The accident at Union Carbide's pesticide plant in Bhopal in 1984 killed 8000 people immediately and injured at least 150,000. It remains the worst industrial disaster on record, and the victims are still dying. The company paid $470 million compensation to a trust in 1989.
The survivors say they received around $500 each and claim the clean-up efforts were inadequate.
Dow Chemical, which took over Union Carbide, still insists that Carbide's Indian subsidiary was wholly responsible for the design and running of the plant. "Union Carbide maintained a very "hands-off" relationship with Union Carbide India on virtually all matters," John Musser, who inherited the Bhopal brief at Dow, told New Scientist this week.
But in the latest of a series of legal actions, Bhopal survivors launched a class action in New York state in 1999. Last month the court forced the company to release internal documents- and some contradict its claims.
Under a policy of forcing foreign companies to invest, the Indian government had asked Carbide to make insecticides such as Sevin in India instead of importing them. It also insisted that the company raise at least a quarter of the investment from local shareholders.
But a 1972 memo says that if Carbide issued enough shares to raise the $28 million estimated cost, the company's stake in its Indian subsidiary would drop below 53 per cent. To prevent this it would have to "reduce the amount of investment... to $20.6 million", with the cuts "mainly on the Sevin project".
This meant using what another memo admitted were unproven technologies, mostly on systems not directly involved in the accident. However, the Sevin production system involved in the accident had had "only a limited trial run", the memo states.
New Scientist's investigation of the accident, and subseq
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Contact: Claire Bowles
claire.bowles@rbi.co.uk
44-207-331-2751
New Scientist
4-Dec-2002