Bhopal Gas Tragedy: As Supreme Court rejects curative plea, here's what happened in 1984

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the Centre's curative plea seeking an additional Rs 7,844 crore from Union Carbide Corporation's successor firms to extend higher compensation to the victims of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy that killed over 3,000 people and caused long standing environmental damage. Dismissing the plea, the Supreme Court said a sum of Rs 50 crore lying with the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) shall be utilised by the Centre to satisfy claims. 

The Centre in December 2010 had filed a curative plea in the case for increasing the compensation amount, insisting that the scale of the actual damage to human lives and the environment could not be assessed properly at the time of the settlement in 1989. Moreover, the Centre is also backing its claim on the ground of rupee depreciation, Advocate Harish Salve contended on behalf of the UCC successor firms.

Bhopal gas tragedy

In one of world’s worst industrial disasters, over 5,295 people were killed and 5,68,292 people were left injured after the toxic methyl isocyanate gas leaked from the Union Carbide factory on the intervening night of December 2 and 3, 1984, in Bhopal. 

The accident affected about 6 lakh people and caused severe environmental damage and also killed a considerable amount of livestock. More than 120,000 people still suffer from the ailments connected to the exposure from the gas leak. The ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing and gynaecological disorders.

Within a couple of days after the disaster, trees in the adjacent areas of the plant became barren. The animal carcasses were  to be found lying abandoned and were dispossed off, people ran on the streets vomiting and coughing. The city ran out of cremation grounds due to the sudden human disaster. 

Methyl Isocyanate, which is no longer in production although remains to be a part of the process in manufacturing pesticides. 

The then chairman of the UCC, Warren Anderson was the prime accused in the case but did not appear for the trial and was declared as an absconder by the Bhopal CJM court on February 1, 1992. Non bailable warrants were issued by the courts in Bhopal against Anderson twice in 1992 and 2009 before his demise in September 2014. 

Decades later and in the aftermath of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Madhya Pradesh government stated that over 102 people who survived the gas tragedy in Bhopal died until December 2019. However, some NGOs claimed the figure to be about 254 people.

"As per the state's health bulletin, 518 people have died due to COVID-19 in Bhopal district so far. We visited the houses of 450 of these deceased to find out whether they were gas victims or not. Out of these 450 people, 254 were found to be the Bhopal gas tragedy survivors," Rachna Dhingra of NGO Bhopal Group for Information and Action (BGIA) claimed.