THAT NIGHT, 40 YEARS AGO

Bhopal gas disaster is a tragedy that people continue to face

- RAKESH KUMAR MALVIYA and ROHINI KRISHNAMURTHY

EVERYTHING WAS going well in life until that dark night arrived." For Bano Bi, a 72-year-old resident of Bhopal's JP Nagar, the night E of December 2, 1984 is where life and time froze. That night, 40 tonnes of toxic methyl isocyanate (MIC)-a gas 500 times more poisonous than hydrogen cyanide-leaked from the Union Carbide India Limited's (UCIL's) pesticide plant next to Bano's residence and spread to a 7 kmradius around the plant. More than half a million people were exposed to the leak. The disaster has resulted in up to 30,000 deaths in the region since then.

Bano mostly talks about the past-"I live a life linked to that gas leak," she says.

Bano, her husband and eight children woke up vigorously coughing that night.

"When we stepped outside, we saw people running everywhere. Cries and screams echoed all around," she says. Bano got separated from her children and husband while escaping the gas chamber the city had become. A day later, she found her family members in hospitals in conditions that defied descriptions.

Within a year, she lost her husband.

Over the next few months, four of her children died. "I was left behind to bear the burden of the gas tragedy and am still suffering," Bano says. She has what the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) terms as the "Bhopal Gas Disease". ICMR ran a decade-long research on the gas-affected population of Bhopal to define this new disease as "a condition of ill-health due to exposure to Bhopal's toxic gases". About half-a-million people in Bhopal suffer from this disease, which has some 40 symptoms, ranging from backache to breathing difficulties. And there is no treatment per se; all one can do is symptomatic medication.