The people of Bhopal, a city in central India, have been victimized twice over. In 1984 a grave chemical accident at a Union Carbide plant there swept away thousands of lives; in the years that followed, official neglect and corporate scorn have only intensified feelings of injustice and frustration. The more than 120,000 exposure victims in Bhopal have been demanding justice ever since the accident occurred, eighteen years ago, but their demands have been left unfulfilled. Almost from the start, the Union Carbide facility seemed doomed. The company built a new pesticide factory there in the 1970s, thinking that India, in its hundreds of millions, represented a huge untapped market for its pest control products. However it wasn’t to be; Indian farmers, struggling to cope with droughts and floods, didn’t always have the spare change in their pockets to buy Union Carbide’s pesticides. The plant never did reach its full capacity and proved to be a losing venture; in the early 1980s, it ceased active production. However vast quantities of deadly chemicals remained; three tanks continued to hold over 60 tons of methyl isocyanate, or MIC for short.
