Bhopal holds up a mirror to India, says Vinuta Gopal of Greenpeace India. The environmentalist deplores the lack of a sense of responsibility for human beings and nature among large corporations. Companies have the certainty that not much can happen to them here, she says, noting that Bhopal is still the blueprint for the way companies handle such disasters in the country. In 1989, US-based Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary paid about $470 million to the Indian government, effectively buying their way out of any further criminal prosecution. Only a fraction of the money reached the victims. It was a cheap decision in every respect. By comparison, in 2011 a US court ordered the giant corporation that now owns Union Carbide to pay $3 million to an asbestos victim with cancer. In Bhopal, the families were paid about $1,600 for each dead relative, while those with injuries were palmed off with $500 -- only enough to pay for a few months of their medications, in many cases. Today the widows of gas victims receive a monthly pension of 150 rupees, or about €1.50. To this day, Union Carbide denies any responsibility for the long-term damage to human beings and the environment in Bhopal. Its representatives claim, for example, that the company secured the evaporation basin with a plastic tarp. They insist that the fact that pollutants still entered the groundwater was purely the fault of local residents, who had damaged the material. The question of toxic waste cleanup on the factory grounds should not be taken up with us, but with the local authorities, says a company spokesman. spiegel.de/international/world/disaster-persists-30-years-after-bhopal-gas-catastrophe-a-1006101.html
Posted on: Sun, 14 Dec 2014 16:33:50 +0000