Everything was going well in life until that dark night arrived.” For Bano Bi, a 72-year-old resident of Bhopal’s JP Nagar, the night of December 2, 1984 is where life and time froze. That night, 40 tonnes of toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC)—a gas 500 times more poisonous than hydrogen cyanide—leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited’s (UCIL’s) pesticide plant next to Bano’s residence and spread to a 7 km-radius around the plant. More than half a million people were exposed to the leak. The disaster has resulted in up to 30,000 deaths in the region since then.
Bano mostly talks about the past—“I live a life linked to that gas leak,” she says. Bano, her husband and eight children woke up vigorously coughing that night. “When we stepped outside, we saw people running everywhere. Cries and screams echoed all around,” she says. Bano got separated from her children and husband while escaping the gas chamber the city had become. A day later, she found her family members in hospitals in conditions that defied descriptions.
Within a year, she lost her husband. Over the next few months, four of her children died. “I was left behind to bear the burden of the gas tragedy and am still suffering,” Bano says. She has what the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) terms as the “Bhopal Gas Disease”. ICMR ran a decade-long research on the gas-affected population of Bhopal to define this new disease as “a condition of ill-health due to exposure to Bhopal’s toxic gases”. About half-a-million people in Bhopal suffer from this disease, which has some 40 symptoms, ranging from backache to breathing difficulties. And there is no treatment per se; all one can do is symptomatic medication.
After 40 years, Bano suffers from nearly all these symptoms. “Living has become unbearable. After the gas exposure, my menstrual cycle became irregular; my limbs started aching; I now have chronic headaches; my blood pressure is always high; I have type-2 diabetes; there is a perpetual feeling of a severe dizziness; and insomnia keeps me awake,” she lists her ailments, showing a thick bunch of prescriptions gathered over four decades. Her visits to hospitals have become a part of regular routine. Doctors prescribe medications, but new problems show up, requiring more tests. From the day after the disaster, she has been taking, on average, 11 pills a day. That means she has already consumed some 150 kg of medicine in the past 40 years.
She says her doctors recently stopped prescribing her medicines, warning her that more medicines could kill her. But Bano does take sleeping pills regularly. That is the only way she will have a few hours of sleep, an artificial reprieve from the toxic reality.
One of her children who survived the tragedy, Ismail, suffers from the same Bhopal Gas Disease. “He works for one day and stays home for four days because of shortness of breath,” Bano says. Ismail’s 12-year-old son is the family’s third gene-ration, born long after the tragedy. “But he has delayed development. He goes to a special needs school,” she adds. In hospitals catering to the gas victims, an ever-increasing number of children born to affected families or growing up in the UCIL plant vicinity have reported crippling health conditions.
It has been a long time since the UCIL plant has been shut down. But its toxic trail continues to kill and maim people. Studies by various agencies have revealed that the toxic waste in the plant and the nearby solar evaporation ponds has contaminated the groundwater of 42 settlements around the factory with a set of chemicals known as “forever chemicals” because they do not lose their potency with time. In 2009, Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Science and Environment, along with the Central Pollution Control Board, analysed samples of soil and groundwater from in and around the factory. The analysis reported presence of high concentrations of toxic chemicals and heavy metals as far as 3 km from the factory and at depths greater than 30 m. The government has been undertaking efforts to manage this waste. An Oversight Committee, appointed by the Supreme Court in 2003, has been established to monitor the disposal process. The same year, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research estimated that 1.1 tonne of contaminated soil, 1 tonne of mercury, 1,500 tonne of corroded plant material and 150 tonne of underground chemical waste is lying in the plant compound.
A host of health issues continue to haunt generations that are not directly exposed to the toxic gas, according to a study published in journal BMJ One in June 2023. The study notes a decline in male births in 1985, a year after the tragedy. The impacts are seen in a 100 km-radius around Bhopal, affecting a wider area than previously reported. “These results indicate social costs stemming from the Bhopal gas disaster that extends far beyond the mortality and morbidity experienced in the immediate aftermath,” the researchers say in a statement. The study also finds a four-fold increase in miscarriages, a higher risk of stillbirth and neonatal mortality (death within the first 28 days of life) following the tragedy. Even decades later, menstrual abnormalities and premature menopause have become common in women who were exposed and in their offspring.
As the toxic gas affected the groundwater and the reproductive health of women exposed to the toxic gas, researchers from the University of California San Diego, US, suspected that the health impacts could trickle down to future generations. The team assessed the long-term health-related damages by gathering data from the National Family Health Survey conducted in 2015-16 and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series from India for the year 1999. The latter, which presents harmonised data from the 1999 socio-economic survey conducted by the National Statistical Office, includes people of ages six to 64 years and those in utero at the time of the Bhopal gas tragedy.
The analysis shows that women who were pregnant with a male foetus and lived within 100 km had one percentage point higher disability that affected their employment 15 years later. Further, the proportion of males born dropped from 64 per cent in 1981-84 to 60 per cent in 1985 if the mother lived within 100 km of Bhopal. There was no change in the sex ratio beyond 100 km. The fall in the male sex ratio could be explained by male foetuses being more vulnerable to external stress. “Male foetuses are more susceptible to adverse shocks including smog, disease, natural disasters and stressful events during pregnancy,” Gordon McCord from the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego, and the author of the study, tells Down To Earth. This, he adds, is due to developmental differences between male and female foetuses. Newborn girls are physiologically more developed than newborn boys.
Men born in 1985 within 100 km of Bhopal have an eightfold higher risk of cancer than those born in 1976-84 and in 1986-90. Men born in 1985, who continue to reside within 100 km of Bhopal, faced a 27-fold higher cancer risk in 2015 compared with those born in 1976-84 and 1986-90 and with those living more than 100 km from Bhopal. Disabilities have robbed people of their ability to earn a living. Men who were in utero during the tragedy and who lived in districts within 100 km of Bhopal are one percentage point more likely to report employment disability compared to their older counterparts and those living further from Bhopal. This increases to two percentage points among those living within 50 km of the city.
The researchers further explain that the long-term consequences estimated in the study could be due to two effects. First is from direct exposure and second is the lack of mitigation of the effects through health, dis-ability and education services. Understanding the short- and long-term damages caused by industrial disasters is key to gaining insight into the trade-offs involved in making regulatory decisions, the researchers write in their paper. “On the one hand, industrial growth creates jobs and economic development, and on the other, they introduce risks that industry and government need to manage through regulation,” McCord explains.
The world’s biggest industrial disaster is also the longest in terms of its impact. At the core of the tragedy is the management of toxic chemicals that the modern world invented for a horde of benefits. This toxicity continues to expand, and so does its threat as a persistent pollutant. As Bano puts it, every cell in her body is a living example of what a chemical can do.
(With inputs from Vivek Mishra)
This was first published as part of a cover story on chemical pollution in the 16-31 December, 2024 print edition of Down To Earth