Hazira Bi lives in house no.384 in Jai Prakash Colony. It’s right across from the ill-fated Union Carbide pesticide plant, in one of the many shantytowns where the deadly methyl isocyanate claimed its unfortunate victims that cold wintry night in December of 1984. Narrating her tale of horror and suffering on the night of the disaster, Hazira looks back. “I had a hard day rolling beedis. It was a cold night and I had retired to bed along with my three children — Manzoor, 7, Mansur, 4, and Mahfooz, 11 months.”
Her oldest child, Saira, 10, was with her grandmother, some streets away in the same neighbourhood that night. It would be a fortuitous move.
Around midnight, her husband Maqsud went out but came back screaming about “something in the air.” “The door had been left open and I felt as if hot ground pepper had been sprinkled in our eyes. We couldn’t breathe, every breath was painful so we all ran out on the street,” Hazira said, adding with tears in her eyes how in that moment of panic she forgot to pick up her youngest son Mahfooz.
On the road there was a virtual stampede. Everyone in the neighbourhood was running out on to the streets, united in their search for clean air, although no one quite knew where that would be. Remembering that she had left little Mahfouz behind, she returned home four hours later. By then, the boy was barely breathing. She rushed to the Carbide plant, where doctors were already attending to a stream of people hit by the poisonous gas. Their eyes watering, choking, the doctors handed out tablets and eye drops.
Unlike thousands of others who died and the thousands more who were maimed and blinded, Mahfouz survived the night. At least he thought he did. The 26-year-old, who married a gas affected girl, has a daughter who bears the scars of that terrible night. Three-year-old Tahiba is a paraplegic, the effect, doctors say of the MIC on her unsuspecting parents.
Hazira’s is just one story, replicated over and over in this benighted corner of Bhopal where 20,000 died and more than 200,000 were critically injured and left with irreversible damage to their eyes and lungs.
Years after the disaster, people are still vulnerable to exposure to the toxic chemicals through polluted ground water, direct contact with contaminated soil or inhalation of contaminated dust. The HCH and other ‘organochlorines’ have also been unsuspectingly been passed on through the milk of cattle that graze on the site.
Those who didn’t die have either gone blind or have a severe eye condition; the severity depending on the duration of exposure, concentration of the gas in the atmosphere, distance of the affected person from the site of the disaster and whether the affected person was asleep or out in the open. A large population is also suffering from pulmonary and other serious disorders. People have suffered irreversible lung damage and their immune system has been compromised for life. They tend to fall sick more often and their working capacity has been badly affected.
Satinath Sarangi of Bhopal Group for Information and Action says: “We have more than 20, 000 people residing close to the Carbide plant, who are being routinely exposed to contaminants in their ground water. Contaminants that can cause damage to the liver, kidney and can cause cancers and birth defects and this is happening routinely.”
The source of the contamination of ground water near the Union Carbide’s abandoned factory is the chemical waste generated in the factory from the time it began its operation in 1971. These wastes-highly toxic chemicals like chlorobenzenes, dichlorobenzenes, trichlorobenzenes, lindane and PCBs-chemicals that can cause cancer, birth defects and a whole range of systemic damages, were dumped both within the factory premises and outside the factory in a landfill. A landfill that leaked from day one, that is as far back as 1981.
For Hazira Bi, who beats herself up every day over leaving Mahfouz behind, merely looking at the living hell that is her grand-daughter Tahiba’s life, makes her relive the nightmare. Sometimes, even money isn’t enough.