This gentleman is one of the 150,000 people who are leading a painful existence as a result of the exposure. These survivors are the core of a powerful grassroots movement aimed at securing justice.

This "Hiroshima of the Chemical Industry" has served as a guidepost in framing safety standards worldwide.

The pesticide plant was located in a poor, densely populated neighborhood. Union Carbide—which is now part of Michigan-based Dow Chemical—stored inordinately large amounts of deadly chemicals there for the production of phosgene gas, to be used in pesticides.

One night, gas spewed out of an underground tank holding 40 tons of lethal methyl isocyanate. Water leaking into it set off a runaway chemical reaction. A 10-meter-high shroud of gas advanced like a stealth killer, in the dead of the night, choking and blinding people in its wake. By the next morning, between 3000 and 8000 were dead.

The decision to build the factory in Bhopal had brought with it the hope of prosperity and social uplift. But those hopes always eluded the low-skilled and impoverished local people. They shouldered almost all the risk, and almost none of the prosperity trickled down to them.

Very few people in the community knew or understood either the industrial processes or the end products. So local government, the medical system and the citizenry were unprepared to deal with the aftermath of the gas leak.

Today, eight thousand miles away from Bhopal, Boston University plans to locate a Biosafety Level-4 laboratory (BSL-4) in the densely populated, low income, urban neighborhood of South End/Roxbury.

Local, state, and federal authorities think this is an ideal location for their "bioterror lab." They are not interested in the lesson of Bhopal.

The three other BSL-4 laboratories around the U.S. are in areas with 1/5 the population densities found in central Boston. The much boasted $1.6 billion expected in research grants, $200 million in construction costs and numerous jobs to be created may all be realized, but how much of this will translate into benefits for the local people?

So why should the people accept the risk of living around a facility working with the deadliest of pathogens, many of which have no known cures?

Jobs created for the creamy layer of the scientific community and high security would make the BSL-4 lab an island-fortress of "prosperity and scientific progress" in the Boston neighborhood.

The disaster at Bhopal continues through the physical suffering of thousands, congenitally defective children, sterile women, and a rising incidence of cancer.

Yet the survivors do not perceive any entity being held accountable for the disaster. Their outrage is largely responsible for a persistent grassroots demand: the U.S. must extradite Union Carbide boss Warren Anderson to face criminal charges pending against him in the Indian courts.

Inadequate and mismanaged economic compensation has only exacerbated the sense of being wronged. Five years after the event, Union Carbide and the government of India settled for a compensation of $470 million. The monetary cost of an Indian life, a lost livelihood, a deformed child was put at $500 per victim.

By comparison, it cost $900 to clean up a sea otter contaminated by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Environmental injustice

A recent Northeastern University report,* based on a study carried out in 362 communities throughout the Bay State, documents that "low income communities face a cumulative exposure rate to environmentally hazardous facilities and sites which is four times greater than high income communities.”

High minority communities (defined as 75 percent or less “white people”) face a cumulative exposure rate to environmentally hazardous facilities and sites which is over twenty times greater than low minority (95 percent “white”) communities." BSL-4 "bioterror lab" plans confirm the findings of the study.

If a similar study on the exposure to ecological hazards were to be done in Bhopal, it might show an even more skewed access to clean environment within the same city.

Enormous amounts of toxic chemicals and pesticide, lying around unprotected even 21 years after the disaster, have leached into the groundwater of neighboring areas. While powerful actors in government and business are busy pointing fingers and reassessing the death toll, marginalized residents continue to drink poisoned water.

A study by the New Delhi-based organization Shristi** found heavy metals, organo-chlorines and pesticides in the breast milk of nursing mothers. People have felt the sanctity of their bodies being trespassed. Mainstream history has wrapped up the disaster in Bhopal as a tragedy whose last act was the legal settlement. The government, media and the urban elite have, as usual, disrespected the experiences of the people.

By collecting evidence and testimonies, the campaign in Bhopal is preserving history. Through vigils, marches, petitions and protests, the public memory of December 1984 has been kept alive—much to the chagrin of the Indian government and Dow Chemical.

What Bhopal says to us

Bhopal is relevant today—everywhere on Earth. Everywhere corporate interests and governments eager to provide a congenial investment atmosphere crush the rights of the weak and underprivileged.

The high social and environmental cost of materially comfortable and secure lifestyles is carefully hidden. Those who live in disadvantaged communities pay most of the cost. But not all of it.

Toxic chemicals abound in the things of everyday use, such as non-stick frying pans, pizza boxes, plastic containers, detergents, lubricants etc. A study published in July 2005‡ documents the presence of 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of babies born in US hospitals. Of these, 187 are known to cause cancer.

The paradigm of "progress" based on infinite growth, without rules for sharing prosperity, hides our perceptions of the rapidly changing "North-South divide."

"Globalization" means that "the South" need not cross national boundaries but emerges within each country, wherever people must pay the price of rapid industrialization, de-industrialization and capital flight.

Bhopal shows, with prophetic clarity, that catastrophe follows when human costs are ignored and community participation is denied. It shows the futility of the trickle-down theory of benefits.

Bhopal holds out lessons in human resilience and the strength of grassroots leadership. It insists that every person deserves a safe and secure life.

Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards, Boston: Northeastern University, 2005 * Shristi: Surviving Bhopal 2002, Toxic Present - Toxic Future. A Report on Human and Environmental Chemical Contamination around the Bhopal disaster site, New Delhi: Shristi, 2002 ‡Body Burden - The Pollution in Newborns, Environmental Working Group, 2005 < www.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden/>