Bhopal Lives On: The Many Faces of the Continuing Disaster

Tür:

Kitap Bölümü

Yazar:

Suroopa Mukherjee

Yayın yılı:

2010

Yayıncı:

Palgrave Macmillan US

Dil:

en

The event of December 3 transformed industrial risk, which had remained more or less a possibility and therefore a mere hypothesis, into the grim reality of a disaster. Described as the Hiroshima of industrial disasters, it left in its trail the official figures of 3,828 dead, 30,000 injured, and 2,544 livestock dead. But statistics belie the true nature of the disaster. This chapter focuses on the events and issues linked to the two decades following the disaster. In this way it draws attention to the many faces of the disaster in the changing national and global context. As pointed out earlier, Bhopal outlived the immediate crisis and continued to plague both the government and the company. It brought to the forefront the brutal reality that corporations in collusion with the state can cause irreparable harm to the most vulnerable section of society. Industrial risk has always been viewed as an inevitable part of enterprise and progress, so that it needs to be contained rather than addressed. The settlement was fallout of the collusion. Profit before people was the ideological impetus that paved way for the disaster to happen in the way that it did. The settlement had a more insidious long-term repercussion. It quashed criminal proceedings against all those who had been accused in the First Information Report (FIR), recorded by the Station House Officer at Hanuman Ganj police station on that night. The FIR was filed against Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), Union Carbide …

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