Bhopal Gas Tragedy

There have been many Industrial disasters in the world but none like Bhopal, a human tragedy that refuses to die down even after 25 years. It is one of the blackest chapters in human development when corporate greed of Union Carbide took thousands of lives and is still ruining the lives of the children who are born to the gas victims. The toxic effects of host of carcinogenic chemicals and Methyl Isocyanide - MIC gas is still being transmitted to the next generation who are born with genetic deformities and live only up to 20 years, which is their life expectancy.

On the fateful night of December 3, 1984 Union Carbide's gases leaked from its ill kept plant across the sleeping city of Bhopal and affected more than half a million people. Of those, more than 20,000 are now dead, rest are struggling with their lives.

For the survivors further horrors lay in store. In the months and years that followed new illnesses began to appear in their bodies. The death-toll continued to mount as more and more succumbed to their injuries. A decade after the disaster, when girls who had been young children at the time of the gas were beginning to reach puberty, it became apparent that something terrible had happened inside their bodies. Some were menstruating three times a month, others once in six months. For many the disruption of their cycle was accompanied by intense, agonizing pain. The children who had been in the womb on the night and those who were born afterwards to gas-affected mothers began reporting the same horrors.

Almost fifty percent of gas-exposed women who were pregnant on the night spontaneously aborted. In the months that followed there was an epidemic of what one doctor called "monstrous births". The children of gas victims are born with cerebral palsy, mentally retardation and with many genetic defects and are terminally ill.

A 2002 study by the Sambhavna Clinic, published in JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) showed conclusively for the first time that the effects of the gas had crossed to a new generation. Children born to gas-affected mothers showed stunted upper body growth. Their heads, chests and internal organs were smaller than average. Besides they had lot of other problems like holes in the heart, cleft upper lip, joint fingers and the list goes on.

In 1999 a Greenpeace report established that highly toxic chemicals in the abandoned factory had leaked into the groundwater and thence into the drinking water supplies of 20,000 people. In February 2002 a study found lead, mercury and cancer- and birth-defect-causing chemicals in the breast milk of women living near the factory.

Today, some 120,000 people in Bhopal are still critically ill as a direct result of gas inhaled on that night. They are breathless, often in pain, unable to work. Many have been forced into destitution, some of the world's poorest people beggared by one of the world's richest corporations, from which came platitudes and evasions but no help.

Bhopal is not only suffering from the diseases caused by toxic gases but also from the government apathy and callousness. The system has been least responsive to the needs of the people in the aftermath.

So many government hospitals have been built in Bhopal since the 1984 disaster but they are of little use to the gas victims. The Comptroller and Auditor General's annual reports suggest that excessive commissions, and not concern for victims' welfare, are the real motive for building these huge hospitals that house seldom-used expensive equipment.

Given the nature of chronic exposure-induced illnesses and the need for continuous medication, systematic efforts towards finding non-toxic drug alternatives or drug-free therapies is long overdue. Despite repeated advice from medical professionals, a community health perspective is yet to become a reality for delivering health care to the gas-affected population. Budgetary allocations to community health services have remained under 2% and there are no government or community health workers. As a consequence, such vital areas as health education and community involvement in medical management remain neglected.

The worst sufferers of the tragedy are the children born with disabilities and terminal illnesses for not fault of theirs. . On one hand they are fighting the terrible chemical inside their bodies and on the other the callous system which does not even consider them gas victims.

While there are provisions for relief to gas victims, the children of gas victims are not even considered as gas victims. Born to the hapless and poverty stricken parents, as they are, they do not have a chance. Many of them have already given up hope and given up treatment. Others are still fighting a losing battle against- their bodies - their government in the hope that they and their children might get some relief. It is their fight for the survival and against the system.