Bhopal's toxic waste: A 40-yr journey

When Mahesh Pal moved to the Nishatpura area in Bhopal in 2000, the gas tragedy that claimed over 5,000 lives in the neighbourhood didn't figure high on his list of concerns.

- Shruti Tomar

BHOPAL: When Mahesh Pal moved to the Nishatpura area in Bhopal in 2000, the gas tragedy that claimed over 5,000 lives in the neighbourhood didn't figure high on his list of concerns. After all, a decade-and-a-half had passed since the world's worst industrial disaster, the infamous plant was long shut, and even the scarred city was beginning to heal. Pal saw that housing prices were cheaper than what they were elsewhere in the Madhya Pradesh capital, and didn't think twice before moving with his family of seven.

He was wrong. Within a year, he and his father developed a skin ailment, followed by joint pains. The reason, said experts, was the local groundwater contaminated by the industrial waste that had been dumped into the soil.

"Our locality is just 1km from the UCIL (Union Carbide India Limited) factory. My family is now battling skin, liver and other diseases due to contaminated water. We moved pillar to post but nothing happened for years," said Pal, 42.

This Wednesday, though, a crinkled smile replaced the severe furrows on Pal's face as a convoy of 40 trucks drove into the neighbourhood, ready to pick up the 337 metric tonnes of toxic waste left over from that fateful 1984 accident. The convoy - almost a kilometre long - pulled into the Pithampur industrial area, roughly 200km away, in the early hours of Thursday. "We are very happy as at least 40 years after the tragedy, the state government has started acting to clear the waste. It increases our hope of getting clean water one day," said Pal.

Since December 3, 1984, when tonnes of lethal methyl isocyanate gas sheathed Bhopal in a dome of death and poisoned thousands of people, the city has been divided into two kinds of victims - those who were exposed to the toxic fumes; and those whose exposure to the local environment, contaminated due to the abandoned industrial waste that lay unattended for decades - caught in a legal tangle.