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carcinogenic substance. The report stipulated that an interval of fifteen minutes would constitute dangerous overexposure. All the same, the investigators considered these risks relatively minor in comparison with the danger “of an uncontrollable exothermic reaction in one of the MIC tanks and of the response to this situation not being rapid or effective enough to prevent a catastrophe.” The document gave a detailed list of the circumstances that could make such a tragedy possible. The fact that the tanks were used for prolonged storage was conducive to internal contamination, which was likely to pass unnoticed until precisely such a sudden and devastating chemical reaction occurred. The investigators had actually found that the tank’s refrigeration system introduced minuscule impurities, which could become the catalysts for such a reaction. They had discovered that these impurities could also come from the flare meant to burn off the toxic gases at a height of 120 feet. In short, the most modern plant, one that Carbide had counted among the safest in the whole of the United States’ chemical industry, appeared to be at the mercy of a few drops of water or metal filings. “The potential hazard leads the team to conclude that a real potential for a serious incident exists,” declared the document. In his accompanying letter, Poulson gave the names of sixteen Carbide executives who should receive copies of his report. Strangely, this list made no mention of the man to whom it was a matter of primary concern. Jagannathan Mukund, managing director of the Bhopal plant, with three tanks permanently holding sixty tons of MIC, would remain ignorant of the concerns expressed by the American engineers and, in particular, of their recommendations to counteract a possible catastrophe.

The plant on the Kali Grounds was a little like his baby. It was he who had set down the plans for the first formulation unit. It was he who had bought the splendid palace from the nawab’s brother to turn it into an agronomical research center. Together with Eduardo Muñoz and several other fanatical pioneers, Ranjit Dutta had laid the foundations for the beautiful plant right in the heart of the City of the Begums. As far as this engineer with the physique of a football player was concerned, his time spent in Bhopal had been a magical period in a richly successful career. After leaving India in 1976 to work in Carbide’s American agricultural products division, Dutta had repeatedly returned to the site of his first love. Every year he vacationed there with his family, boating on the waters of the Upper Lake, listening to poets during the mushairas in Spices Square, and dreaming beside the illuminated outline of the factory whose funnels he had designed. *

Now, at the age of fifty-four, he was vice-president in charge of the agricultural products division at the company’s headquarters. And that summer of 1984, at the time when the team of investigators led by Poulson was compiling its report, the Indian engineer had just come back from a pilgrimage to Bhopal. This time, however, the man who loved the city so much returned sad and disappointed.

“I didn’t like what I saw during that visit,” he later recounted. “I saw the approaches to the factory overrun with rubbish and weeds. I saw unoccupied workers chatting for hours over cups of tea. I saw mountains of files strewn about the management’s offices. I saw pieces of dismantled equipment lying about the place. I saw disorientated, unmotivated people. Even if the factory had temporarily stopped production, everyone should have been at their workstations getting on with maintenance work… . It’s strange but I sensed an atmosphere of neglect.”

As soon as he got back to Danbury, Dutta tried to relay this impression to his superiors but, oddly, it seemed none of them wanted to listen. “They probably thought I was harboring some sort of grievance against the local management,” he would say, “or that I wanted to take over the running of the factory again. But I only wanted to warn them that strange things were