Twenty-four years after

The same factory in December 1984 leaked poison gas, killing thousands in the most hideous and disgusting ways. Adil’s mother was caught in the gas but survived. I am lucky, she’d say, but a new Terror was already on the way.

People didn’t know that their drinking wells were being poisoned by chemicals leaking from the factory. The water began to smell and taste foul. Held up to the light it appeared full of oily globules which sank to form a tawny layer. The goo was a cocktail of lethal poisons, but at the time no one knew this. Except Union Carbide.

A 1989 secret Carbide memo records proof that it knew soil and water in its factory were badly poisoned by chemicals whose effects included skin and eye damage, cataracts, diarrhoea, vomiting, abdominal pain, liver and kidney damage, convulsions, brain damage, anaemia, birth defects and cancers.

By 1993, Adil’s mother was married, pregnant with Adil, and Carbide’s silence had lasted four years. When environmentalists, alarmed by soaring rates of cancer, birth-defects and early deaths near the plant, expressed fears that chemicals might be poisoning the water supply, Carbide denounced them as mischief-makers.

In 1999 Greenpeace tested soil and water in 14 areas near the factory. They found mercury levels 6,000,000 times higher than normal and more than 30 chemicals in the water — many proven to cause birth defects and cancers. A 2001 study found lead, mercury and the factory’s signature poisons in the breast milk of nursing mothers. In some communities 95 per cent of women are anaemic. During Carbide’s ten years of silence, hundreds of children were born with terrible injuries. If you are willing to risk being seriously upset, you can see their pictures on www.bhopal.org.

Union Carbide’s final act of contempt was to...