Did UCC mislead India while seeking licence?

There are reasons to believe Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), whose neglect led to the Bhopal gas leak that killed thousands, misled the Indian government while seeking a licence to set up the pesticides plant where exceptionally large quantity of lethal methyl isocyanate (MIC) was stored in complete disregard to safety rules.

Bhopal trial court judge Mohan P Tiwari has already highlighted the role of the company’s India chairman Keshub Mahindra and discredited the defence that he was ignorant of what had been going on before the disaster in December 1984.

However, two vital documents speaking volumes of UCC’s attitude towards the Indian market and people have escaped the legal proceedings.
Argentinean agronomic engineer Eduardo Munoz, who had been assigned the task of setting up the plant in Bhopal by UCC (now owned by Dow Chemicals), had objected to it being in a residential area. He had sought to stop storage of huge quantities of MIC. But his bosses in the US overruled, saying, “You have absolutely no need to worry, dear Eduardo Munoz. Your Bhopal plant will be as inoffensive as a chocolate factory.”

Later, India accepted the UCC application filed by Munoz.

It’s expected of the India government now to reveal all documents it examined or were submitted by UCC in the 1970s before allowing the plant.
UCC’s safety audit report prepared by senior executive RD Bradley, much before the company spread its tentacles in India, also makes startling revelations. 

“Our safety performance has shown no improvement for more than 10 years as measured by the most significant yardstick: Disabling injury frequency,” Bradley said in the confidential report on the company’s safety performance during 1958-1968.

“Furthermore, in the last 10 years we have become the most hazardous employer in the Big Seven chemicals group, maiming people at more than twice the rate of the others,” he said, adding, “We rank seventh in the Big Seven [DuPont, Monsanto, American Cyanamid, Allied, Celanese, Dow and Carbide, in that order].”

As such, global environment protection group Toxics Watch has rightly asked the government to explain the manner in which it accepted UCC’s application when it didn’t have sufficient industrial intelligence.