Young India’s Bhopal challenge

The Bhopal question has one more angle: why was there so much public and media outrage over this 25-year-old issue? Why did the national media focus on this story, which till now had been consigned to the backrooms where only noisy environmental activists live?

The Bhopal legacy: reworking corporate liability

Days after President Barack Obama lashed out at British Petroleum (BP) saying he would not let them ‘nickel and dime’ his people in the oil spill case, a sessions court in Bhopal did precisely that with the victims of the world’s worst industrial disaster.

A different waste model

Should India import and reprocess the world’s growing mountains of junk and toxic garbage? Should this become our business opportunity, capitalizing on the fact that rich countries need cheaper and more efficient ways of dealing with their waste—everything from electronic to medical?

Not learning from Bhopal

It is 25 years of the Bhopal gas disasterthe night when chemicals spewed out of the Union Carbide factory to kill and maim thousands over generations. The question is if we have learnt from the disasterlearnt how to handle chemical accidents; to dispose of industrial toxic waste; to manage crucial medical relief, to give monetary compensation speedily and to establish the liability of pollutersso that accidents like this do not happen again.

Desperately seeking waste

By the time you read this, the decision would have been taken: to allow or not to allow the French warship Le Clemenceau into India, so that it can be dismantled with unknown quantities of toxic substances in its structure. The decision could be to send the ship back for decontamination, or to send the asbestos waste back to France after removing it from the ship. But whatever the decision, it is important that the matter of Le Clemenceau is not buried with its body at the Alang ship funeral grounds.