What should we have done? Health care relief should have received the first priority. A large, universally accessible tertiary health care system needed to be set up in Bhopal. This should have been accessible to all and the full range of health services required should have been provided. If this had cost us more than $470 million, so be it. And this should have been in place in 1984 itself. Second, monetary compensation needed to be paid. The principles for this are well identified but the recipients are not. Had the state and local government put their minds to it in 1984, the problem would have been much easier to handle. All it required was a proper health census in 1984. A costly exercise but one that was possible.

Third, the judiciary failed in 1989 in agreeing to the $470 million in lieu of protection from criminal and civil cases. It partially undid this in 1991 when it ruled no protection was to be given to UC and its managers against criminal cases. But it got into an area it had little understanding of and now our hands are tied to that $470 million figure. Moreover, our judicial system has also been unable to extradite the senior managers who should have been incarcerated for negligence.

When the government takes away an aggrieved party’s right to go to court (as it did by passing the Bhopal Gas Leak Act), it is taking on the task of providing adequate relief. If it cannot, then the government should be in the dock. The one entity that has no culpability in the matter is Dow Chemicals that agreed to take over UC in 2001, under the impression that the matter was closed.

... contd.