Bhopal gas leak | The tragic cost of negligence
A newsman recalls his experience covering one of India's most haunting man-made disasters
The first sight that hit me were the rows of bodies laid out on the lawns of Bhopal’s Hamidia hospital.
The first sight that hit me were the rows of bodies laid out on the lawns of Bhopal’s Hamidia hospital.
Though I lived in Bhopal, I was on assignment in Indore on the night of December 2 when the nightmare unfolded at Union Carbide. In those pre-TV (and pre-internet) days, I’d heard only a garbled radio report the following morning about some people killed in a gas explosion.
Mine seemed to be the only vehicle on the highway heading towards Bhopal: countless buses and trucks, bursting with people, were fleeing the state capital.
I was 28, relatively new to the profession and still recovering from a traumatic week in Delhi’s refugee camps interviewing victims of the anti-Sikh violence that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination on October 31. I felt unprepared to report on India’s greatest industrial disaster. To make matters worse, the INDIA TODAY news team was busy covering the general election due at the end of December. I would have to do this alone.
My friends in the dailies were piecing together the number of dead and affected, but I realised the INDIA TODAY story would have to be about why and how the gas had leaked. A source I found in Union Carbide was too scared to reveal his name, so I persuaded a former Carbide engineer to confirm the events my source described. I paid for hundreds of photos of the Carbide plant from a local studio to compile an infographic explaining what had happened. In the midst of it all, I had to rush to check out a rumour that the MP government had dumped bodies into the Narmada river to hide the scale of the deaths. It was false.
When I flew to New Delhi with all the material, we’d almost run out of time. One of my editors, Suman Dubey, and the excellent design team helped me put together the full cover story. If there was one thing that was seared into my mind while covering many bloody events during my decade-long stint at INDIA TODAY, it was the tragedy of ordinary people often being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Bhopal only underlined this sad truth.