OPINION | City of Lakes, City of Loss: Remembering and reclaiming Bhopal

Bhopal spurred a series of systemic legal reforms.

Bhopal is a city of lakes and evening light, of sham-e-Bhopal, of a gentle blend of town and countryside. Its identity was shaped by syncretic culture and old Nawabi tehzeeb – by poetry, food, music, and an easy coexistence of communities. Yet, in the national imagination, all of this has been eclipsed by a single word: tragedy.

For those who live here, that label is inescapable, but it is also painfully incomplete.

Today, working in public policy, I often feel like the child who was born in Bhopal, trying to understand what adults never fully explained about this day. Bhopal taught me that disasters do not end when headlines fade; they seep into water, soil, bodies, and bureaucratic files. It taught me that justice is not a court order but a long, uneven struggle for dignity. But most importantly, it gave me a responsibility to ensure that memory becomes reform, and that my city is known not only for its loss, but for its insistence on being heard.

For most of India, 3rd December is just another date on the calendar. In Bhopal, it is a collective death anniversary. In the age of OTT, series like The Railway Men have finally carried Bhopal’s story beyond the city’s borders, reminding the rest of India that the night of 2–3 December 1984 was not an abstract “industrial accident” but a lived catastrophe that ordinary workers, railway staff and residents tried to navigate with almost no information and even less support.

On the night of 2–3 December 1984, about 40–45 tonnes of the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from a storage tank at the Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal. Over 500,000 people living in the densely populated neighbourhoods around the factory were exposed in a matter of hours, in what is still regarded as the world’s worst industrial disaster.

Official figures have always struggled to capture the human cost. The government of Madhya Pradesh has certified 3,787 deaths as directly related to the gas leak. At the same time, broader estimates place the final toll between 15,000 and 20,000, with more than half a million injured.

A 2006 government affidavit recorded 558,125 injuries, including nearly 3,900 people left with severe, permanent disabilities. Over time, research suggests that more than 22,000 people have died due to MIC exposure, and three generations have suffered chronic respiratory illness, eye damage, cancers, and congenital disabilities.

The toxic legacy is not just in the lungs and genes. Chemicals abandoned at the factory site have leached into soil and groundwater for decades. Investigations have documented contamination levels in groundwater many times above safe limits, with nearby communities reporting high rates of illness and birth defects.

Even on the 41st anniversary this year, residents of worst-hit colonies such as Phoota Maqbara and Bluemoon Colony speak less about the past gas cloud and more about today’s foul-smelling tap water, unfinished pipelines and persistent sickness.

If Bhopal is a wound, it is also a turning point in India’s industrial and environmental regulation. In 1985, Parliament passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster (Processing of Claims) Act, allowing the Union government to act as the exclusive legal representative (parens patriae) of all victims, to process claims “speedily, effectively, equitably and to the best advantage of the claimants.”  A special Welfare Commissioner’s office was set up in Bhopal to register and adjudicate claims.

In 1989, the Supreme Court approved a controversial settlement under which Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) agreed to pay US$470 million in “full and final” settlement of all civil claims.  On the Court’s directions, this amount was deposited and, by mid-2024, around ₹1,549 crore had been disbursed to more than 5.7 lakh claimants. The Court would later describe the disaster as “unparalleled in its magnitude and devastation” and “a ghastly monument to the dehumanising influence of inherently dangerous technologies.”

Beyond compensation, Bhopal spurred a series of systemic legal reforms. The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, often described as an “umbrella legislation”, conferred broad powers on the central government to regulate and improve environmental quality and prevent hazards to human life and property, and is widely acknowledged as a direct response to the disaster and to the inadequacy of existing sectoral laws.

The Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991, then made it mandatory for industries handling hazardous substances to obtain insurance that could provide immediate relief to affected persons, reducing dependence on protracted and uncertain litigation. This was followed by the Chemical Accidents (Emergency Planning, Preparedness and Response) Rules, 1996, which established central, state and district crisis groups, mandated on-site and off-site emergency plans, and specified thresholds for hazardous chemicals so that the next leak, if it occurred, would confront a more prepared state.

From a purely legislative standpoint, one might say: Bhopal worked”. It forced the Indian state to recognise industrial disasters as a governance category, not as freak accidents. But the law on paper is not the same as justice on the ground.

The first unresolved question is compensation. Survivor groups have long argued that the 1989 settlement grossly underestimated both the number of affected people and the long-term nature of harm, leading to tiny per-capita payouts – often a few hundred dollars for a lifetime of disability.

In 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court dismissed the Union government’s curative petition seeking additional compensation from UCC’s successor companies. The Court held that the 1989 settlement could not be reopened in the absence of fraud and emphasised that if the fund proved inadequate, the responsibility to make up the shortfall lay with the Union of India as a welfare state – a responsibility the government had itself accepted in earlier proceedings but failed to honour through mechanisms like insurance.

The second unfinished chapter is criminal accountability. While some Indian officials of UCIL were convicted in 2010 on reduced charges and given two-year sentences, none actually spent time in prison. Attempts to enhance their punishment were dismissed as delayed. Efforts to bring senior UCC and later Chemical executives to face trial in India have repeatedly stalled, with the company contesting the jurisdiction of Indian courts even as it benefits from the finality of the civil settlement.

The third and perhaps most damning is the failure in environmental remediation and public health. Even though a major waste-removal exercise was finally undertaken in 2025 under a High Court–mandated deadline, this came four decades after the disaster and remains deeply contested. Activists have criticised the operation as “greenwashing”, pointing out that it focused mainly on already containerised waste while leaving deeper, long-neglected contamination in the soil and groundwater largely unaddressed. Independent testing has repeatedly detected cancer-causing chemicals in groundwater at levels far above accepted safety limits, and communities in and around the former factory site continue to report high rates of respiratory illness, reproductive disorders and disabilities in children and grandchildren of gas-exposed families.

When residents in the worst-affected bastis today say they “survived the gas but are dying of water”, they are not speaking metaphorically.

Finally, there is the question of institutional learning. India has seen several serious industrial incidents since then, from gas leaks in Visakhapatnam to fires in chemical clusters. Each time, we repeat the language of “wake-up call”. Yet, the pattern of weak enforcement, poor inspection capacity, contested environmental impact assessments, and opaque siting of hazardous plants near working-class and peri-urban communities persists.

So, this December, what does it mean not to let Bhopal remain just another framed photograph in our collective conscience? It requires a shift from symbolic remembrance to structural reform.

First, chemical safety must be treated as a core governance priority rather than a technical afterthought. Second, corporate accountability must extend across borders; the Bhopal experience exposed the limits of traditional tort law when multinationals shield themselves behind subsidiaries and jurisdictional gaps, making it imperative to rethink bilateral investment treaties, due diligence obligations and cooperation with home-state regulators. Third, the “polluter pays” principle must be meaningfully embedded in environmental remediation: even if the 1989 settlement is closed, continued contamination of soil and water is a separate, ongoing wrong, demanding a credible, transparently monitored clean-up plan in which survivor groups have a central voice.

Equally important is a right-to-know culture for communities living around hazardous facilities to be fully informed about the risks they face, regularly drilled in emergency responses and actively involved in District Crisis Groups under the chemical safety framework, rather than being kept in the dark until disaster strikes. Finally, survivors’ perspectives must be placed at the heart of long-term policy responses: health registries, epidemiological studies and social protection schemes should be designed with, not merely for, those who continue to live with the consequences.

As someone who calls this city home, I do not want Bhopal remembered only as a gas cloud over a sleeping town. I want it to stand as the place that forced India and the world to confront the true costs of “inherently dangerous technologies”; where private profit collided with public vulnerability so sharply that the law itself had to change; where policymakers learnt what can never again be treated as the price of growth.

A public holiday will mean a day off for many children, a memorial for survivors, a wreath-laying for officials, and a few sombre posts for the rest of India. Suppose it means more than ritual. In that case, memory must become mandate: industrial corridors, chemical parks and “ease of doing business” must rest on rigorous safeguards, transparent regulation and survivor-centred justice. Those who died that night – and those still living with its aftermath – deserve a Republic that treats “never again” not as a slogan, but as a hard constraint on policy and economic ambition.

(Himani Agrawal is a Research Analyst at the Centre for Economy and Trade, Chintan Research Foundation.)