Rip Van Winkle act

The group of ministers (GoM) dealing with the resuscitated Bhopal gas leak tragedy of December, 1984 went about its job as though it was working on a blank slate and there was no previous history. It was literally the Rip Van Winkle act, the Appalachian folk tale of Washington Irving in which the idler-hero goes to sleep for 20 years and returns to find everything changed. In the case of the government of India and the GoM it is as though that the world has been standing still these 25 years.

It has announced enhanced monetary compensation to the victims: Rs10 lakh to relatives of the dead. Rs5 lakh to those who have been incapacitated and Rs2 lakh for those temporarily hurt. Of course, the detail was hidden away that whatever the money the victims had received by way of compensation earlier will be deducted from the fresh compensation.

Then it turned to the issue of cleaning up of the toxic waste at the Carbide site that has remained there for the last 25 years without taking cognisance of the changes in ownership of the UCIL. Union Carbide had sold off its shares in the Indian unit to an Indian company in 1994 with the permission of the Supreme Court. The UCIL site has been taken over by the Madhya Pradesh government in 1998. It has suggested that global tenders should be floated for the clean-up of the site and it has allocated Rs300 crore for the purpose.

The third major decision was to explore the extradition of former Carbide CEO, Warren Anderson, pretending to be unaware of the out-of-court settlement that Union Carbide and the government of India agreed to in 1987 by which Carbide paid US$470 million in compensation and in turn the government freed the American company of its civil and criminal liability. Of course, it was much later that the Supreme Court had allowed for the revival of criminal liability.

The Carbide case is extraordinarily messy in every which way. But in true bureaucratic fashion the GoM ignored the tangled aspects instead of disentangling it. The speed at which the course of action has been charted out is quite dazzling without the caveat that this comes after 25 years, of which Congress has been in power at the Centre and in Madhya Pradesh for 15 years.