The Bhopal Gas Tragedy became a very dramatic symbol of the failed promise of not only technology, but also the Green Revolution: Kim Fortun

In her 2001 book Advocacy after Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders, Kim Fortun, Director of EcoGovLab, a hub connecting environmental governance researchers, educators and advocates globally, wrote about the aftermath of the disaster. The book describes the events in Bhopal in the early 1990s, years after the gas leak in 1984.

Down To Earth speaks to Fortun about her experiences in India and how the disaster shaped environmentalism in the country.

Q: You conducted field work in India between 1990 and 1992, a few years after Bhopal gas tragedy. What was the mood like in Bhopal?

A: I initially went to India to do research in Tamil Nadu and thought the Bhopal disaster would be a background case and not the main focus of my work. But when I visited Bhopal, shortly after the original settlement of the case [In February 1989, the Supreme Court directed a final settlement of all Bhopal litigation, amounting to $470 million], there was just a lot of outrage and fear. At that time, gas victims were not even getting interim relief payments.

It was a very urgent and sad time. I realised that while I was doing research, I could be of service to the movement by helping with English language writing because all the court proceedings were in English. I worked both with Bhopal Group for Information and Action, with the women’s organisation (Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Udhyog Sangathan or Bhopal Gas Affected Working Women’s Union) and a very vocal worker of the Union Carbide India Limited, who wrote his own account of the disaster. I helped him with the English rendering of that. He taught me to understand really what happened, in technical detail. At that point, there were several lines of work happening in Bhopal. One was on getting interim relief payments to the victims, which was quite urgent. There was still some effort to get the case heard in the United States.

Q: How did the grassroots movement in Bhopal shape environmentalism in India?

A: At that time in India, there was a surge of grassroots environmentalism, which really countered the older form of environmentalism that focused on conservation like saving tigers. At the time, people’s movements of various kinds, agricultural movements, women’s movements took off. There were a lot of meetings that brought people together across the country, and there was a sense that it needed to come from the grassroots. The grassroots organisations in India in the early 1990s were just impressively strong and well-read in an understanding of structural problems that produce not only Bhopal, but other environmental harms around the country. There were many highly educated people that had moved to rural spaces or to work with informal communities. There was a lot of capacity and a lot of crosstalk across organisations.

There was a deep critique of the Indian state for believing too much that technology would bring prosperity to all. There was also a deep critique of bureaucracy, which in some ways was a bit ironic because more democracy would have helped prevent the Bhopal tragedy — but that was not the case. One of the things I have tried to emphasise in my teaching of the Bhopal disaster over many years now is that we have not seen the capacity building needed to prevent these kinds of disasters.

Bhopal became a very dramatic symbol of the failed promise of not only technology, but it was read as a signal of the failure of the Green Revolution because it was manufacturing pesticides. And because Bhopal was commemorated annually, people came from around the country. So, Bhopal literally became a place where people came together to imagine what a people’s environmentalism would look like.

There was also a question of what to do with the west, what to do with modernity. For local people, it was a profound failure of a multinational corporation that really dashed expectations that things from abroad brought good things and that you could have confidence in them. And I think workers were deeply disappointed in the company that they had believed in.

Q: Do you think bureaucracy failed to put the necessary checks and balances to prevent the disaster and did it also fail in the aftermath?

A: I think that a robust bureaucratic operation would be to monitor facilities like the Union Carbide Bhopal facility. But that was not done then. It is not done today. We still have a small number of inspectors that are visiting and checking on very high-risk industrial facilities in India. In the US too, this is really concerning. They tend to miss things. We have seen incidents where we later realise that the industry is storing too much of a given chemical than what their records say. The fire department does not know what they are storing, and so it creates risk because there is no oversight of the companies. This is likely to become even worse in the US in the coming years.

In the aftermath of disaster and once things go beyond the immediate period of urgency, like in Bhopal, the bureaucratic attention falls away. In Bhopal, you see it in the failure to clean up the site. I think in terms of compensation, schemes only delivered individual payments and did not really improve structural conditions for surviving communities.

Q: In hindsight, how do you think the Bhopal gas tragedy should have been handled?

A: Most fundamentally, the disaster should not have happened. We should have had oversight that would have prevented it. I feel privileged to understand the Bhopal disaster technically well because it is very clear to me that it was preventable. This ranges from the original design of the plant, which happened in the US, to the training of the workers in India. Many of the safety systems in the plant were not functional the night of the disaster. Audit reports were sent back to the US warning that things were not right. One very vocal worker of Union Carbide told me that even in the design of the plant, engineers inside Union Carbide argued that they should not be storing such a dangerous chemical in such a large tank in the middle of a densely populated area. They had an alternative to store in smaller vessels. If something had gone wrong, less gas would have been released.

In the aftermath of disaster, justice is hard to come by. The interim relief payments took eight years before they were made available to victims and the amount was very small. People worried constantly that they would not be able to prove their status as gas victims. Many of them did not live in hard-walled houses. They had to prove where they lived on the night of the gas leak. People were worried over the integrity of that paperwork. When compensation courts came to Bhopal, victims had to go stand before judges and defend their right for compensation. It put a lot of the burden of proof and justification on victims that certainly should not have had to do that.

When I was in Bhopal, they were just beginning to build the hospital to care for victims. From very early on, there was a sense that that the hospital really was not built to serve those most impacted by the disaster. It was a good distance away and was more focused on elite clients. I do not really know what that hospital has done in the last couple of decades. I think disaster recovery requires building community infrastructure, including schools and preparing a generation to not be caught off guard by industrial risk. I think real preparedness means a robust public education.

Another aspect of justice in Bhopal would certainly have been the cleanup of the facility and the water that resulted from the pollution left behind at the factory site.

Q: Do you think most industrial disasters that have occurred are preventable?

A: I think petrochemicals are inherently dangerous. There are slow dangers of everyday exposures to petrochemicals for residents living near facilities, but also workers. I think industrial facilities can be run better. It is important to recognise those companies that do a better job and are proactive in reducing the risk on their sites. For example, using small tank storage instead of a large tank one.

In Southern California, close to where I live, there are two refineries that still use hydrofluoric acid (a strong acid that is used as a cleaning agent in the petroleum industry, in the production of high-octane fuel, germicides, dyes, tanning and fireproof material) in the refining process. If this chemical is released, it would be catastrophic and most refineries around the world no longer use hydrofluoric acid. There is an alternative. Governments should hold companies accountable and ensure they use the safest options. People that live nearby can ask for it, but it really does take government actions to ensure safety.

Q: How much role did science play in understanding the extent of harm from the Bhopal gas tragedy and how much has the toxicological research evolved since then?

A: Environmental science at that time and historically has been very conservative because scientists cannot say that x causes y. Harm happens in a more non-linear way. What is interesting and sobering about Bhopal is that there is no question that the disaster harmed people.

In Bhopal, the immediate aftermath could not be questioned. Needing science to understand the harms was not so important in the immediate aftermath because it was just so dramatic. However, it did come up in assessing the extent of the harm. Gas leak survivors and advocates have argued that the Indian state has dramatically underestimated the extent of harm.

However, one of the things that has happened since the 1990s is an incredible flourishing of research in environmental health sciences. We know so much more than we did then. Not that we did not know that many chemicals were dangerous then. It is very sobering that chemical exposures during pregnancy can have health effects on children. Air pollution does not just affect your lungs, it is also implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. This understanding of what pollution does to people has just enhanced dramatically.

However, I think our capacity to use that science in regulation is much more limited. Some of or a lot of that is political will, and just the extraordinary influence of industry on the regulatory process. The industry lobbies against using a lot of academic studies in regulatory decision-making. We need to find a better way to move science into governance. It is challenging even in the best of situations, where you do not have political pushback.

We need to just keep funding studies on toxicology, epidemiology and molecular chemistry. Once the science is here, we need to be able to use it. Clearly, that pathway is not open.

I have heard stories of academic scientists going to a regulatory meeting and they do not get a lot of compensation for it. And then they describe how the industry representative comes fully prepared. Fundamentally, there is an issue of who is in the room and what vested interests are at play when we make regulatory decisions.

Q: Your book also talks about lawyers, journalists, and environmental activists reading the Bhopal case differently. Could you elaborate on that?

A: There is a real divergence in the way people identify and characterise problems and what they think should be done to address them. Some of those differences are because of vested interests that just want to pretend the problem does not exist. But there are also other kinds of differences — if you ask a medical professional about the key problem and what are the priority actions going forward, they will have a perspective different from that of a legal professional or an engineer or a community person who lives nearby.

Learning to work with different perspectives and knowledge forms is critical to holistic understanding of the problem. I think it often breaks down into distrust because there is a sense that difference is a problem rather than something that can help increase our understanding. Something that has happened since the Bhopal disaster is that there is a recognition that community knowledge is valuable in understanding environmental threats and harms.

Q: Union Carbide took moral responsibility for the disaster, and they put out the message that forces in India were keener on fighting a long legal and political battle, which did not benefit the victims at all. Did such messages work in their favour?

A: Yes and no. It depends on who you ask. Certainly, chemical industry trade groups rallied behind Union Carbide. Even in the years after the disaster, the chief executive of Union Carbide was made the president of what was then the American Chemical Manufacturers Association. The name is now changed. There was this sense of defending the strength and the safety of the whole industry.

On the other hand, academics and industry engineers never bought Union Carbide’s claim that it was a disgruntled worker that introduced water into the storage tank, and that triggered the reaction which led to the gas leak. I remember reading a report of an academic conference where Union Carbide tried to tell that story, and nobody was taking it. Some employees of the company became very ashamed of their employers because of the disaster.

But you also must remember that while they promised to take moral responsibility, it was certainly not visible on the ground. Remember that this was also the beginning of a surge in corporate social responsibility. I think there is a connection, and that Bhopal was a driver of this. As it became clearer how risky these industries are, they increased their investment to create an image of being safe and socially responsible. It also prompted a lot of the PR campaigns through which corporations claim that they are on top of their game.

Q: What are some of common threads that emerge when you look at the whole Bhopal disaster and its comparison with other major industrial disasters?

A: It is really the question that needs to be at the centre of the way we teach Bhopal to future generations of workers, engineers, lawyers, and plant managers so that they understand that there are patterns to this. Many petrochemical facilities around the world are not only running dangerous processes, but their facilities are also ageing. They were built in the 1950s, and that exacerbates the contemporary risk. You need facilities that are well designed for safety, using the least toxic chemicals, and are not storing them on-site. There is a checklist of things one can do to make a facility safer even if dangerous chemicals are being used. These industries need investment in plant maintenance and upgrades. The industry should ask if they are investing in their workers? Are workers allowed to voice out their problems? I think you often see declines in worker training and skill as a precondition of disaster, along with a lack of government oversight, lack of organisation in the community. If the community does not even know about the risk, they cannot hold the company accountable.