Bhopal Disaster Research Articles

When Silicon Valley Feared Bhopal

In Silicon Valley, the Bhopal disaster led to a bitter controversy regarding poisonous gases used in high-tech manufacturing. Concerned by the potential release of deadly gases by semiconductor plants, fire departments drafted a stringent ordinance regarding their use, handling, and storage. Microelectronics firms opposed the ordinance and campaigned for a weaker set of rules. As public opinion shifted toward strict regulation, the Inter-Governmental Council of Santa Clara County forced industry to go back to the negotiating table and develop a revised version of the firefighters’ ordinance in collaboration with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, an environmental group. The toxics gas ordinance was later incorporated into the Uniform Fire Code and set the rules for the utilization of hazardous gases in the American West.

Airborne Toxicity in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

Abstract In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, people across the world came to realize the significant relationship between air and human health. This pandemic, which changed the course of many lives, demonstrated how air serves as a transmitter of viruses. However, this quality of air is not new, with air acting as a significant tool in transmitting diseases, pollution, and even death. It is crucial to understand that airborne diseases include but are not limited to epidemics or pandemics such as the black death, influenza, or COVID-19. Since the Chernobyl disaster, it is perceived that the previously feared disasters were replaced by new and human-made hazards such as toxicity and radioactivity. Environmental disasters such as the Bhopal disaster, Donora Smog, and the Chernobyl disaster emphasize the impact of toxic chemicals on humans and more-than-human lives. These disasters show that toxic substances that threaten the lives of all living things imperceptibly seep into the soil, water, and air, causing harm to ecosystems, and entering into human and more-than-human bodies. Exposure to toxicity and radioactivity can happen in the blink of an eye, transmitted through the air we breathe. Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise presents a significant example of toxicity through its striking portrayal of an airborne toxic event. This event, the appearance of a cloud of the fictional chemical Nyodene D., presents an environmental crisis through which relationships between air and environments can be explored. Similar to the issues and reflections experienced after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the characters in White Noise experience chaos, uncertainty, and fear following the abrupt occurrence of an airborne toxic event.

Animal’s Gaze in Sinha’s Animal’s People

The article critically studies Indra Sinha's Animal’s People by critiquing Animal, a deformed young man born in the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster. Narrated by Animal himself via tapes transcribed by an Australian journalist, the novel explores themes of animality, identity, and representation. The article draws on a variety of scholarly perspectives, including ecocriticism, postcolonial criticism, posthumanism, and others to uncover the complexities of Animal's character. Drawing on the insights of Julietta Singh, Justin Omar Johnston and Andrew Mahlstedt, among many other scholars, the paper critiques common interpretations of Animal as the voice of the oppressed and offers a new perspective on his character. The paper argues that Animal's voyeuristic gaze is not compatible with typical animal behavior, but rather affirms Animal’s compromised morality as a deformed human being. Despite his efforts to establish his animality, Animal's actions betray macho human tendencies and challenge the idea that he is the appropriate figure to represent animals and ecology at large.

The Bhopal disaster (1984 – 2024): Reflections on the anniversary of a wound that does not heal

The Bhopal disaster (1984 – 2024): Reflections on the anniversary of a wound that does not heal

Precarious Lives of the Proletariat: Exploring the Human-Induced Catastrophe in the web series The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984 (2023)

This study explores the concept of ‘slow violence,’ a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe the insidious, often unnoticed effects of power imbalances over time. It examines how ‘state vampirism’ and ‘industrial capitalism’ oppress marginalized populations, with a focus on India’s dependency on countries like the USA. The research juxtaposes exploitation and deprivation in human-induced disasters, such as the Bhopal Gas tragedy (1984) and Chornobyl (1986), through the lens of Marxist subalternism. It also analyzes the portrayal of these themes in the 2023 Netflix series “The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984,” highlighting the plight of slum dwellers near Bhopal’s carbide factory. Ultimately, this paper questions the victimization process by capitalist multinationals, positioning Bhopal as a prime example of ‘corporate violence.’

COVID-19 mortality in 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy survivors: implications for chemically exposed populations.

Leakage of methyl isocyanate from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, killed thousands and left deleterious trans-generational effects. Gas-exposed populations experience higher rates of lung and metabolic diseases, and immune dysregulation, all associated with adverse outcomes in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We used publicly available, official data from government sources to estimate COVID-19-associated crude mortality in populations with and without a history of gas exposure. Overall, there were 1240 deaths among patients hospitalized with known COVID-19 in Bhopal, of which 453 (36.53%) were in gas-exposed individuals, 726 (58.55%) were in gas-unexposed individuals and the exposure status of 61 (4.92%) individuals could not be determined. There were 351 and 375 deaths in gas-unexposed people in the first (April 2020-February 2021) and second (March 2021-July 2021) waves, respectively; in the gas-exposed population, there were 300 and 153 deaths in the two respective waves. The overall annualized crude mortality of COVID-19 was 3.84 (95% CI 3.41 to 4.33) times higher in the gas-exposed population at 83.6 (95% CI 76.1 to 91.7) per 100 000 compared with the gas-unexposed population, at 21.8 (95% CI 20.2 to 23.4) per 100,000. When stratified by age, compared with unexposed people, the gas-exposed individuals experienced 1.88 (95% CI 1.61 to 2.21) and 1.24 (95% CI 1.02 to 1.50) times the mortality rates in the age groups of 35-65 and >65 y, respectively. These findings indicate that gas-exposed individuals are likely to have a higher risk of severe COVID-19 and death and need to be specifically targeted and recognized for preventive and promotive efforts.

Intersecting Disability and Trauma: a Study of Identity Metamorphosis in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

The motive of this paper is to examine identity as a metaphor of change in the interface of trauma and disability study. The creation of identity and meaning in disability study, especially caused by disasters like chemical leakage, is reformulated by the effect of traumatic situations in the socio-political-psychological existence. Identity gets divided into post-human combination of ‘self’ and ‘other’. It is also reframed by the memory of past in contrast with present, and by the allegorical existence of dream and reality. Such is in the case of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), which represents the tragedy caused by Bhopal Gas disaster. It reflects on the modification of identity, especially in the character of Animal (a disabled victim), springing from normal to paranormal entity due to the memory of traumatic night. There are other characters such as Somraji and Maa Francis, who collectively suffer from identity crisis due to the memory of ‘that night’. Thus, the formation of identity varies over the experience of traumatic events of ‘that night’.

The Railway Men

Abstract The Bhopal Disaster, also known as the Bhopal Gas Tragedy, is recognized as the world’s worst industrial disaster. The Bhopal Disaster is the only industrial disaster affecting half a million people in the last few decades. Because of the sheer magnitude of this disaster, this topic remains relevant, especially to learn what preventive measures could have been taken to ensure such a tragedy never occurred. The disaster occurred from a mixture of chemicals that produced a toxic gas, a lack of employee reporting when issues arose in the plant and weak safety systems. In December 1984, a poison gas blanketed the city of Bhopal. Due to the mistakes mentioned above, over two thousand people and many more livestock died overnight and were discovered the next morning. The effects of the disaster still linger in the same location to this day.

The drive and passion of Faisal Khan to improve onshore and offshore process industries' safety levels

AbstractIn 1997, a number of articles were co‐authored and published in leading process safety journals (e.g., Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Process Safety Progress, and Process Safety and Environmental Protection) by a young and enthusiastic scientist, Faisal Khan—motivated by a drive to improve the safety practices of the time after the 1984 Bhopal Disaster—and a well‐known Professor and Scientist from the Centre for Pollution Control and Environmental Engineering at Pondicherry University, Dr. Shahid Abbas Abbasi. It began a new horizon in the process safety domain, as this young scientist continued to excel in this field and shed light with numerous inventions and by training several hundreds of next‐generation safety professionals as a Professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland, University of Tasmania, and Texas A&M University. This article is written in honour of Dr. Faisal Khan. Capturing the fullness of Dr. Khan briefly is an arduous task; however, the authors of the current article have attempted to describe his personality, background, and contributions based on their professional interactions with him.

Paired with the impaired: disability, disaster and the role of the nation in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

ABSTRACT In this article, I focus on Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People as case study, a literary representation of the compound crises of disability and a postcolonial chemical disaster that resulted in mass human disability and deaths. Set in the fictitious place of Khaufpur in India, the novel is a retelling of the 1984 ‘Bhopal Gas Disaster’. Sinha’s narrative depicts how the disaster extracts all human qualities from the eponymous character Animal and transforms him into a ‘creature’ with a crooked spine and walking on four ‘legs’, a progeny of the ‘Apokalis’, striving hard to survive, along with many other people of Khaufpur. This article will also investigate how Sinha makes Animal the icon of the impaired nation suffering from economic disability. I would simultaneously attempt to find out how a postcolonial nation becomes disabled in the hands of the multinational corporate economy, the imported ‘Biopolitics’ and neo-colonial exploitations, whilst also thinking about these metaphors critically.

Monster Ecologies: Material Eco-Rhapsody and the Bio-Gothic in Animal’s People

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People incorporates bio-gothic aesthetics to address the unprecedented ontological, perceptual, and political challenges presented by the Bhopal chemical disaster. Bio-gothic aesthetics refer to biological substrates to represent a “trans-corporeal” body (Alaimo), one enmeshed with a damaged environment, where disruptions to the ecosystem return to disturb the so-called normal behavior of the body. Sinha’s novel mobilizes a typical character from gothic fiction—the monster—to perform an embodied critique of neoliberal globalization. The bio-gothic monster reveals the body to be a site of universal (but unequal) precarity and risk, a surface of intervention for disciplinary power, and a node in a multi-species network of irruptive, improvisational resistance. By analyzing moments of material eco-rhapsody, in which drugs or other psychoactive chemicals enable Sinha’s narrator, Animal, to tap into an extrasensory beyond and channel a damaged-yet- resilient environment, I describe how the bio-gothic monster offers new ontological, phenomenological, and political formations capable of resisting neoliberal global amnesia. The bio-gothic monster serves as a site where the seemingly immaterial flows of global capitalism become fleshy and, therefore, as a key node for the formation of new, feral assemblages in the pursuit of postcolonial environmental justice.

Causal relationship between environmental aspect and environmental risk

This study aims to determine the causal relationship between environmental aspects and environmental risks, and to develop a risk management model for various hazard consequences. The research utilizes a general project life cycle model based on ISO 21500, adapted to identify cause-and-effect relationships between environmental aspects and hazards. The relationship is defined as the critical accumulation of an organization’s activities impacting the environment, which can trigger dangerous events under certain conditions. An algorithm for managing risks related to air, water, and soil pollution, stemming from this cause-and-effect relationship, is developed. The Bhopal tragedy is analyzed to illustrate the environmental consequences and economic losses from pollution. The study’s originality lies in defining the interrelationship between environmental aspects, sources of danger, and adverse environmental events. Its practical value is in the development of a risk management algorithm to address hazards leading to pollution-related losses.

Crip Life Amidst Debilitation: Medicalization, Survival, and the Bhopal Gas Leak

In a textbook horror-story of global capitalism, on December 3, 1984, the U.S owned Union Carbide pesticide factory spewed forty tons of lethal toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC) on the city of Bhopal in India. Nearly 10,000 people died and 30,000 people were disabled overnight. Continued exposure to MIC at the factory site has disabled many more in the decades since. Yet, few disability scholars have considered the histories of the survivors of the leak as a key site of crip politics. Drawing on work by Nirmala Erevelles, Jina Kim, Jasbir Puar, and Alison Kafer, this paper explores how the long history of debilitation, disablement, and survivorship since the Bhopal Gas Leak provides essential ground for re-zoning disability studies in the Global South. Braiding the theory of debility with the methodology of critical disability studies, this article posits that it is insufficient to say that the most marginalized in the Global South experience debility. Rather, it is also necessary to focus on their modes of survival in the face of the constant material and intellectual reproduction of said debilitation. The article demonstrates how poor lower-caste and Muslim workers and city-dwellers in Bhopal were subject to the debilitating logics of transnational corporate negotiations, racialized environmental de-regulation, and governmental profit-seeking in the years leading up to the leak. Through crip readings of medical research published between 1985 and 2000, I argue that this debility has been compounded through knowledge production which did not pay heed to the ways in which its victims contended with their vulnerability. In contrast to these sources, this article further examines testimonies and organizational pamphlets to contend that survivors in Bhopal offer their own model of disability justice and crip survival in the face of debilitation. In an era of vibrant disability rights organizing in the United States, the survivors of the leak emerged in global media primarily as victims of a tragedy caught in an endless cycle of injustice. Moving past the stance of pity often deployed in discussions of Bhopal, I highlight efforts of survivance that center disabled futurity, even as these activists use a different vocabulary and thereby strive to channel attention and resources to the myriad forms of crip survival in postcolonial India.

Investigating the Medical Aspects of the World's Worst Industrial Disaster.

The 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India caused much mortality and morbidity of a multisystemic nature in the exposed population. Heated scientific debates occurred about the spectrum of health effects, toxicology, and treatment. The national and transnational aspects of the disaster impeded scientific public health investigation. Some of them included the lack of accident-related and toxicological information, expertise, and funds to conduct investigations. Government agencies failed to coordinate with each other and use validated methods in epidemiological investigation. The complexity of the Bhopal crisis was underscored by the severe mortality and morbidity as well as its occurrence in a developing nation that had little experience in dealing with chemical disasters. Lessons to be learned from the disaster include the use of scientific investigative methods to facilitate clinical investigation, long-term monitoring, rehabilitation, and treatment of the gas victims.

Survival Analysis for Cohort of Bhopal Gas Disaster Victims during 1985-2015.

After the gas tragedy on the night of December 2/3, 1984, at Bhopal, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) started following up on four population cohorts with different levels of post-disaster mortality from December 3-6, 1984. The present study was undertaken to estimate the survival time of the cohort, and investigate the risk of mortality based on exposure, gender, and median age. Survival analysis is generally used to evaluate factors associated with the time to an event of failure or death among any covered population. To know the cause of death and mortality rate, a retrospective cohort analysis was conducted on the outcomes of 92,320 individuals with an exposed and non-exposed group from 1985 to 2015 in Bhopal, India. Basic survival analysis method, Kaplan-Meier method, and Cox proportional hazard regression model were used to analyze the mortality risk. During the past 30 years, the survivability was 87.25%, and the mortality rate was 7.2% for the cohort population of Bhopal gas survivors. Cox regression analysis showed that exposed, males, and individuals above 21 years (at the time of the disaster) were at higher risk of mortality from 1985 to 2015. During the initial two phases, the mortality was higher in the exposed group, but over time, their survival turned out to be the same in both groups.

Long-term health and human capital effects of in utero exposure to an industrial disaster: a spatial difference-in-differences analysis of the Bhopal gas tragedy

ObjectivesGlobalisation and industrialisation can increase economic opportunity for low/middle-income nations, but these processes may also increase industrial accidents and harm workers. This paper examines the long-term, cohort-based health effects of...

The Anthropocene as Impasse: Optimism, cynicism, and the desire for justice in Indra Sinha s Animal s People

This paper reads Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007) for its representation of the impasse that develops in the wake of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984) as its victims wait endlessly for justice. I examine the narrative form that the impasse takes in the novel, detailing how the stagnancy and frustration of the impasse shape the novel’s narrative movement. I track the different negotiations between optimism and cynicism that shape people’s attachment to justice in the novel’s world. The tensions and correlations between these modes of cynicism and optimism serve to trace the affective and political contours of the impasse while offering a critique of the structural impossibilities of movement. I examine how two temporalities—the suspended time of the impasse and the toxic temporality of the poisons—intersect in the novel. At the intersection between the two is the impasse of the Anthropocene.

Post-Colonial Disasters and Narratives of Erasure: Reimagining Testimonies of Toxic Encounter

Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists, to trace the socio-political, economic and ecological injustices of post-colonial disasters like the Bhopal gas leak. Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People bears witness to such accounts and recreates the night of December 2–3, 1984, through the testimonies of the people surviving the gas disaster. This article identifies Sinha’s narrative technique as ‘eco-testimony’, which strategically revives hitherto undocumented survivor testimonies and their experiences of eco-social exploitation in the post-disaster environment and forges a voice of dissent against the uneven, attritional and necropolitical violence of multinational companies and their chief ally, the neocolonial nation-state.

‘There is Nothing Post-Colonial About it’

This interview with the writer Indra Sinha, conducted in Toulouse, France in June 2017 and reworked in January 2020, is a product of my research on the relatively recent theoretical endeavour to interrogate the relationship between postcolonial and ecocritical studies. Indra Sinha’s fictional and non-fictional works have substantially contributed to the international visibility of human and environmental injustices around the world, suggesting his potential engagement with the relationship between these two theoretical frameworks. In the interview conducted within this context, Sinha’s debut novel Animal’s People (2007), shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker prize, is discussed as a postcolonial eco-socialist work offering a fictitious account of neo-colonial practices in India. The novel, particularly as the literary representation of the Bhopal disaster, sheds light upon the continuous destruction of human and non-human beings in postcolonial lands under neo-colonial policies. Yet, Sinha’s ardent problematization of ‘postcolonialism’ as a label in particular, and of all labels in general for delineating literary works, complicates, albeit fruitfully, the course of the interview and our discussion of new theoretical frameworks emerging out of postcolonial theory. His responses on this issue are powerful statements calling for a particular focus on, if any -isms deemed necessary, transnational capitalism and ‘traditional old-fashioned extortionism’ instead of postcolonialism.

Effect on Antioxidants and Chromosomal Aberrations in the Offspring of Methyl Isocyanate Exposed Population of Bhopal

Bhopal gas tragedy was one of the worst industrial disasters that produced short-term as well as long-term health effects in the exposed population. The present study is an attempt to know about the genomic damage as well as the level of antioxidant caused by Methyl Isocyanate in the offspring of the exposed population and to know about the frequency of chromosomal aberrations in them. Offspring’s of the Methyl Isocyanate Exposed individuals living in the vicinity of 1.5 km from the Union Carbide’s pesticide plant were selected randomly from the study. Equal number of age (20 years – 50 years), sex (male / female) and locality matched non-exposed individuals were also enrolled as controls. All the subjects were non smokers and not employed at any type of chemical industry or a radiation department. Cytogenetic analysis was performed by standard protocol of lymphocyte culture as per as Moorhead et al. Chromosomal aberrations were observed. The antioxidant level of Vitamin E and Blood Glutathione was also recorded. Student’s t-test was performed to test the significance difference between means of chromosomal aberrations. The means were considered to be statistically significant at 1% level of probability. It was observed that the level of antioxidants (both Vitamin E by Jargar et al. and Blood Glutathione by Beutler et al.) was highly significant in the MIC Exposed and MIC Exposed F2 Generation Population as compared to MIC Non-Exposed Population. But, significant difference between MIC Exposed and MIC Exposed F2 Generation Population was observed. The mean percentage of normal metaphase in the Exposed group was significantly higher (p < 0.0001) as compared to Non-Exposed. Besides this, chromosomal aberrations (dicentrics and double minutes) were recorded at mitotic metaphase and were statistically elevated in the MIC Exposed Population. The present study indicates that the genomic instability still persists at a higher intensity among the Bhopal Gas Survivors. The higher incidence of chromosomal aberrations may act as the intermediate processes in the pathway of the progression of any genetic disorders and cancers. Hence, our study suggests that the Exposed Populations and their Offspring’s is more vulnerable and gas affected.
 Keywords: Chromosomal aberrations, Methyl isocyanate, Bhopal gas tragedy, Long-term genotoxicity, Exposed Population