Episode 5: “Mot Ka Silsila Abhi Bhi Jaari Hai” – The Ongoing Season of Death

EPISODE 5: MOT KA SILSILA ABHI BHI JAARI HAI / THE ONGOING SEASON OF DEATH

ACT I

Molly: The abandoned Union Carbide factory, still standing today, is guarded. Cops stand outside the front gate, the silhouette of their beer bellies protruding from their khaki uniforms clearly visible from a distance. Soon after Apoorva began her research in Bhopal, she went to see the factory for herself. Here’s our conversation when she returned.

Apoorva [phone interview]: The other day, I was at a standstill, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and go visit the now-abandoned Union Carbide factory. And like I’ve said a couple of times, I’m only 5 kilometers away, so it’s literally a 15-minute drive from my house to the factory.

   So my driver and I, we set off. And one of the most mind-boggling things is that I have read so much about this tragedy. I’ve read fiction novels, I’ve read research papers, I’ve read every kind of literature on this factory. And there are these landmarks that every single one of these pieces of literature mentions. Every single article talks about how the railway tracks were right next to the factory. And as we were driving near the factory, there it was! There was the train. I could see it, you know? It was the one that was going over to a nearby city. And these articles talk about this temple that was right at the corner, and there it was, this temple. It was still there. And even though 30 years is a long time, it really isn’t that long.

     But finally we make it to the main gates of the factory. And I had no intention of actually entering the complex. I just wanted to take a photo or two from a distance away. So anyway, we end up at the main gate, and there are these two cops right across from the main gate, and my driver says that I should just ask them how to get closer. And it’s fascinating– this short cop and this tall cop have this routine rehearsed. And the short cop is very much playing the role of “Oh, no, no, of course not,” and the tall cop is very much playing the role of, “Maybe, just for you, maybe we can bend the rules here.” So the gate stays closed, but there’s a little door right next to the main gate that we walk through. And the cop offers my driver his motorcycle. And he goes, “It’s a large complex. You can just take this motorcycle to go check it out.”

     And we’re driving around, and at this point it’s pretty overgrown. There are trees everywhere. There’s still a path that you can make out, but most everything is kind of overgrown with weeds and trees. It’s really green, surprisingly green. I just imagined it to be kind of a toxic wasteland. And we’re driving around, and we make it to one side of the complex, which is kind of near the wall. And the setting is exactly the way that I’ve read of it! There are slums that are– the houses have been built, literally leaning against the outside of these walls. And these neighborhoods expand as far as the eye can see. And in the distance, you can see the train that is still coming in. And there are cows eating the grass within the complex. I mean, how did these cows get here?

Molly [phone interview]: They must have paid the cops too, right?

Apoorva [phone interview]: I guess! It’s bizarre. I just had a moment where I was like, “Wow. This is real. This is all real.” And at this point, while I am having my moment, the two cops have caught up to us. So they start giving us a full-blown tour. They point out, “Oh, that was the old hospital that Union Carbide used. And here’s one of the reactors. And here are these cows, and they die every once or twice a year because there’s so much contamination in the dirt.” And he talked about how the people in the area, there’s still so many birth defects. And as he’s telling me all this, we’re walking up to the main factory. And finally there we are. We’re in front of the factory. And the tall cop, he points out one of the tanks, and he goes, “That’s the one. That’s the one that leaked the gas.”

[music]

Molly [phone interview]: “That’s the one?” That’s how he said it?

Apoorva [phone interview]: Yep. And I was like, “Oh my god.”

Molly [phone interview]: Wow. Do you believe him?

Apoorva [phone interview]: I have… No. I don’t think he knows which was the actual tank that leaked the gas. It doesn’t matter, you know? The purpose of this was thatrics.

     But I take a photo of it outside, and I’m turning away, ready to leave. And he goes, “Where are you going? You can see it from the inside.” And we go inside the factory. And it’s completely rusted over. There are these giant nests, like bees’ nests and birds’ nests. And there’s rubble everywhere. And I can definitely see that as a layperson, just looking around this factory, it definitely seems like there’s nothing left. It definitely seems like there’s nothing left to be cleaned up because it’s all just rust now. There’s no chemicals. You can still breathe, and it doesn’t bother your lungs or your eyes or anything. So I can see how a lot of the politicians can convince regular citizens that this is no longer a danger to their lives.

[music]

Apoorva: So who does own the factory? Who is responsible for removing it? For cleaning up whatever remains inside it? These are more than administrative questions, unfortunately. They are life and death. Because this factory is now the origin of a second, ongoing, present-day water crisis. 

 

INTRO

[music]

Molly: This is the story of the Bhopal gas tragedy, of the men, women, and children who survived it, and the decades-long struggle for justice, compensation, and the right to clean drinking water.

Apoorva: This is the story of the Bhopalis who were shaped but not defined by the disaster, of hope, of resilience, and of memory. I’m Apoorva Dixit.

Molly: This is They Knew Which Way to Run. Please note that this podcast contains depictions of death and loss that some people may find disturbing. 

Apoorva: And I’m Apoorva Dixit.

—

Apoorva: Episode 5: Mot Ka Silsila Abhi Bhi Jaari Hai / The Ongoing Season of Death

 

ACT II

Molly: As Apoorva saw in 2017, the Union Carbide factory is still mostly standing. It’s overgrown, of course, and the vats and tanks are mostly empty, but it’s much more than just an eyesore, or even a potential danger for future accidents. It is actively poisoning the water supply that runs to tens of thousands of people in the greater Bhopal area every day.

Apoorva: Here is Sathu Sarangi, the head of Sambhavna Clinic, who we’ve heard from many times in previous episodes, explaining the situation. 

Sathu: See, the story of the water contamination follows almost the exact script of the disaster. Which is completely negligent, what we call criminally negligent and reckless with regard to people’s health and life and all of that by the company. The government not taking enough care to know what’s happening, and again, collaborating with the company to play down the damage and help it to escape liability. And the people, again, not having information, but being victimized and revictimized and having to fight for something as basic as drinking water.

Apoorva: This contamination stems from two issues – neither of which is related to the gas tragedy other than the fact that it was Union Carbide who caused them. First, while the factory was still active, the area around the factory was used as a dumping ground for toxic waste. This waste has now soaked into the ground and into the water supply, which Bhopalis obtain from underground aquifers. 

Sathu: All of these toxins, they would dump all of these, what I would say, industrial waste. Some of them were actually other ingredients that were poisonous. And all of this would go inside the factory premises, which is a large area, 68 acres. Now, the interesting thing is that in Institute West Virginia…

Apoorva: Institute, West Virginia is a town, and the location of Union Carbide’s main factory in the US. And the only other Union Carbide factory producing methyl isocyanate (MIC).

Sathu: They just dump it into the river, you know, and the river takes it to the sea. Here, they did not have any river in Bhopal. So what they would do is they would dump it inside the premises. And in fact, you can find in the drawings that there were some 21 spots that were marked for them. A number of them, I would say more than half of them, were unlined pits. So just dig a hole in the ground and let stuff go. It began with pretty innocuous, small things, like the formulation plant would mix all these powders. The bowels would go and settle all over the factory floor and all around, and they would hose it down. And all these will go into a pit. So that’s how it began.

     In Charleston, West Virginia, they designed a waste management system for the factory. It was just dumping its waste inside. Uh, I said all of the dumping was inside the factory premises, but that was not quite correct, because they would dump a lot of stuff just outside the wall where nobody was watching. Because what was to the North of the factory wall? Farmers. Fields.

Apoorva: The second issue was that Union Carbide used solar evaporation ponds to generate solar energy. These ponds work when the sun heats the bottom of the pools and allows the hotter, saltier part of the water to be pumped away for energy distribution. 

Sathu: Across the railway track, about 400 meters from the MIC plant, actually, they had three huge ponds over an area of 32 acres. These ponds were about 18 to 20 feet deep and they had a lining of what’s called HDPE, high-density polyethylene. And from that time, from ‘77 onwards, uh, what used to happen was all this slurry and waste – cause most of it would be liquid waste – were all pumped into these three ponds. They were called solar evaporation ponds. You know, we’ll be building on the fantasy that the sun will take away everything. So what would happen?

     But then these Charleston, West Virginia technologists, they knew didn’t know the monsoon. So from the first monsoon onward, what would happen was – their calculations were some rain, occasional rain. They didn’t know about the torrential rains of the monsoon. The first monsoon started overflowing. And when it overflowed, it all flowed into the farmer’s fields. It burned standing crops. The stuff began right from the beginning. And so you can say it started in ‘77 – the contamination of the soil and eventually the groundwater. But much more happened later. 

Apoorva: But Union Carbide knew these pools were leaking since 1982 – two years before the gas tragedy even occurred. Which means that they have been sitting there, leaking into Bhopal’s water supply ever since.

Molly: As recently as a couple years ago, scientists have found contamination and toxicity in water samples from all over the city. One Bhopal-based survey conducted in 2018 found “harmful bacteria and other dissolved inorganic substances… over 2,400 times above the safe limit.” 

Apoorva: Another report out of the UK, conducted in conjunction with the Sambhavna Clinic, said that, “There are parts of the factory where the soil you walk on is 100 percent toxic waste, and there are areas where you still see pools of mercury on the ground.” And an often-cited Centre for Science and Environment study in 2002 found lead, mercury and organochlorines in the breast-milk of the Bhopali women using and drinking this contaminated water. 

Molly: People in the surrounding areas of the factory, whose drinking water comes from those underground aquifers that pass right by the factory site, have been found to have higher rates of birth defects, cancer, neurological damage, chaotic menstrual cycles and mental illness than of their other Bhopali counterparts.

Apoorva: The Bhopali government, however, denies that the factory has anything to do with the water contamination, even though a full-scale contamination survey has never been performed. In fact, when I spoke to one former Bhopali official, Babulal Gaur, he denied any connection completely.

Molly: Babulal Gaur served as a politician for most of his adult life. He was part of the opposition party at the time of the gas tragedy, and one of the most vocal advocates demanding the ruling party step down due to this massive failure. He also served as a Minister for various different local Bhopali departments, including the Bhopal Gas Relief and Rehabilitation Ministry in the early 1990s. 

Apoorva: But when I spoke to him in 2017, he told me that the tragedy was over. He told me that he believes the activists are making up the claims about water contamination to get more compensation money from the government. He said that any potential contamination would have already evaporated, and he doesn’t believe any new studies that come out saying otherwise. 

[music]

Molly: This is not a new problem. Local activists like Krishna Bai have been fighting for clean water for over 20 years. 

Krishna: It was impossible not to know our water was contaminated. In 2004, it was rusting our pots and pans. We couldn’t really digest our food after we drank it. 

Molly: Krishna was just one of hundreds of activists from all over Bhopal who have fought for clean water, both in their protests, which we’ll talk about in a minute, and in the courts. 

Apoorva: You may recall Judge Keenan of New York from Episode 3, who assigned jurisdiction for Bhopal’s compensation case to India, rather than America, in 1989. Well, 1989 was not the last time Keenan heard about Bhopal. In fact, many cases were presented in his court through the decades, into the 2000s. In 1999, he heard the Bano case, which argued for Warren to appear in criminal cases in India and alleged property damage in the colonies around the factory who were drinking contaminated groundwater. In 2004, in the Janki Sahu case, he heard the argument for personal injuries coming out of the pollution at the former Union carbide factory. In 2007, the Sahu II case sued Union Carbide Corporation, now Dow Chemical, for ongoing contamination from the Bhopal factory. 

Molly: Judge Keenan dismissed each and every case presented to him. All of his rulings were appealed and maintained. In 2013, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote: “…no reasonable juror could find that Union Carbide Corporation participated in the creation of the contaminated drinking water. Neither UCC’s approval of the plan to ‘back-integrat’” the plant, nor its transfer of technology for pesticide manufacture, nor its designs for a waste disposal system, nor its limited involvement in remediation amount to participation in the failure of the evaporation ponds to contain the hazardous waste.”

Apoorva: Many of the people who live in the contaminated areas today were never affected by the gas because they did not live in Bhopal at the time of the tragedy. It wasn’t until they came to Bhopal, or came specifically to the water-contaminated areas, that they started dealing with health issues.

Molly: Shahazadi Bi and her family lived in Bhopal at the time of the tragedy, but didn’t move to a water-contaminated area until 1992.

Shahazadi: We didn’t know what the dangers of this place were. We used to live in Kazi Camp, Berisia Road. There used to be a farm here. They used to raise cows here, so land was cheap. Obviously we weren’t rich people. We only had the construction salary of my husband – Rs. 200 – and then the compensation we got for all of my kids. We bought this current land for Rs. 9000. And then we started building a house here in 1992. And it was not until 2001 that we discovered that the water we were drinking was poisoned. In 2001! After 9 years!

 

Apoorva: Sarita is only in her twenties, but got involved in the activism because she realized the health effects were leaking into future generations.

Sarita: At first, when we used to pump water, we didn’t mind it much. We thought that since it was coming from the pump, that’s why it was dirty and smelled bad. But when we started getting sick, they told us that this water is causing diseases and disabling our children, I went to Chingari and met those kids, and then I realized that this water was ruining our generation. Something inside told me that I should join, because if we don’t do anything today, tomorrow someone else will be affected.

Molly: Her friend Safreen joined the movement because her parents were involved. 

Safreen: I went to the rallies and met other survivors, and I felt good about learning about my roots. We all chanted together, we would have fun together. People still have so much josh, even now that they’re so old. In 2006, my parents both went walking to Delhi. I didn’t go in 2006, but I went in 2008.

Apoorva: Survivors decided to take their rallies on the road in 2006, much like Rasheeda Bi, and Champa Devi, and the other survivors did in 1989. They marched all the way to Delhi, about 450 miles, to demand clean water from the Prime Minister directly. 

Molly: And then, when no changes occured, they did it again in 2008. 

Safreen: We reached Delhi in 37 days. We just wanted to remind the PM of his promise from 2006. In 2006, he had promised that  us Bhopalis would get clean water, a daily wage, and that survivors’ widows would get a pension. But none of that happened. And we had to walk all the way to Delhi just to remind him. But when we got there, there was no response. No one acknowledged that we had done this feat. We couldn’t even get a meeting with any politician. They wouldn’t agree to anything.

     So then we wrote a letter in blood to the Prime Minister. The blood was donated by the adults, but we kids wrote the letter. We asked the Prime Minister to meet the 50 of us. That’s all. “PMji, please meet us.” That’s all. Nothing happened. We waited, but nothing happened. So then we did a protest at the India Gate. We all put white sheets over us and pretended to be corpses, to remind everyone how Bhopal looked after the gas tragedy. And to remind everyone that the season of death in Bhopal is ongoing. Mot ka silsila abhi bhi jaari hai Bhopal mai.

     Nothing happened. Instead, they just arrested us. They wrote our names down, but then they released us. So then we decided to put on a protest in the PM’s office. There were 50 or 60 women that came together. And before we would do a protest, there was always a training the night before. We would tell people where to go, how to lie down, what to do when the cops came. How you should make your body go limp when the police try to pick you up. We knew that the security around the PM’s office is very tight, so we couldn’t all just show up. So decided to go as tourists with umbrellas and just humming like we were there to sightsee. And we had tied the white sheets around our hands so that people couldn’t see what we were holding. So we went, two to four people at a time. And finally, when we were all in, 20 to 30 just laid down on the floor in the office with the white sheets over our head. And we got great press coverage, but then a LOT of police came. And they arrested all of us. And they kept us overnight in the jail. At the police station, they beat people up and really abused us. Even the kids were arrested. 

     The next morning, they took us to a medical exam. Outside, there was a hunger strike going on. So they put like ten of us in the van, so they could take others to the medical exam. And we just sat in the van for a while, waiting for the adults to come back from their exam. And we asked the police to go see our relatives. They told us no, and closed the van door. There were two cops in the van and a few outside. And we told the cops that if you don’t let us go, we’ll jump out of the windows. The cops told us to go ahead. So we did. So then their boss was like, what are you doing? What if you kids get hurt jumping out the window? How would that look? The boss told us that we were so unruly and he never saw such disrespectful kids. And we told him that if you ever came to Bhopal, you’d see everything…

     After that, they knew to keep an eye on us Bhopal folks. 

[music]

Shahazadi: Since 2001, I’ve done hunger strikes five times! In 2007, seven of us did a hunger strike for 14 days. The cops carried us to the hospital and tried to make us break our hunger strike. The collector came and broke our hunger strike, and years after, we got clean water in 2012.

Apoorva: In 2012, finally, the Bhopali government began piping in water from the nearby Narmada River to dozens of affected neighborhoods, instead of forcing people to use the contaminated underground wells. Shahazadi Bi remembers the day well.

Shahazadi: That day, the day we got our sinks finally gave us clean water, I felt like we had finally done something. Finally, we had earned something from the government. Finally, we got clean water and will be saved from this poison. At least, we can finally drink at peace. But every single drop of clean water we have gotten was won by so many buckets of sweat.

Apoorva: In 2018, when I interviewed these women about their fight for clean water and the efforts they took to obtain it, I asked Sarita if they celebrated when they finally got the water that they needed.

Sarita: No, of course we didn’t celebrate. This was our right! It wasn’t like we’d been given some sort of surprise or gift. This was our right, and we took it. You party when you’re given something unexpectedly or something you didn’t ask for. We spent so much time and energy on this. We have been arrested, gotten beaten up, been on hunger strike for 21 days, arrested pregnant women, we have lived in tents in thunderstorms. Only after all of that did we get anything. Did we get something as basic as clean water.

 

ACT III

Molly: There has been a lot of youth involvement with the water protests – so much so that they created their own organization, Children Against Dow Carbide, in 2008. Soon after, several activists, including Safreen and Sarita, took their protests to the U.S. to visit another Union Carbide factory. The one in Institute, West Virginia. 

Sarita: It was hard because it was tough to get a visa and passport. But eventually, we got everything together. We met so many politicians, and we went to West Virginia to see the factory and meet the locals there. 

Molly: Perhaps not surprisingly, Union Carbide’s West Virginia plant had all kinds of safety measures put into place that Bhopal didn’t have, including the installation of protective suits and breathing equipment on every level of the factory, special training for firefighters on how to respond to chemical fires, and special cooling coils lining the inside of the tanks of methyl isocyanate – the chemical released in the Bhopal tragedy. 

Apoorva: And yet in August 1985, only eight months after the gas tragedy in Bhopal, the Union Carbide factory in West Virginia also had a leak. The factory released a toxic cloud containing multiple chemical contaminants into the air, causing more than 100 residents eye, throat, and lung irritation. Union Carbide denied the fear that any methyl isocyanate had escaped.

Molly: The Environmental Protection Agency in 1993 reported that there were multiple reasons for the leak: a high-temperature alarm that should have alerted workers to the leak was out of service; the tank’s level indicator was broken; a water-spray system built to keep the gas from going off site didn’t work; and a new gas detection system was never set up to test for one of the main gasses that escaped that day.

Apoorva: If this sounds a lot like what happened in Bhopal, it’s because it is. If you remember from Episode 2, we discussed all of the safety features that should have prevented the gas tragedy in Bhopal that had been foregone, as well, including turning off the refrigeration system for the tanks two years months prior to the tragedy; ignoring the need for instrument repair; turning off the alarm systems because they sounded so frequently; and foregoing a computer system that would alert workers to a leakage.

Molly: Then, in 2008, an explosion at the same West Virginia factory sent metal projectiles weighing up to a hundred pounds within 80 feet of the methyl isocyanate storage tank – the only one like it left in the U.S. 

Apoorva: The factory in Institute is in a region of West Virginia called Chemical Valley because it’s become a popular spot for chemical and coal factories. Not surprisingly, its people have suffered all kinds of pollution, from black water running from their faucets to skin rashes to coal-cleansing chemicals spilling into the river in 2014.

Sarita: So we talked about how we were affected, and they told us about their issues. We tried to come together with different groups of people across the US to help our fight to bring Dow Chemical to justice.

 

ACT IV

Molly: The water contamination is Bhopal’s best kept secret. I mean, very few people outside of Bhopal today know about the gas tragedy. But even those who do definitely don’t know about the water contamination caused by the very same factory. 

Apoorva: The Bhopali activists I was lucky enough to interview are brave and resourceful, but they’ve essentially been left to their own devices. Even now that the government is finally providing clean water to these neighborhoods – or at least to some of them – they’re still not admitting that it has anything to do with the factory. Which is mind-boggling. Even other Bhopalis don’t know about this water battle or that it has anything to do with Union Carbide or the gas tragedy. 

Molly: I think it’s just evidence of the larger point that the world loses interest in ongoing, chronic tragedies. I mean, just look at COVID-19. Some may argue that COVID is much bigger than Bhopal. It’s global. It’s affected all of us. It’s well documented in our social media. It’s gone on for years. You wouldn’t think we’d be able to lose interest, but haven’t we already? 

Apoorva: Yeah. In our third year of COVID-19, after passing the really morbid checkpoint of a million deaths in the US, I think COVID and the crises in Bhopal are pretty parallel. Each disaster creates a new class of inequities, and time erases evidence of the violence that caused them. COVID has disproportionately harmed the disadvantaged. Just like MIC in Bhopal, it targeted the marginalized. Wealth insulated many of us from COVID’s impact, just as elevation and literal insulation determined who survived the gas tragedy.

Molly: And the toll will be generational. How will the children born today understand the current disaster? Some will never know life without a mask, will never know the parents they’ve lost or the aunts and uncles without long-term COVID disabilities. Similarly in Bhopal, some children will never know life without birth defects from the water crisis, will never know the parents they lost to the gas tragedy. 

Apoorva: And yet others will know COVID as nothing more than a sentence in their social studies textbook. Like me, they might not even hear of it until they get into middle school. And it’s so easy to fall into pessimism and assume that you can’t do anything about all these big issues, so there’s no point in doing anything at all. Even remembering. 

Molly: But the activists don’t forget. They organize. They take care of each other. They teach the next generations about the power of their voices. They remember. 

Apoorva: And so must we.

 

OUTRO

Molly: You’ve been listening to They Knew Which Way to Run. Tune in next time to learn more about the survivor-activists Apoorva interviewed in Bhopal, how they’ve changed since the tragedy, and what they’ve managed to build in the years since. 

Apoorva: We encourage you to check out our website at www.TheyKnewWhichWaytoRun.com, where you can learn more information about the tragedy, see photos of the survivors and make a donation to NGOs on the ground still fighting for justice today. You can also read a transcript of this episode. This podcast series is written, edited, and produced by me and Molly Mulroy. Quinn Mulroy is our sound editor and associate producer.

Molly: All the interviews used in our podcast were conducted by Apoorva Dixit both independently and while working with Sambhavna Clinic and photographer Francesca Moore. Our head of marketing is Shreya Joshi, our transcription specialist is Avi Dixit, our copy editor is Julia Hamilton, our cover art was designed by Amey Zhang, our website designer is Ljiljana Brusic, and all of our music is composed by Derek Renfroe. 

Apoorva: Very big thank you to everyone who supported us with this podcast and the following Bhopalis for sharing their stories for this episode: Krishna Bai, Shahazadi Bi, Sarita, Safreen, and Sathu Satirangi

     Also, thank you to our voice actors: Meena Kasargod, Vartika Shukla, Jyoti Narayanan, and Nandini Basu.  

     I’m Apoorva Dixit.

Molly: And I’m Molly Mulroy. Thank you for listening.