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“Every year, around the anniversary of the Bhopal gas tragedy, I get asked: What is new this time? That is the saddest question,” said Rachna Dhingra, who has been campaigning for justice, compensation and answers for the thousands of victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy for 19 years.
It has been 37 years since the pesticide factory by Union Carbide India Ltd started spewing methyl isocyanate (MIC) on the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984, turning the city into a gas chamber and killing at least 3,000 people immediately and 16,000 more in the following years.
As many as 500,000 people were exposed to toxic levels of the gas. But very little has changed for the sufferers, said Dhingra.
On October 26, the Bhopal survivors’ organisations at the forefront of the fight for justice, launched a campaign to ask the same questions they have been asking for over three decades to jog the public memory and yet again, seek answers.
Read more: Bhopal gas tragedy: A continuing disaster
They have been asking one question a day for the last 37 days on the microblogging platform Twitter, addressed to the Union government, the Government of Madhya Pradesh — specifically the department of Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation.
Dhingra, member of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, listed out some of the questions they have tweeted out:
“These questions are not new,” she reiterated, “but the least we want from the authorities is to be accountable.”
The questions were posed by International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, an umbrella body mainly comprising members of four groups: Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmchari Sangh, Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Purush Sangharsh Morcha, Bhopal Group for Information and Action and Children Against Dow Carbide.
Years of government apathy towards the crisis has led to obfuscation of the toxicological data of the accident — the company held back vital information under the garb of ‘trade secrets’ and the government did not fight for it, the activist said.
The result: There is no treatment protocol for the victims even 37 years after the fateful day.
ICMR recognises that the gas victims have multisystemic damage and yet, they are only given symptomatic medication, even psychotropic drugs for their conditions, Dhingra said.
“The tragedy was a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies and private healthcare sector,” she added. “At one point, Bhopal had more hospital beds than any city in the United States.”
Read more: The chemistry of living death
One of the most common side-effects of the consistent use of symptomatic medication is kidney damage in the gas victims. The Government of India has compensated at least 2,000 gas victims for complete renal failure, Dhingra shared. The cancer prevalence in the district of Bhopal is 10 times the national average. Patients who were exposed to the toxic gas in 1984 still turn up at hospitals with nervous system damage and mental illnesses.
The rickety health infrastructure of the district, however, is not indicative of such widespread health crisis, Dhingra pointed out. “The district hospital does not have a single pulmonologist, nephrologist or any other specialist.”
A call to Jai Prakash District Hospital in the city confirmed the claim.
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had a disproportionate impact on this population, Dhingra shared. “The first 15 COVID-19 deaths in the city of Bhopal were gas victims.”
Of a total of 970 deaths due to the infection in the district, around 500 were from affected group, according to Dhingra. “This is significant, considering the population share of gas victims in the district’s overall population is a little over 13 per cent.”
The state government has not taken any specific measure to protect this extremely vulnerable group, which suffers from several comorbidities, from contagion, despite being warned by scientists as early as in March 2020, she added.
To top it all off, the only hospital dedicated for the treatment of the gas leak survivors was turned into a COVID-19 facility last year, depriving several patients without crucial treatment for at least 20 days.
The grim situation, however, proved that the health problems caused due to exposure to toxic levels of MIC were not temporary, as the government has maintained, said Dhingra. She added:
Out of the official tally of 574,000 people who were exposed to the gas, the government classified 525,000 to have suffered ‘minor injuries’. That is 93 per cent of the impacted population who received a paltry compensation of Rs 25,000 each.
The high COVID-19 fatality rate and caseload among the gas victims show that a much larger population was severely impacted than the government will have us believe.
The ‘37 years, 37 questions’ campaign has generated six responses so far from the Bhopal Gas Tragedy Relief and Rehabilitation department of the state government. “The answers were ridiculous and shows that the government doesn’t want to meaningfully address the problems,” said Dhingra.
37 questions, 7 answers:
Some answers the survivors received were to questions on the unused funds and government apathy.
“We have given jobs earlier and will give again” was the response to the question on why the Madhya Pradesh government has been sitting on the large sum of money received 10 years ago to secure jobs for the victim.
The group tweeted out a question why MP has not moved an application in the Supreme Court for early hearing of the petition for which they are interveners? To this, the department answered that the petition does not concern them and was filed by the Government of India.