Photograph by BEDI / AFP via Getty Images
WORDS BY ALESSANDRA BERGAMIN
Just after midnight, as the winter chill settled across the city of Bhopal, Bano Bee awoke to a sudden rumble outside. Under the shadow of a hulking industrial factory in the neighborhood of JP Nagar, the lights became smothered in a fog that snaked under the doors and coiled into homes roofed with metal sheeting. Thousands of people—coughing, choking, and gasping for air—woke up as if they were on fire. Screams echoed across the city.
Bano Bee coughed and wheezed from her home opposite the factory. Her eyes burned as if smeared with chili powder. Run, run, run, she heard her neighbors cry. She took her five children in tow and fled into the darkness.
Families scrambled toward the train station and hospital. Many were separated in narrow alleyways. Bodies lay scattered on the streets, crumpled and still. Bano Bee ran, fighting the urge to vomit, until she collapsed, too.
Nobody knew what was happening. How could they? No siren sounded. No emergency lights flashed. No warning to stay inside and cover your nose and mouth. By the time the sun crested the horizon, more than 3,000 people would be dead.
I met Bano Bee at the end of the monsoon rains in 2024, nearly 40 years after the world’s worst and deadliest industrial disaster.
On December 3, 1984, the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant leaked more than 27 tons of methyl isocyanate into Bhopal’s air. Half a million people were exposed to hazardous levels of a chemical once described in a company safety report a decade earlier as “a poison to humans” if inhaled. More than 10,000 people died within three days of the disaster, and that figure more than doubled in the years to come. Decades of internal documents have shown that the Union Carbide Corporation, or UCC, considered the low-caste residents of Bhopal expendable; they did not expect survivors to form one of India’s most important, female-led environmental justice movements.
Now in her 70s, a white cotton dupatta draped around her head, Bano Bee gathered alongside a dozen survivors at the seemingly seldom-used office of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, or ICJB, a coalition of five survivors organizations. For these women, who have orchestrated sit-ins, die-ins, protests, and marches, activism involves little desk work. Seated in a circle on a black and brown mat, some survivors, such as Verma Bai Puri, explained they were only children at the time of the disaster. Others, like Usha Dongre, arrived years after the gas leak but have dealt with the aftermath. Only two—Bano Bee and Ramkali—were mothers with young children at the time.
“Decades of internal documents have shown that the Union Carbide Corporation, or UCC, considered the low-caste residents of Bhopal expendable; they did not expect survivors to form one of India’s most important, female-led environmental justice movements.”
The UCC factory—operated through an Indian subsidiary with Union Carbide as the majority shareholder—was built in the late 1960s. Despite securing loans with the help of former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the plant was built under budget. It was equipped with inferior technology and shirked the safety standards that were mandatory in Europe. UCC initially imported methyl isocyanate, an ingredient in the company’s pesticide, but in 1979 began manufacturing MIC on-site as a way to profit from India’s ongoing “green revolution” toward agricultural modernization. But early on in Bhopal, many suspected the volatile chemical was dangerous.
Seeking better pay, one of Bano Bee’s relatives moved from another state to work at the UCC factory. The stench of the factory followed him home every day; sometimes, she noticed lizards and flies would suddenly die as they neared his work shoes. Son, her family implored him, take off your clothes, leave them outside, stop working there. But he had no other option. Even as he struggled to go to the bathroom without pain, he could not quit.
“We knew,” Bano Bee said. “We knew it was very toxic.”
What they didn’t know is that for months, the refrigeration system, a crucial safety feature, had been switched off to save on electricity. They didn’t know that on the night of the disaster, the factory was storing 134 times the maximum permissible storage limit of MIC in Europe. In fact, despite years of concern from workers unions, journalists, and city officials, so little public information about MIC was released that when people arrived at the hospital that December morning, no one knew what they had been exposed to.
Union Carbide tells the story differently, and its current ownership—the Dow Chemical Company—says the chemical industry responded to the incident “with its strengthened focus on process safety standards, emergency preparedness, and community awareness.” But Rachna Dhingra, an activist who works with ICJB, doesn’t buy it. “From day one, Union Carbide did what it continues to do,” she said at a Bhopal activist event in Boston last year. “Lie and hide information.”
Dow did not respond to requests for comment.
As hospitals overflowed, medical staff called UCC hoping for a treatment plan. But according to doctors working that night, they were told the chemical released was tear gas and those affected could wash their eyes with water. When a proven, lifesaving treatment was found, the program was quickly terminated—a move many activists and doctors believe UCC played a role in, in order to downplay people’s injuries.
According to Satinath Sarangi, the founder trustee and consultant at the Bhopal nonprofit clinic, Sambhavna Trust, there was evidence the damage was not only to the eyes and lungs as UCC said, but had crossed the pulmonary barrier and entered the bloodstream.
Bano Bee and Ramkali have suffered from hypertension and musculoskeletal problems. Others have faced miscarriage and stillbirth, kidney and lung problems, cancer, and ongoing mental health issues. Long-term health effects have been intergenerational, with disabilities and deformities common among the children and grandchildren of survivors.
“We are not able to do any work, there is a problem in getting food. We are not able to educate our children. What harm will happen to them if we are given what is rightfully ours?”
The damage to the environment lasted far beyond that night in 1974. Prem Bai, an older woman with a shock of red hair tucked beneath a turquoise dupatta, moved to a vacant lot near the factory in Bhopal after the disaster. She said the well water was a “bit oily,” and when she filled a pot with water and left it overnight, it would have a powder-like substance in it the following morning.
“Our hands burned when we washed clothes or wiped the floor,” she said.
UCC routinely dumped hazardous waste into unlined pits before constructing solar evaporation ponds—giant holes lined with a sheet of plastic—to store chemical waste and byproducts. Internal documents revealed that two years before the disaster, UCC staff in India informed the company’s U.S. headquarters that toxic waste was spreading from the ponds to the reservoirs across Bhopal. “Continued leakage from evaporation pond causing great concern,” the notice read.
But the message went unheeded. Only later did studies find excessive chemicals and heavy metals in samples of groundwater, well water, soil, and even breast milk.
Every mother, wife, and daughter I met at the ICJB office was affected by Bhopal’s poisoned environment. One’s son, who was born 10 years after the disaster, died from leukemia at 22 years old; another’s daughter has tumors growing all over her body; and another’s eldest daughter gets her period every three to four months.
“Our uteruses are also harmed,” the latter’s mother said. Her name is being withheld for medical privacy. “It has affected us severely,” another mother added.
Shortly after the gas leak—during which time the company’s CEO was arrested in Bhopal, released on bail, and allowed to leave for the U.S., never to return—UCC was already looking to circumvent the many court cases filed against the company. By 1985, without the input of a single survivor, the corporation entered settlement discussions with the government of India. Four years later, they settled for $470 million—a fraction of the $3.3 billion the Indian government initially sought. It also came with conditions that absolved UCC of further accountability, some of which were later overruled by India’s Supreme Court.
Survivors with lifelong injuries received an average of $500 per person. But many did not qualify, and among those who did, the money was dispersed over decades, Dhingra explained, equaling just a few cents per day. A few hundred dollars barely covered their needs, Bano Bee explained. An already poor population was further entrenched in poverty.
“We are not able to do any work, there is a problem in getting food. We are not able to educate our children,” Bano Bee said. “What harm will happen to them if we are given what is rightfully ours?”
But just five years after the gas leak, when women led the first march to India’s capital of New Delhi, survivors were already fighting for what was owed. In pursuit of fair compensation, medical assistance, clean water, environmental remediation, and the blacklisting of Dow Chemical—which purchased UCC in 2001 but refused to accept its liabilities—survivors have wielded grass brooms called jhadoos at Dow offices, demanding the company clean the contamination or be swept out of India. Some, such as Prem Bai, met with a government minister, tying a thread, or rakhi, around his wrist—symbolic of brothers looking out for their sisters—in a plea for clean water.
In 2008, some 100 survivors and activists walked 500 miles in a padyatra, or protest march, once again from Bhopal to New Delhi. The group put on a dharna, or sit-in, for four months as activists and survivors chained themselves to the fence surrounding the Prime Minister’s home; wrote letters to the government in the blood of disaster victims; staged a die-in before the white-arched monument of India Gate; and embarked on a three-week hunger strike. The demonstration resulted in a survivor-inclusive federal commission and the construction of a clean water pipeline for the affected communities.
“We kept on fighting, we did not fear anyone. Even today, we are ready to fight.”
But success has almost always been preceded by violence. During a New Delhi demonstration two years earlier, Bano Bee—then in her mid-50s—and another senior survivor were knocked unconscious by police while being arrested. That same day, some 200 to 300 activists, including dozens of women survivors and at least 35 children under 12 years old, were detained by police for protesting outside a government building.
Krishna Bai recalled another protest a few years later when 30,000 people flooded Bhopal’s trains and tracks. Police beat the activists with iron-bound bamboo sticks called lathis. Ten people were hospitalized, and another eight female survivors were jailed. “They were really dangerous,” Krishna Bai recalled.
The latest protest was on December 3, 2024, when survivors and activists gathered outside the rusting Union Carbide factory to mark the 40th anniversary of the disaster. By candlelight, a row of seven women and children held a black and white banner reading “Bhopal Disaster is Corporate Crime. So Are Industrial Pollution & Climate Change.” Among them was Bano Bee, swathed in colored fabric and holding a tall wooden torch, her face aglow in the flame’s light.
The remembrance—focused on corporate crime—incorporated art, protest, collective memory, and the burning of an effigy. Demonstrators demanded compensation, medical care and research, and environmental remediation. The latter began sooner than expected.
Indian authorities in early January began moving nearly 350 tons of toxic waste from the Bhopal factory—now swallowed by overgrown trees—to the industrial town of Pithampur, where it will be incinerated over the next three to nine months. While government officials have guaranteed high safety and environmental standards, ICJB said in a recent statement they are concerned about a second, “slow-motion Bhopal in Pithampur.”
Protests erupted when the waste trucks arrived in Pithampur. Residents marched through town, circulating pamphlets that read, “Send the toxic waste generated from the American company for disposal in America.” Two men doused their bodies in flammable liquid and set themselves alight. Police soon arrived, arresting hundreds and, for the moment, quelling opposition. But, as four decades of resolve and resistance from Bhopali women have shown, the call for justice is not so easily silenced.
“We kept on fighting, we did not fear anyone,” Bano Bee said. “Even today, we are ready to fight.”
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