40 years later, Bhopal is still in crisis

Carrying a clipboard, Farhat Jahan, a community research worker, crisscrosses the narrow alleyways of Vijay Nagar—a locality in the central Indian city of Bhopal.

Just over 40 years ago, on a chilly December night, the world’s worst industrial disaster struck the residents of this neighborhood and those nearby. More than 500,000 people were exposed to a cloud of toxic gases that escaped from Union Carbide’s pesticide plant—about 2 km from Vijay Nagar—and wafted through dense settlements near the factory. The accident was the result of a runaway reaction involving methyl isocyanate (MIC), which the company used to make carbamate pesticides. All safety systems for stopping such a leak were absent or out of order.

Thousands died within days of the disaster, and estimates suggest that about 20,000 people who had been exposed to the gases perished in subsequent years. Many of those who are still alive grapple with long-term health problems, particularly respiratory disorders. People exposed to the toxic gases have reported pregnancy losses, irregular menstrual cycles and excessive menstrual bleeding, and premature menopause. A recent study suggested that men whose mothers had been exposed to the gases while pregnant with them were more likely to have a disability that affected their employment. These men also faced high risks of developing cancer by age 30.

But many activists say that government machination has hindered systematic investigations into persisting and emerging health problems linked to the accident. Amid lack of transparency, and often inaction, others have stepped up. “When you don’t have your own scientific agency generating data, or even when they are generating such data but hiding it, then you’re only left with the people doing this work,” says the Bhopal-based social activist Rachna Dhingra.

Jahan, 40, is part of a team that has been conducting surveys since 2010 to track the long-term health of people affected by the disaster. Along with her colleagues at the Sambhavna Trust Clinic, a Bhopal-based nonprofit that provides free medical care to survivors of the accident, she’s also been interviewing people exposed to groundwater contaminated by toxic waste that sits buried in the Union Carbide factory or was discharged into ponds outside its premises.

During one such survey this December, Jahan looked for Kallubai Satya’s house. Her team had interviewed the now 45-year-old’s family more than a decade ago, and Jahan wanted to follow up. The household now had new members, including the wives of two of Satya’s sons and their offspring.

Sitting in a small room packed with sewing machines and filled with the smell of a hot clothing iron, Satya and her family patiently answered Jahan’s questions. Were they grappling with any health conditions such as tuberculosis or cancer? Does anyone smoke or drink? Did the women have trouble conceiving, or miscarry, or face menstrual problems? Were any of the marriages between close blood relatives? Were the kids born with any birth anomalies or did they have any cognitive impairments?

“With God’s grace, all our children turned out fine,” Satya said. But she acknowledged that her 11-year-old grandson was rather short in stature for his age, which Jahan made a note of.

En route to interview the next family, Jahan reflected on the past 15 years, during which she’s visited thousands of homes in the disaster-affected areas as well as unexposed localities in the city. What stands out is “that people [directly] affected by the gas tragedy often don’t seem to make it past 70 years of age,” she said. “Many households are flocked by illness. Some people have had to stop working; they spend their lives visiting hospitals.”

Survivors often ask Jahan when they’ll be rightfully compensated. In 2023, India’s Supreme Court rejected a petition seeking an additional $1.1 billion from Union Carbide in compensation for survivors and their families. Filed by the Indian government in 2010, the petition argued that the original 1989 settlement amount of $470 million was based on incorrect counts of deaths and injured people and that the toll was a lot higher than claimed at the time. It also significantly underestimated the chronic health issues many people would face. “Once your lungs are scarred, then that becomes long term,” says Ramana Dhara, an environmental medicine physician and a former member of the International Medical Commission on Bhopal.

The compensation that people received was outrageously meager, he says. Still, a five-judge bench dismissed the additional compensation request, stating that there was no legal rationale to revive the issue 3 decades later.

Meanwhile, Jahan—who is also a Bhopal disaster survivor—continues to witness everyday struggles in many households, including her own. But the work has brought her unexpected solace. “For a long time, I thought what was happening in my family was unusual,” she says. “But after visiting so many people, I realized we’re just one of them.”

The harrowing December night

Late in the evening of Dec. 2, 1984, water entered an underground storage tank, E610, containing MIC—an intermediate chemical that’s highly toxic and volatile. At the Bhopal plant, Union Carbide used MIC mainly to produce a pesticide called Sevin. How water entered the storage tank is uncertain, even today. One theory suggests that a missing sealing disc known as a slip blank allowed water to flow while workers cleaned a connected pipe.

When water reacts with MIC, methylamine and carbon dioxide form. The reaction is exothermic, generating a lot of heat. The methylamine then reacts with MIC to form dimethylurea, which further interacts with MIC to form trimethylbiuret. At high temperatures, MIC can form a trimer.

In tank E610, these runaway reactions led to a huge pressure buildup, causing the pressure-relief valve to open and the tank’s contents to escape. All fail-safe mechanisms were malfunctioning, including a refrigeration system that would have cooled the MIC tank and a gas scrubber that could have neutralized the toxic discharge.

After midnight, a thick, poisonous cloud began drifting into nearby neighborhoods. “It was very heavy,” says Jerry Havens, a professor emeritus of chemical engineering at the University of Arkansas and a former member of the International Medical Commission on Bhopal. The gas cloud “was not pure MIC,” he says, but contained “the monomer of MIC, the dimer, the trimer, and a bunch of other things.” Because of its density and the low wind speeds that night, the gas cloud stayed close to the ground and spread across a roughly 40 km² area.

Many people who were fast asleep woke up coughing violently, desperately gasping for air, with their eyes burning and throat searing. “Our eyes, our nose, our mouth felt like they were on fire, and we thought someone nearby was burning chilies,” says Hemraj Batham, a 47-year-old survivor. People were screaming, running in disarray, he says. Within hours, human corpses and animal carcasses lined the streets.

Hamidia Hospital, Bhopal’s largest and closest to the disaster site, was flooded with people experiencing blindness and injuries to their airways and lungs. Its hallways were filled with the sounds of men, women, and children crying and vomiting. Dead bodies arrived constantly. “There were piles and piles of bodies spilling out of the mortuary doors,” says Prakash Hatvalne, a documentary photographer who captured the catastrophe. “I can’t forget that sight.”

Many of the deaths were a result of pulmonary edema, a condition in which fluid accumulates in the lungs and can cause respiratory failure. This fluid buildup resulted from an inflammatory response that was triggered by exposure to high levels of MIC.

While the Indian government investigated the gas leak, survivors continued to show up at hospitals and clinics with lung infections, eye irritation, conjunctivitis, and reduced vision. Many pregnant people who had been exposed to the toxic gases experienced pregnancy loss. Several babies born to disaster-struck parents died within 4 weeks. People grew concerned about long-term health complications they and their children might endure.

One problem was that little was known about MIC’s toxicity in humans, Dhara says. Also, “no population had ever been exposed to this amount of MIC.”

Contending with chronic illnesses

Jahan was 2 months old when the Bhopal disaster occurred. She grew up hearing stories about the pomegranate tree in her grandmother’s house that appeared scorched the next morning. Jahan’s mother sometimes mentions the horrific sight of hundreds of corpses of people who were trying to flee but succumbed on the streets to the poisonous gas. As a kid, Jahan recalls playing with an incentive spirometer, a lung-exerciser device her father was given to help with the shortness of breath he experienced for a few years after the disaster.

While her father’s symptoms improved, her mother’s health deteriorated. She increasingly experienced recurring cough and difficulty breathing, and in 2018 was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis—a condition in which lungs become scarred. Jahan’s sisters experienced kidney failure: one died because of the condition and other is undergoing dialysis. Her 14-year-old niece has intellectual disabilities and cerebral palsy, a developmental disorder affecting movement and posture that activists have linked to the Bhopal disaster or chronic exposure to contaminated groundwater.

“At home, the situation is such that we have one person ill one day, and then the next day someone else feels unwell,” Jahan says. For many families like hers in Bhopal, the harrowing events of 1984 have upended their lives.

To understand the long-term clinical and epidemiological effects of the disaster, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) established a cohort in 1985. This cohort consisted of two groups comprising about 80,000 individuals in gas-exposed areas and nearly 16,000 people living in the city’s unexposed localities. Researchers monitored the groups’ health until 1994.

The ICMR released its first report in 2004—nearly 20 years after the disaster. Nature Medicine reported that the Indian government had blocked the findings from being published earlier because of an ongoing legal battle with Union Carbide.

The ICMR report revealed that affected communities had higher death rates, mainly from respiratory disorders, as well as high rates of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and eye-related disorders. It also noted mental health illnesses including depression and anxiety among survivors. ICMR recommended researchers continue tracking the cohort to assess whether other organs were affected or whether cancer cases proliferated.

Meanwhile, other researchers conducted animal model studies to help identify potential long-term risks of MIC exposure. One study found persistent changes in the lungs and progression to pulmonary fibrosis in rats and mice exposed to 20–30 parts per million (ppm) of MIC for 2 h. Another study noted fetal deaths in 23 out of 30 pregnant mice subjected to MIC concentrations of 9 and 15 ppm for 3 h. Researchers also linked MIC exposure to a roughly 20% reduction in the length of fetal limbs and the lower jaw. Two other rodent studies indicated MIC’s potential for inducing cancer.

Much of the research has focused on MIC, but people in Bhopal were exposed to a mixture of gases, Havens says. The exact composition of the gas cloud remains unknown, though scientists have modeled it based on the residual contents of the MIC tank.

In a follow-up report, ICMR continued to find high rates of respiratory, gastrointestinal, and eye-related disorders between 1996 and 2010. It also noted declining rates of pregnancy loss among survivors. But these results were based on a shrinking cohort. The report revealed that through 25 years, the survey population fell by 79% in the group from the affected areas and 64% in the control group. The reasons for this decline, according to the surveyors—employees of the Madhya Pradesh government’s Centre for Rehabilitation Studies—included deaths of elderly individuals and relocations as people moved to other places. But many people didn’t trust the report and pointed out its inadequacies.

Dhara, for instance, mentioned that even if people migrated, “you’re still supposed to follow them.” Activists, on the other hand, accused the surveyors of fabricating data and filling out questionnaires on their own. The ICMR report also came under fire for failing to assess the health status of children and grandchildren born to survivors of the Bhopal gas accident. Activists further criticized ICMR for not investigating the cause of chronic health problems and ways to mitigate the damage and risks faced by survivors. “Research should not go on and on with no answers, no relief,” social activist Dhingra says.

Meanwhile, a cancer registry set up by ICMR revealed higher incidences of oral, throat, and lung cancer among male residents of gas-exposed areas between 1998 and 2007 compared with those living in other parts of the city. The agency linked these cancers to heavy tobacco use. Cervical cancer rates were higher among people from disaster-affected areas, which ICMR attributed to the population being largely poor—and thus unable to afford regular health screening and care.

The Sambhavna Trust Clinic urged the government and the larger scientific community to review ICMR’s claim suggesting no association between cancer and exposure to MIC and other toxins created during the Bhopal disaster. In its 2018 report, the clinic recorded nearly twice as many deaths due to cancer in the gas- affected population as in the control group. A 2023 study estimated a 27-fold higher risk of cancer among men born in 1985, who had been in the womb when the gas release occurred and hadn’t changed residences since, compared with other men who were born before or after the disaster and lived more than 100 km away from Bhopal.

Another area of contention is whether the Bhopal disaster led to more babies across multiple generations being born with congenital abnormalities. In 2016, a scientist at ICMR’s National Institute for Research in Environmental Health led a study that found that 9% of 1,048 babies born to gas-exposed mothers had birth anomalies compared with 1.3% of 1,247 kids born to unexposed mothers in a control group. These findings remained unpublished as an internal review committee deemed the research methodology to be flawed and the outcomes to be mired in assessment bias.

Activists who obtained the minutes of meetings where results about these birth anomalies were presented have accused ICMR of suppressing the data. The study proposal went through multiple rounds of approval, and even if there were errors, no attempt was made to correct the flaws and repeat the study, says Rashida Bee, a Bhopal disaster survivor turned activist. She’s the cofounder of the Chingari Trust, which offers free treatment, rehabilitation, and special education for children from families affected by the 1984 disaster and who have birth anomalies and cognitive disabilities.

Bee says she sees these conditions appear in the next generations. Along with other activists, she has voiced concerns about the intergenerational health of families with members who were directly exposed to the toxic gases in 1984 and others who continued to consume or use groundwater contaminated by the toxic waste discarded by Union Carbide.

Reports from independent environmental organizations indicated high levels of heavy metals and organochlorine pesticides in water samples obtained from wells and hand pumps up to 3.5 km away from the factory. In the mid to late 2000s, the government started sealing hand pumps and tube wells to restrict access to the tainted water and began supplying safe drinking water to several affected communities, albeit in response to protests and court orders. But irregular and limited water supply, particularly in the summer, had forced some residents to continue using groundwater.

“Whether future generations have been affected [by the disaster and the toxic waste] still has not been conclusively proven,” says N. D. Jayaprakash of Bhopal Gas Peedith Sangharsh Sahayog Samiti, a nonprofit organization working to support Bhopal disaster survivors. “We need proper monitoring.”

The battle continues

On the 40th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, activists and survivors marched along the city’s streets shouting slogans such as “Bhopal ka insaaf karo” (“Justice for Bhopal”). Armed with torches and a banner that read “Bhopal disaster is corporate crime,” the crowd made its way to the city’s prominent mother-and-child statue. Erected to commemorate the 1984 tragedy, the statue depicts a woman holding her dead baby with one arm and covering her face with the other.

Opposite this memorial stands the infamous Union Carbide plant. Abandoned since the gas leak, the factory’s remains are rusted and splotched with bird droppings. Dense, unkempt scrub surrounds the defunct tank E610. Usha Gaur, 58, a survivor who lives about 1.5 km from the Union Carbide plant, wishes that the factory never existed. At least “our lives wouldn’t be ruined,” she says.

Early this year, 12 trucks hauled away 337 metric tons of hazardous waste that had been left at the factory. The move was the result of a deadline set by the Madhya Pradesh high court and the judges’ observation that, after 40 years, the authorities were still in a “state of inertia.” Acknowledging that the waste had contaminated the surrounding soil and groundwater, the court said its removal and safe disposal was paramount for public safety, calling the inaction so far a “sorry state of affairs.”

The trucks hauled the waste 225 km to the Pithampur Industrial Waste Management facility. It’ll take 3–9 months to incinerate this waste, and the residue will be landfilled. Protests have erupted in the town of Pithampur, where residents are concerned about pollutants entering the air during incineration and leaching from the landfill into their soil and groundwater. Authorities have promised four layers of filtering before any exhaust is released from the incinerators and a double-layer landfill liner to seal the solid residue waste.

But as per an NDTV news report, most previous test runs to incinerate Union Carbide’s waste at the Pithampur facility have failed to contain the release of toxic chemicals. Dhingra also points out that in and around the factory, there’s still more than 1 million metric tons of contaminated soil that hasn’t been excavated for disposal.

Meanwhile, people in Bhopal want Dow, which acquired Union Carbide in 2001, to compensate them for their long-term health problems and pay to clean contaminated groundwater. Dow has consistently denied any responsibility, saying that it did not inherit any liability for Bhopal and arguing that Indian courts have no jurisdiction over the US-based company. In addition, US courts have absolved Union Carbide of any liability for ongoing pollution and cleanup. US judges ruled that Union Carbide India and not Union Carbide, its 50.9% owner, was responsible for these problems.

While these battles have dragged on for decades, Bhopal gas survivors have struggled to get proper medical care. They’ve faced bureaucratic apathy and “total indifference from successive governments,” Jayaprakash says. “They were always trying to underplay the magnitude and gravity of the problem,” he says, because “most bureaucrats are pro multinational companies.”

Some doctors in Bhopal have questioned the causes of chronic health problems among survivors. “Patients and others have connected every symptom and condition to the gas exposure, thinking it’ll give them an advantage for getting compensated,” says Sanjay Saxena, a radiologist and former chief medical and health officer of the government’s Gas Rahat Hospitals in Bhopal. Many have chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and kidney disorders common to non-exposed individuals, he says.

Activist Dhingra says there’s nothing new about authorities accusing survivors of exaggerating or even faking their illnesses to obtain compensation. “It’s a narrative that the state has been pedaling since 1987,” she says. “There’s a deep prejudice that plays out because a lot of the affected people are poor, a lot of them are [low-caste] Dalits, and a lot of them are Muslims.”

At a press briefing in December in Bhopal, doctors at the Sambhavna Trust Clinic cited 7 times higher incidence of kidney-related conditions, 5 times higher rates of diabetes, and 4.5 times greater prevalence of heart-related illnesses among survivors of the Bhopal gas disaster. The findings have not been peer-reviewed.

The challenge, environmental medicine physician Dhara says, is that little has been done to investigate what is the “Bhopal syndrome,” meaning “what health effects are predominantly attributable to the Bhopal disaster.”

Whether Sambhavna Trust Clinic’s ongoing long-term health surveys will reveal new answers remains to be seen. But one thing is clear, Jahan says: 40 years later, life is still far from normal for many survivors of the Bhopal disaster.