Spatially, the city is divided in half as well; while one side boasts picturesque lakes, upscale hotels, and heritage sites, the area near the factory reveals an alternate reality — seen in its poorly developed neighborhoods, congested slums, and lack of clean drinking water.
Outside the factory walls, locals wryly note that petty thieves often exploit gaps in the perimeter to steal metal scraps from the defunct factory, selling them for a pittance. In May of this year, a massive fire erupted at the UCC site, causing panic among locals. The cause remains unknown.
“There’s a high court order that says there should be a proper wall around the factory. You’ve got a major toxic hotspot right in the middle of a city — one of the so-called cleanest cities in the country. But despite the court orders, the government just doesn’t seem to care,” said Rachna Dhingra, a social activist working for the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy.
Poisoned Water, Forgotten People
While Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and its current owner The Dow Chemical Company, alongside the Madhya Pradesh and central Indian governments, sidestep accountability, Bhopal continues to live through a second catastrophe: toxic contamination on-site and around the factory.
Around 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) from UCC, in Brij Vihar colony, several houses have been locked up, with residents fleeing to the better parts of the city due to the toxic groundwater. Left standing for hours, the water solidifies into a whitish-green substance, corroding taps, tanks, and utensils, while causing serious harm to people. From the elderly to the young, many suffer from severe skin diseases, allergies, kidney stones, and rising rates of heart conditions. Residents claim that all of this is linked to the contaminated water.
However, those who stayed behind are fighting for justice. R.S. Pal, at 70, is the grand dean of Brij Vihar colony and has survived both the Bhopal gas tragedy and its aftermath. “We’re stuck drinking this water that the factory is responsible for. We’ve tried everything — going to the Nagar Nigam, the district authorities, the state government, even the Human Rights Department,” he said.
“We’ve written so many applications asking for clean water, but it’s like no one’s listening. It just feels like we’ve been left to deal with this on our own.”
R.S. Pal
Satinath Sarangi founder of the Sambhavna Trust Clinic, which provides free medical care to the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy explained, “Over the years, all kinds of pollutants have been found in the water — like organochlorines, dichlorobenzene, trichlorobenzene, hexachloride, and heavy metals like mercury, lead, chromium, and nickel. There are also pesticides in the mix.”
“These toxins affect the brain, liver, kidneys, lungs, and skin. We’re seeing a lot of kids with behavior issues, many cases of cancer, problems with the reproductive system in women, including irregular menstrual cycles,” he said.
Nearly four decades after the gas leak, the situation remains unresolved. In August this year, The Indian Express reported that the Madhya Pradesh state government is finally moving forward with a plan to incinerate 337 metric tons of hazardous waste still festering at the Union Carbide site. Following years of legal wrangling and delays, the central government allocated Rs 126 crore ($15 million) on March 4 to execute the cleanup.
The project is slated to take 180 days. Waste will be carefully transported, stored, and incinerated at a designated Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facility (TSDF). Yet, despite the strict protocols designed to mitigate environmental harm, doubts remain. Local social groups dispute official assurances of safety, citing past failures in preventing harmful emissions.
While the above-ground waste is relatively secure, the factory site still houses significant quantities of hazardous chemical waste buried in 21 unlined pits. Additionally, outside the factory walls, the remnants of three enormous solar evaporation ponds, constructed by UCC in 1977, can be found. These ponds were used to directly discharge untreated waste.
The thin liners designed to prevent chemical seepage into the ground quickly deteriorated. Even before the gas disaster, internal Union Carbide memos from 1982 indicated that the ponds were leaking, contaminating the groundwater aquifers.
Despite conducting tests that confirmed environmental and groundwater contamination, Union Carbide chose to ignore these findings. Following the tragedy, UCC closed the factory, but the highly toxic waste has remained on the site, contained within the ponds and pits, ever since.
“The government is only talking about some 300 metric tons which is not even 0.05% of the total waste. They basically do not want to address the elephant in the room that there is contamination inside the factory and outside the factory because it has seeped into the water from the solar evaporation ponds,” said Dhingra.
She emphasized that new victims continue to emerge daily because the government refuses to conduct a comprehensive scientific assessment of the contamination’s extent and impact.
Dhingra alleges that the government is complicit with the corporation. In the last decade, Dow Chemical’s market presence in India has surged. While the Indian government has repeatedly filed applications in the Madhya Pradesh High Court, demanding ₹350 crore ($41.69 million) from Dow Chemical, Dhingra says there has been little follow-through to ensure the company pays. Dhingra sees it as deliberate collusion between the current government and Dow Chemical.
The district magistrate of Bhopal did not respond to requests for comment.
‘I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by poisonous water,’
J.P. Nagar colony, just across the road from the Union Carbide plant, used to be a line of shanties. Today, it appears to have changed, there are a number of blue and white pucca (cemented) houses across the road, suggesting the area has moved on. But a closer look offers a different reality. When questioned about the Bhopal gas disaster and its aftermath, residents of the colony became reticent, some fearful of the “big, powerful people.” Many pointed to Kasturi Bai, a first-hand witness of the disaster, who has more stories than others to tell.
Sitting on the machan (a raised platform) outside her home, in golden spectacles and a bright pink saree, Kasturi Bai seemed to be a frail, elderly woman. But Kasturi Bai did not mince her words, especially when explaining how the political-corporate nexus devastated people like her, who lost almost all her family to the disaster.
“No one from the government, no chief minister, no prime minister ever comes to help us. No one has done anything for us. I’ve lived here my whole life, and half my family is gone. I’ve gotten sick so many times from drinking that water. The same illnesses keep coming back. I’ve fallen sick twice just recently. I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by this zehreela (poisonous) water,” she shared.
“The water used to stink, but we used it for everything — cooking, drinking, even bathing the kids. They’d get sick after drinking it. It was filthy, but we had no choice; there was no other source of water.”
In 1999, a study by Greenpeace said that some locations sampled around the factory were the “hot-spots” of severe contamination with heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants. In 2022, the Sambhavna Trust Clinic claimed that the toxic waste left untreated in and around the abandoned Union Carbide factory has contaminated 29 more residential colonies in the vicinity in addition to the 20 colonies identified by the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research in June 2018.
“This isn’t really about the Bhopal gas disaster itself; it’s about how little Union Carbide spent on managing their hazardous waste and setting up a proper disposal system. They cut corners, while building the plant and while running it. That’s why today we’ve got over 200,000 people living around the factory with contaminated groundwater,” Dhingra explained.
The Madhya Pradesh government, in compliance with a Supreme Court order, installed a Narmada pipeline for clean water, but many areas continue to rely on the contaminated groundwater during supply disruptions or breakages — and in their ordeal, the ghost of the disaster lives on.
