Bhopal 1 Year Later: Renewal Cost Too Much

The wretched slum neighborhood where hundreds of Indians died when the Union Carbide pesticide plant spewed forth poison gas one year ago is undergoing a face lift at the hands of the Indian government.

Jai Prakash Nagar, a squatters’ colony of hovels and huts that Indians call a busti slum, now has electric lines running into every hut. Only a few dozen feet across a road from the main gate of the American-owned plant, the devastated neighborhood now features new red-brick sidewalks instead of dirt paths and open sewers.

Gleaming white, four-wheel-drive “gas relief” ambulances patrol the streets.

There were no ambulances in Jai Prakash Nagar and neighboring areas when the people needed them a year ago. Now there are nine.

“We are upgrading the slum,” explained an Indian official.

High Cost of Urban Renewal

No one paid much attention to Jai Prakash Nagar before the gas leak. Now it is everyone’s favorite charity. But if you ask most of the people who live there, they would quickly trade their new slum for their old one. The price of urban renewal has been too great.

A year after the deadly gas leak killed more than 2,000 people here, thousands of victims are still undergoing regular treatment at clinics surrounding the closed-down, rapidly deteriorating plant.

Their number is mixed with thousands of other desperately poor Indians who have come to take advantage of free health care and government relief programs. However, doctors estimate that half the patients they see are still suffering from exposure to methyl isocyanate, the poison gas used in the production of household pesticides by Union Carbide’s Indian subsidiary.

The most common complaints are breathlessness, stomachaches and persistent headaches. The gas victims’ misery is compounded by the fact that despite the best efforts of several hundred doctors and at least 14 independent medical studies, no successful line of treatment has been devised for them.

“No regime has been established,” said one doctor. “The long-term effects are still not known.”

Rafiq Bee, 30, a handsome Muslim woman dressed entirely in black except for several red plastic bracelets on each wrist, was bent over in pain when she came into the D.I.G. Bungalow Hospital clinic recently for treatment.

She lived in Jai Prakash Nagar with her husband and four children. Now she complains of chest pains and stomach pains. She told the doctor her husband still cannot work because he cannot breathe regularly. She was three months pregnant when the gas spilled into her home. Her baby, now 6 months old, also has lung problems, she said.

Rigors of Winter

Dr. N.N. Nanda, her physician and the director of the clinic, said the symptoms have been aggravated by the arrival of colder temperatures.

“Since winter has come again, the problems of cough and breathlessness have started up,” said Nanda. “There has been permanent damage to these people’s lungs that makes them vulnerable to exposure and infection.”

Nanda’s clinic, a converted state government office a few hundred years yards from the Carbide plant, sees about 600 outpatients each day. Before the Bhopal gas disaster, there were only two small clinics in the slum colonies here. Now there are seventeen. Two more hospitals are under construction.

It will take decades to unravel the physical and moral legacy of the Bhopal gas disaster. In the chilly hours before dawn last Dec. 3, an estimated 40 tons of the methyl isocyanate gas spewed from the plant and enveloped its victims as they huddled for warmth in their slum huts.

300,000 Affected

Officials estimate that 300,000 Bhopal residents were affected in some way by the gas leak. The city, the capital of Madhya Pradesh, the largest and one of the poorest Indian states, has a population of 900,000.

Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Motilal Vohra has declared Tuesday a day of mourning in Bhopal. “An appeal has been made to make it a day of prayer in all mosques and temples,” said L.K. Joshi, spokesman for the state government.

The government, which was criticized for allowing slum communities to be built only a few feet from the Union Carbide fence, also has announced a public mass meeting where Vohra will distribute food, introduce a program to train gas-impaired residents as television technicians and announce plans for a massive memorial to the dead.

Several local organizations that sprang up after the disaster also have plans for the anniversary.

Paintings by Children

The largest, the Ngrik Rhat Ar Pnarwas Committee (Citizens’ Committee for Relief and Rehabilitation), intends to unveil its own memorial to the victims. It will also display paintings by children who were victims of the gas leak, including several that depict Union Carbide Corp. Chairman Warren M. Anderson as a giant ogre with gas pouring from his mouth as victims die at his feet.

“We consider that what happened in Bhopal is not just a disaster,” said Padmanaban Murti of the citizens’ committee. “Humanity must take lessons. We learn from war. What we have seen is that even in peacetime we can have Hiroshima disasters.”

Another group called the Poison Gas Episode Struggle Front has made Tuesday the culmination of a “Throw Union Carbide Out Week” and will use the anniversary day to urge nationalization of Carbide’s 12 other factories in India. In the past, demonstrations by this group have ended in violence as police attempted to disperse crowds with wooden sticks.

Firm Charges Sabotage

Union Carbide, based in Danbury, Conn., announced last week that it will build a $10-million pulmonary research institute and treatment center in Bhopal. Chairman Anderson, in making the announcement, said he believes the disaster was the result of sabotage and that, while the company has no legal liability, “Carbide has never wavered in our acceptance of a moral responsibility for Bhopal.”

The demonstrations by the government and the agitation groups threaten to upstage the actual victims of one of history’s worst industrial accidents.

Before the physical wounds have healed here, Bhopal has become a symbol--at least in Indian eyes--of industrial callousness and multinational exploitation of the Third World. Even government officials talk in these terms.

“A crime has been committed on these people. The profit motive triumphed over attention to human needs,” charged state government spokesman L.K. Joshi, who recently taught American history at a northern India university. “This is the lesson of Bhopal. Too much of a price has been paid for progress. In the future, progress should be tempered with caution.”

$40 Million in Relief

Possibly anticipating a huge settlement with Union Carbide from lawsuits pending in U.S. courts, the government of India has already spent an unprecedented $40 million on relief efforts in the Bhopal area.

Besides the new brick sidewalks and the power lines, several ramshackle dwellings have television antennas. Nearby are several offices where the state government is distributing cash payments of 1,500 rupees ($130) intended for needy victims of the gas disaster. However, little attention is paid to who gets the payments; often they go to families who complain the loudest of their plight, whether they are gas victims or not.

Critics of the government charge that the efforts are only political image-building, in effect bribes to avert blame from the government, which is controlled at the state level by the ruling Congress-I Party of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

“What you see is all for appearance,” said Murti of the Citizens’ Committee. “Jai Prakash Nagar has just been built up for public consumption. It is the first place the foreign press goes. Go to places just a little distance away and nothing has been done.”

Image-Building Works

So far, at least, the image building has worked. In Bhopal elections, delayed because of the gas tragedy, the Congress-I Party swept state and city governments posts. The chief minister of Madhya Pradesh at the time of the disaster, Arjun Singh, later became a national hero for his role as a mediator in the Punjab crisis and now is a minister of the central government.

The government, meanwhile, contends that it has only begun work to aid the city. A few weeks ago, it came out with an extensive urban renewal plan that it said is related to the effects of the gas tragedy. The plan calls for a new airport, street lighting, new parks and 5,000 new homes for slum dwellers.

The cost of the massive renewal: about $300 million, the same amount offered by Union Carbide as an out-of-court settlement for the gas leak.

(The $300-million offer--$100 million in cash and $200 million to be paid over a 30-year period--was rejected by the Indian government. The government, by an act of Parliament, claims to represent the gas victims in their claims in the United States. An important hearing will be held in New York next month to decide if the cases should be heard in the United States or in India).

The irony of the Bhopal situation is that despite the rebuilding and ambitious urban renewal plans, little progress has been made in finding ways to treat the still-suffering victims.

Little Known About Illness

Despite the medical studies of the effects of methyl isocyanate on the human body, little is known yet about why so many people died and why so many others still suffer respiratory ailments. A Union Carbide-commissioned study on the long-term effects of the gas, promised in March, still has not been released.

Doctors in India, meanwhile, are locked in an academic dispute over whether the injuries to victims were caused by pure methyl isocyanate or cyanide produced as a chemical side reaction. Patients therefore are being treated for both possibilities.

One man, A.K. Saadan, 36, a bank auditor who was passing through Bhopal with his family when the gas leaked occurred, said he has so far received 30 injections of sodium thisulphate, the commonly prescribed treatment for cyanide poisoning. Saadan said he has been fired from his job at a government-controlled bank in Bombay because treatment for his ailment is available only in Bhopal.

“I lost my vision for two days. Now I have no energy. No breath. Even climbing a staircase is the most difficult thing for me,” said Saadan, a tall, handsome man who spoke in flawless English.

‘Complete Indifference’

He is most bitter about losing his job at the government bank: “At one place, the government is making tall claims about relief and rehabilitation of gas victims, but at another place the same government of India has adopted an attitude of complete indifference toward my plight.”

More bewildering than Saadan’s case is the case of Ashok Yadav, 13.

Yadav, who looks about 10, sits under a red blanket in the methyl isocyanate ward at Hamidian Hospital. The special ward, like many of the places devoted to rehabilitation and relief work, has been given a fresh coat of paint. The blankets and bedding are all much better than those found in the rest of the hospital. But underneath Yadav’s bed, undisturbed by pedestrian traffic, are several scurrying mice. The floor is filthy.

Yadav’s face is swollen. His eyes show pain as he slowly rocks his upper body. He complains that he is hungry but cannot eat. His stomach hurts. Yadav lived in Jai Prakash Nagar and lost both his parents and all his siblings in the gas leak.

“He has renal (kidney) failure apart from his pulmonary problems,” said Dr. Raghavendra Pathak, attending physician at the special gas clinic and a professor of medicine at nearby Gandhi Medical University. Renal failure is an unusual complication, and Yadav’s doctors are uncertain whether it is gas-related.

Times staff writer Michael A. Hiltzik in New York contributed to this story.