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By Root 1089 0

and gauges, which relayed, among other things, the temperature and pressure of the three tanks of MIC. Maintenance crews underwent the same cuts. The plant went from a total of nearly a thousand employees to six hundred and forty-two. What was more, a hundred and fifty workers were yanked from their regular workstations to make up a pool of manpower that could be moved here and there as the need arose. The result was a drop in the standard of work as many specialists found themselves assigned to tasks for which they had not been trained. The replacement of retiring skilled personnel with unskilled workers made further savings possible at the risk of having key positions filled by inexperienced people. The latter often spoke only Hindi, while the instruction manuals were written in English.

Kamal Pareek would never forget “the painful meetings during which section heads were obliged to present their plans for cuts.” The most senior engineers were reluctant to suggest solutions that would compromise the safety of their installations. But the pressures were too great, especially when they came from Carbide’s Danbury headquarters. That was how the decision was reached not to change certain parts every six months but only once a year. And to replace any damaged stainless steel pipes with ordinary steel piping. Numerous cuts were made along those lines. Chakravarty, the man primarily responsible for this flurry of cutbacks, seemed to know only one metal, the tinplate used in batteries. He behaved as if he knew nothing about corrosion or the wear and tear on equipment subject to extreme temperatures.

“In a matter of weeks, I saw everything I’d learned on the banks of the Kanawha River go out the window,” Pareek would say. “My beautiful plant was losing its soul.”

Unfortunate Kamal Pareek! Like so many other young Indians whom science had wrested from the ancestral constraints of their country and projected into the twentieth century, he had put his faith in the new values preached by the prestigious American multinational. He was suddenly discovering that that magnificent edifice was founded on one religion alone: the religion of profit. The blue-and-white hexagon was not a symbol of progress; it was just a commercial logo.

No ceremony was held to mark the departure of D.N. Chakravarty in June 1983. He left Bhopal satisfied that he had been able, in part, to stem the factory’s hemorrhaging finances.

Jagannathan Mukund was left in charge, but with a mission to continue the policy of cutbacks initiated by the envoy from Calcutta. He rarely left the air-conditioned ivory tower of his office. His June 1983 reply to the three inspectors from South Charleston claimed that many of the defects had been corrected, but critical items remained to be addressed. Some of the faulty valves in the phosgene and MIC units would not be able to be replaced for several more months. As for the automatic fire detection system in the carbon monoxide production unit, it could not be installed for a year at the earliest. These grave infractions of the sacrosanct safety principles would soon provoke another cry of alarm from the journalist Rajkumar Keswani. The factory was continuing to go downhill. The maintenance men had no replacement valves, clamps, flanges, rivets, bolts or even nuts. They were reduced to replacing defective gauges with substandard instruments. Small leaks from the circuits were not stopped until they were really dangerous. Many of the maintenance procedures were gradually phased out. Quality control checks on the substances produced became less and less frequent, as did the checks on the most sensitive equipment.

Soon the factory only went into operation when the sales team needed supplies of Sevin. This was precisely the method that Eduardo Muñoz had tried, ten years earlier, to convince the engineers in South Charleston to adopt, in order to avoid stocking enormous quantities of MIC. Now that the plant was operating at a reduced pace, Mukund stopped MIC production in order to gradually empty the tanks. Soon they held only