Tons of Toxic Waste Still Mark Bhopal Gas Leak
Posted on: Wednesday, 2 July 2008, 00:05 CDT
By Somini Sengupta
Nearly a quarter-century after gusts of poison gas leaked out of the Union Carbide pesticide factory here, killing thousands and turning this ancient city into a notorious symbol of industrial disaster, hundreds of tons of toxic waste still languish inside a tin-roofed warehouse in a corner of the old factory grounds, with a rolling, padlocked shutter for a gate.
At least now it is locked. For 20 years, it lay out in the open, in small mounds scattered around the compound.
The waste has yet to be carted away. The factory grounds have yet to be cleaned up. No one has even bothered to examine to what extent, over 20 years, the toxic waste has seeped into the soil and water and what damage it has wrought on the health of the people who live nearby - except that in desultory checks over the years, a state environmental agency has turned up pesticide residues in the neighborhood wells far exceeding permissible levels.
Advocates for those who live near the site, who for two decades have drunk from the neighborhood wells and tended kitchen gardens on this soil, continue to hound the company and their government.
They chain themselves to the prime minister's residence one day, dog shareholder meetings another, refusing to let Bhopal become the tragedy that India forgot. They insist that the Dow Chemical Company, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, should pay for the cleanup.
"First it was the company. Then it was the government," charged Mira Shiva, a doctor who heads the Voluntary Health Association.
The question of who will pay for the cleanup of the 4.5-hectare, or 11-acre, site has assumed new urgency in a country increasingly interested in attracting foreign investment.
Dow, based in Michigan, says it bears no responsibility to clean up a mess it did not make.
"As there was never any ownership, there is no responsibility and no liability - for the Bhopal tragedy or its aftermath," Scot Wheeler, a company spokesman, said by e-mail.
The government of India is in the throes of a high-stakes debate about whether to accept Dow's argument. It is a debate that would have taken place behind closed doors were it not for public- information requests by the advocacy groups that turned up a series of revealing correspondence.
It showed that one arm of the government - the Chemicals and Petrochemicals Ministry, which is entrusted with the cleanup of the site - wants Dow to put down a $25 million deposit toward the cost of repair, while the Commerce Ministry, among others, warns that forcing Dow's hand may endanger future investments in the country, to the tune of $1 billion.
A senior government official, prohibited from speaking publicly on such a contentious issue, described the quandary. "Do you want $1 billion in investment or do you want this sticky situation to continue?" said the official, who called it a "stalemate."
In the company's defense, Wheeler pointed out that the former factory grounds, along with the waste it contained, had been turned over to the Madhya Pradesh state government in June 1998, and that "for whatever reason most of us do not know or fully understand, the site remains unremediated."
Wheeler went on to say that Dow could not pay for remediation efforts, even if it wanted to out of sympathy for the plight of the locals, because it could potentially open up the company to further liabilities.
"Dow has a fiduciary responsibility to its employees, retirees and shareholders to not take on liability risks that are not ours to bear," Wheeler wrote.
The government is expected to make a final decision later this year.
Dow will not confirm what its India investment plans are, except to say that it sees "high potential growth opportunity for the chemicals and plastics businesses."
Its efforts to press its products into the Indian market last year drew attention from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; Dow paid $325,000 to settle charges that one of its subsidiaries had bribed Indian Agriculture Ministry officials in its efforts to sell a pesticide called Nocil, which is banned for sale as a home gardening product in the United States.
Beyond who will pay for the cleanup here, the bigger question is why 386 metric tons of hazardous waste - some local activists insist there is a great deal more - buried in the factory grounds remain here 24 years after the December 1984 leak.
The answer lies in a perfect Indian storm: a company that was allowed to dump the land onto the government before it was cleaned up; lawsuits by activist groups that still wind their way through courts and prevent any cleanup; ill-considered decisions on the part of local residents that only heighten their health risks and a network of often-lethargic, seemingly apathetic government agencies that do not always coordinate with one another.
The result is a wasteland in the heart of the city. The old factory grounds are frozen in time and apathy, an overgrown forest of corroded tanks and pipes, buzzing with cicadas, where stray dogs howl at sundown, cattle graze and women forage for twigs to cook their evening meal.
Just beyond the factory wall is a blue-black open pit, once the repository of chemical sludge from the pesticide plant and now a pond into which slum children and dogs dive on hot afternoons. Its banks are an open toilet. In the rainy season, it overflows through the slum's muddy alleys.
The slum rose up shortly after the gas leak. Poor people flocked here, saw land going for cheap and put up homes, coming right up to the edge of the sludge pond.
In 1992, a government-run research center found hazardous wastes dumped in five places on the factory grounds. All told, there was nearly half a hectare of toxic waste.
Then, in tests that did not begin, inexplicably, until 12 years after the gas leak, the state pollution control board began turning up traces of pesticides in the groundwater, including endosulfan, lindane, trichlorobenzene and DDT. Soil sediments were not tested. Never was the water from these neighborhood wells compared with other city neighborhoods. The pollution board saw no cause for alarm.
Nevertheless, in 2004, complaints from area residents led the Supreme Court to order the state to supply clean drinking water to the people living around the factory.
Around the same time, under public pressure, the state authorities finally scooped up the toxic waste that had lain in clumps around the factory grounds, and stored it inside the tin- roofed, padlocked warehouse. It was then supposed to be taken to an incinerator in neighboring Gujarat, but the government has yet to find a contractor willing to pack it into small, transportable parcels.
For his part, the state gas and health minister, Ajay Vishoni, said he was confident that none of the waste was hazardous anymore, nor had anyone proved to his satisfaction that it had ever caused the contamination of the groundwater.
It is not as though the government was unaware of the likelihood of contamination. A government research center warned several years ago that if left untreated, the toxic remains on the factory grounds would eventually seep into the soil and water.
"It is a scandal that the hazardous wastes left behind by Union Carbide unattended for 20 years have now migrated below ground and contaminated the ground water below the factory and in its neighborhood," wrote Claude Alvares, a monitor appointed by the Supreme Court, who visited here in March 2005.
Today, so enraged and distrustful are some of the area residents that they blame contaminated water for every ailment, from cleft palates to Down syndrome, among their children.
In the Shiv Nagar slum about a kilometer from the factory, there is a boy named Akash, born with an empty orbit for a left eye. Now 6, he cannot see properly, nor speak.
Akash's father, Shobha Ram, a sweetmeat-maker who bought land here many years after the gas leak and built a two-room house, blamed the hand-pumped well from where his family drew water on the edge of the sludge pond.
"We knew the gas incident took place," he said. "We never thought the contaminated water would come all the way to our house."
The stories repeat themselves in the nearby slums.
In Arif Nagar, two brothers, Nawab and Hassan Mian, 8 and 12, move through their house like newly hatched birds, barely able to stand on their feet. They have no control over their muscles. Their mother, Fareeda Bi, is unsure of what exactly is wrong with them, but she, too, blames the water.
To compound the tragedy, there is no way to know whether the water is to blame. The government suspended long-term public-health studies many years ago, and refused to let scientists publish even the results of short-term inquiries.
Source: International Herald Tribune
User Comments (0)
RSS Feeds