 More comprehensive estimates that included the cost of
medical research and treatment, economic rehabilitation and legal costs arrived at a sum of just
over US$4 billion.237
To calculate the amount of the award, India’s Supreme Court had used provisional figures for
the dead, disabled and injured used by the Madhya Pradesh High Court to calculate interim
compensation. These figures, involving a total of 205,000 victims (comprising 3,000 dead, 30,000
permanent or total disabilities, 20,000 temporary or partial disabilities, 2,000 serious injuries,
50,000 minor injuries, 50,000 cases of loss of belongings and 50,000 cases of loss of livestock)
were only estimates.238 In March 1989 the Supreme Court itself had ordered the distribution of free
food grain to 582,692 gas-affected people,239 a figure far higher than the one used to calculate the
compensation amount. By the time of the settlement, more than 600,000 compensation claims had
been filed. And by the time the Supreme Court gave its final judgement on the settlement in 1991,
the official death toll had risen from the estimated 3,000 to 3,828 (figures which other sources
consider to be significant under-estimates).240 The arbitrariness and insufficiency of the award
amount became clearer as years went by and the figures kept rising.
Definite figures continue to be contested by all parties concerned, but it is evident that the
Injustice Incorporated 49
initial figure of 3,000 deaths used by the Supreme Court to calculate UCC’s compensation amount
has been significantly exceeded.241 The number of survivors suffering injury and disability has also
risen dramatically, from an initial estimate of 102,000 in 1989 to 554,895 in 2003,242 and to
568,293 in 2010.243 This is more than five times the numbers of injured and disabled people used
by the Supreme Court to calculate the settlement award.
THE CoMPEnSATIon MECHAnISM
The inadequacy of the US$470 million was not the only problem with compensation of the victims.
The system for disbursing the money was fraught with problems. Once the settlement amount was
paid to the government of India, individual claimants faced numerous challenges in proving their
claims and the amount of compensation that they should receive.
Claims were adjudicated in courts by Claims Commissioners, Additional Claims Commissioners
and the Welfare Commissioner (a sitting judge of the Madhya Pradesh High Court).244 Claimants
had to pass through several stages in order to secure compensation.245 Survivors say that the
process involved innumerable trips to hospitals, government offices, lawyers, banks and the
courts.246 For many struggling and illiterate families, the process itself was prohibitive.
The excessive paper work and complicated procedures also opened the way for opportunistic
intermediaries, brokers, lawyers and doctors to extract bribes from the claimants.247 Numerous
survivors told Amnesty International about the difficulties they faced in accessing compensation.
One, Kiran Jain, a 40-year-old widow who spoke to Amnesty International in 2004, said:
Having all your papers is not enough. You have to pay a bribe for everything even to get a
Pension Book or a Below Poverty Line card. If you pay, you get what you want; if you don’t, then
just suffer.248
Many victims were unable to produce medical records so they were categorized as having no
injury, even though they were ill and could prove they lived in the exposed area.249 The
categorization process, named the Process of Injury Evaluation, relied largely on three investigations:
X-rays, the Pulmonary Function Test (PFT) and the Exercise Tolerance Test (ETT). However, these
were not widely administered. A 1989 study showed that while at least 60 per cent of the victims
required PFT the claims directorate had only ordered 15 per cent to take the test, whilst only two
per cent had been ordered to take the ETT.250 There were a number of other problems with the
categorization process: medical assessments did not evaluate how victims’ illnesses affected their
ability to carry out their normal levels of activity and work;251 and serious illness was categorized
as “disability”, and that disability was understood only as an inability to work - as a consequence,
all those who were not engaged in paid work (considered to be at least 70 per cent of the affected
population) including elderly people, students, housewives and children, were automatically given
the lowest compensation.252
Thousands of claims were not registered at all. Many of these included children whose claims
could not be registered until August 1992 when the Supreme Court ordered that minors had a
legal entitlement to be registered. Indeed, children born to gas-affected parents have never been
considered for compensation.253
50 Injustice Incorporated
A comprehensive assessment of the compensation system has never been carried out. Publicly
available government data is limited and often out-of-date. However, the accounts of survivors and
research by a number of non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International,
consistently highlight that the amounts of compensation paid were not based on any reasonable
calculation of the damage suffered
ECONOMIC REHABILITATION
The gas leak radically affected the social and economic wellbeing of the impacted communities,
entrenching existing poverty and marginalization. Most of those affected were very poor, and the
effects of the gas leak caused them to lose their principal or only source of income.255 Many families
lost their main wage earners. Livestock owned by families died. Chronic illness and mental distress
affected the capacity of many to work and earn their livelihoods. Women often bore the additional
burden, sleeping very little due to an increased workload alongside household duties, childcare
and care for relatives whose health had been impaired by the gas leak.
The extent of unemployment due to gas-related diseases is unclear. In 2005, local activist
groups demanded that information be gathered “to determine exactly how many people are
unemployed as a direct or indirect result of gas and ground-water poisoning.”256 Some estimates
are in the tens of thousands.257 No monitoring was done by the government.
The Madhya Pradesh government’s relief efforts included economic rehabilitation to address the
loss of income of many thousands of people affected by the gas leak. The government established
some training programmes and built work sheds to help support small-scale enterprises. However,
these initiatives were largely discontinued or never fully completed and only a small number of
people were able to derive any long-term benefits.258 Government data on the schemes has always
been limited and there is no known evaluation of the initiatives.259 There remains a lack of
information on the number of people who are unemployed or underemployed as a result of the gas
leak. The last estimates, produced by survivor groups around 10 years ago, point to a figure of at
least 60,000 families.
Bhopal Gas Tragedy
It was the 2nd/3rd December 1984 when a Chemical factory named Union Carbide leaked Methyl Iso Cyanate (MIC) into the air causing deaths of 25,000 people and affecting 700,000 people. It was the worst industrial disaster the world has seen, since or before. MIC contamination into the soil, air and water made sufferings of people to continue till now, at the time I am writing this article, sufferings like lung diseases, gyanae problems in woman, high number of diabetes, cancer and obessity diseases.
Recently, this issue is brought to light by Netflix webseries "The Railway Men" produced by Yash Raj Films (YSR). Abdul Jabbar Khan (1957 - 2019) was an activist who fought for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy. As a 27-year-old, Jabbar had seen his parents and brother dying during the gas tragedy. Jabbar's name became synonymous with the battle for the welfare of the survivors. He was posthumously awarded the Padma Shri (civillian award of India).
Union Carbide's chief Mr. Warren Anderson fled the Bhopal city being escorted in a blue ambassador state car. At that time, Madhya Pradesh which is the province containing Bhopal city had a chief minister (Indian equivillant to governor) called Arjun Singh from Congress Party, the party that also had the central government at Delhi with prime minister Rajeev Gandhi. The prime minister and the chief minister both of them were partner in crime, facilitating the escape of Anderson and not only that denying the antidote of Sodium Thio Sulphate to save lives because that could have revealed the use of "cyanide" and exposed Union Carbide of using the deadly poision in its manufacturing. The story do not end here, after one year of the tragedy in 1985 the government passed the bill which stipulates that only the government can fight the case for Bhopal victims and than the same government settled the case for very low compensation amount of 600 crores and helped Anderson washed away the blood stains of 25000 humans. Some may argue that it was an accident and Union Carbide did not deliberately killed them. However, when analysing the past records of Union Carbide and previous deaths of workers at the factory, state of machines and equipments, safety measures and monitoring one can say that they comitted no less than a murder of thousands and did not even tried to save lives at the onset of gas leak which they could have done by calling authorities and telling them that a wet piece of cloth can save life. To conclude, they did not cared even little for the lives of humans let aside Bhopalis or Indians. This is the character of those corporates and world has to decide whether it wants to endanger themselves for these "vultures" or want to help in just cause of Bhopal's gas victims.
1987 CBI CBI-Charge-Sheet, document