Did the deadly chemicals contaminate the ground water after the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal? Has the gas affected the genetic structure of those who breathed it? It’s 25 years since the tragedy and the answers are somewhere—but not in government studies.

Close to Ground Zero of the Bhopal Gas tragedy, the smell of chemicals wafts through the air even today. With every monsoon, some more of the insulation of the storage tanks, motors and pipes gives away, littering the ground with white-cotton wool like debris. Large storage tanks, one of them the 601 from which the deadly methyl isocynate had leaked, are now a deep brown with rust. From one of the crusty tanks, a black oil-like substance drips little by little, measuring the march of time over the last 25 years.
The overgrown, unkempt, 67-acre Union Carbide factory site with a growing Bhopal creeping up on its sides does not answer the two questions that beg answers: one, have the tonnes of chemicals once used to make the pesticide Sevin leached into the ground to contaminate the groundwater? Two, did the 40 tonnes of methyl isocynate (MIC) that leaked that fateful night leave its mark on the genes of the living, enough to affect babies born today?
For answers, one has to turn to government reports and findings on contamination and resultant health impacts. But in the fuzziness and incompleteness of these reports, no answers can be found.
It’s been the same routine over the years. Whenever the activists up the ante, the government sets up another round of committees to conduct studies. And each time, the government studies conclude that there is no reason to get worried. The water is potable and the morbidity of the population living around the factory site is not abnormal.
But facts on the ground and some of its own data in their reports cast shadows on the government’s conclusion. Take these two scenarios, a few kilometres apart from each other but tied to the events of that December night.
In a colony called Arif Nagar, with a railway line separating it from the Union Carbide factory, Farida Behn tries to keep her two sons busy indoors on a hot sunny afternoon. Both her sons, Hasan and Nawab, suffer from Down Syndrome. The older one is 12 but it was only last year that she took him to a doctor. Her husband is a taxidriver and cannot afford the trips to the hospital. The case of Farida and those of several other families with children with congenital malfunction came to light after a survey was conducted by the Sambhawna Trust two years ago. Now they both go to a day care centre that’s run by a Charity.
Both Farida and her husband had inhaled the gas when the tragedy struck. They also have been drinking water from tubewells for nearly a decade. In a small colony of 10,000 people, there are scores of such children born in the last decade. Satinath Sarangi of the Sambhawna Trust calls this a “silent medical emergency”.
At the Gandhi Medical Hospital, Dr Ganesh has done chromosome analysis for 500 carefully selected gas-affected families. He has found genetic abnormality in the structure of chromosomes in all of them. Now he wants to go deeper into the nucleus to see what exactly it has done to the DNA. He has no staff for fieldwork, no money to carry out these expensive studies. It is only when his work is complete, that it can be said with clarity that the Hasan and Nawab are a result of genetic mutation on one of his parents. Till then, all such cases do not form a trend. Dr Ganesh’s work is yet to be published. His other published work with 229 cases had shown that 54 children had genetic abnormality. “This should have been enough indication to probe deeper,” said Ganesh. Despite several attempts, this has not been sanctioned by the ICMR. This connects to another inexplicable act of the government and a huge hole in the annals of medical research.

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