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By Root 971 0

and welfare experts. Together, they monitor more than ten thousand economically disadvantaged patients, and see that they all receive effective treatment. The team at Sambhavna Clinic has discovered that certain yoga exercises can dramatically improve chronic respiratory problems. Half the patients thus treated have regained the ability to breathe almost normally and have been able to give up the drugs they had been taking for many years. The clinic also manufactures some sixty plant-based Ayurvedic medicines, which have already enabled hundreds of patients to resume some form of activity—a spectacular achievement that has wrested from poverty some of the fifty thousand men and women once too weak to do manual work.

So many years after the catastrophe, five thousand families in Chola, Shakti Nagar, Jai Prakash Nagar and other bustees are still drinking water from wells polluted by the toxic waste left by the factory. Samples taken by a Greenpeace team in December 1999 from the vicinity of the former installation showed a carbon tetrachloride level 682 times higher than the acceptable maximum, a chloroform level 260 times higher, and a trichloroethylene level 50 times higher.

No court of law ever passed judgment on Union Carbide for the crime it committed in Bhopal. Neither the Indian government, claiming to represent the victims, nor the American lawyers who had extracted thousands of powers of attorney from poor people like Ganga Ram, managed to induce a court on the other side of the Atlantic to declare itself competent to try a catastrophe that had occurred outside the United States. One of the American lawyers representing the Indian government had taken young Sunil Kumar, one of three survivors of a family of ten, to New York to try and persuade the judge before whom the case had been brought, to agree to try Carbide. It was the ambulance chaser’s view that only an American court could require the multinational to pay an amount commensurate to the enormity of the wrong. They sought damages of up to $15 billion. Carbide’s defense lawyers argued that an American court was not competent to assess the value of a human life in the third world. “How can one determine the damage inflicted on people who live in shacks?” asked one member of the legal team. One newspaper took it upon itself to do the arithmetic. “An American life is worth approximately five hundred thousand dollars,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “Taking into account the fact that India’s gross national product is 1.7 percent of that of the United States, the court should compensate for the decease of each Indian victim proportionately, that is to say with eight thousand five hundred dollars.” * One year after the catastrophe, no substantial help from the multinational had reached the victims, despite the fact that Carbide had given $5 million in emergency aid. It took four long years of haggling before, in the absence of a proper trial, a settlement was drawn up between the American company and the Indian government. In February 1989, Union Carbide offered to pay $470 million in compensation, in full and final settlement and provided the Indian government undertook not to pursue any further legal proceedings against the company or its chairman. This was over six times less than the compensation initially claimed by the Indian government. The lawyers for the government nevertheless accepted the proposal without consulting the victims.

This very favorable settlement from Union Carbide’s perspective sent the company’s stock up two dollars on Wall Street, a rise that enabled Chairman Warren Anderson to inform his shareholders that in the final analysis, the Bhopal disaster only meant “a loss of forty-three cents a share” to the company. One week after the fateful night, Union Carbide shares had dropped fifteen points, reducing the multinational’s value by $600 million.

Most surprising was the psychological shockwave that the disaster triggered throughout every level of the company, from engineers like Warren Woomer or Ranjit Dutta, to ordinary workers,