July 14, 2008
IITians protest Dow sponsorship of golden jubilee celebration
Mumbai/New Delhi, July 14 (IANS) Hundreds of former and present students, including many faculty members of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B), have protested acceptance of sponsorship by an alumni group from US-based Dow Chemicals for a golden jubilee conference in New York July 18-20. Addressing the media in Mumbai Monday, Janak Daftari, an IIT-B alumni, said: “A group of IIT-B alumni, mostly from Silicon Valley, in total disregard to the sentiments and the callous practices being followed by the firm in their (alumini’s) origin country, has gone ahead and under the aegis of IIT-Bombay Heritage Fund are organizing a two-day golden jubilee function in New York between July 18-20.”
The Bhopal gas tragedy, which is often considered as one of the world’s biggest industrial disasters, took place December 3, 1984. A Union Carbide subsidiary pesticide plant released 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate, which killed more than 3,800 people and affected many thousand more. The Dow Chemicals now owns Union Carbide.
Daftari said that over 1,000 students signed a petition last year urging the IITs to debar Dow from on-campus recruitment or sponsoring programs, “purely because of Dow’s mishandling of its subsidiary Union Carbide’s environmental and criminal liabilities in Bhopal and its disregard for Indian courts.”
He said the company was forced to call off its recruitment plans in Mumbai, Chennai, Kharagpur and New Delhi and “IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi returned Dow’s sponsorship at the last minute, succumbing to pressure from alumni, faculty and students”.
“It is a sheer irony that in 2005, the organisers of Global IIT Conference in the US, cancelled their invitation to the then CEO of Dow, William Stavropoulos. And here the IIT-B Heritage Fund has gone ahead and not just accepted the sponsorship but has even put the firm at the pedestal of gold sponsor,” Daftari said.
Asked whether IIT authorities have given any approval to the contentious event, Daftari said an invitation has been sent to all senior members of the institution.
“Obviously, the golden jubilee celebration is being done privately but then there is a tacit approval from the senior administrators. After all they are seriously contemplating to attend the event even though scores of faculty members have opposed the sponsorship itself,” he said.
In Delhi, Ravi Kuchimanchi, another alumni, said he, like scores of others, was shocked that the organisers of the conference could even think of associating themselves with a company that has caused such an enormous disaster and given birth to innumerable tales of agony.
“In 1984 when the gas leaked in Bhopal, I and other students in IIT-Bombay were shocked and angry. Today I am shocked to see, instead of forcing Dow to fork up money and clean up the Bhopal site, the organisers of the 50th anniversary celebrations have sought its money. As IIT alumni we can do better,” a disappointed Kuchimanchi said in a press statement in the national capital.
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July 07, 2008
Decades Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal
SOMINI SENGUPTA, New York Times, July 7, 2008
In 2004, complaints from area residents led the Supreme Court to order the state to supply clean drinking water to the people living around the factory, like this young girl, filling buckets fed from a government-provided tank. By then, nearly 20 years had gone by, with residents of the nearby slum drinking contaminated water, with often disastrous results on their health.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
BHOPAL, India — Hundreds of tons of waste still languish inside a tin-roofed warehouse in a corner of the old grounds of the Union Carbide pesticide factory here, nearly a quarter-century after a poison gas leak killed thousands and turned this ancient city into a notorious symbol of industrial disaster.
The toxic remains have yet to be carted away. No one has examined to what extent, over more than two decades, they have seeped into the soil and water, except in desultory checks by a state environmental agency, which turned up pesticide residues in the neighborhood wells far exceeding permissible levels.
Nor has anyone bothered to address the concerns of those who have drunk that water and tended kitchen gardens on this soil and who now present a wide range of ailments, including cleft palates and mental retardation, among their children as evidence of a second generation of Bhopal victims, though it is impossible to say with any certainty what is the source of the afflictions.
Why it has taken so long to deal with the disaster is an epic tale of the ineffectiveness and seeming apathy of India’s bureaucracy and of the government’s failure to make the factory owners do anything about the mess they left. But the question of who will pay for the cleanup of the 11-acre site has assumed new urgency in a country that today is increasingly keen to attract foreign investment.
It was here that on Dec. 3, 1984, a tank inside the factory released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas, killing those who inhaled it while they slept. At the time, it was called the world’s worst industrial accident. At least 3,000 people were killed immediately. Thousands more may have died later from the aftereffects, though the exact death toll remains unclear.
More than 500,000 people were declared to be affected by the gas and awarded compensation, an average of $550. Some victims say they have yet to receive any money. Efforts to extradite Warren M. Anderson, the chief executive of Union Carbide at the time, from the United States continue, though apparently with little energy behind them.
Advocates for those who live near the site continue to hound the company and their government. They chain themselves to the prime minister’s residence one day and dog shareholder meetings on another, refusing to let Bhopal become the tragedy that India forgot. They insist that Dow Chemical Company, which bought Union Carbide in 2001, also bought its liabilities and should pay for the cleanup.
“Had the toxic waste been cleaned up, the contaminated groundwater would not have happened,” says Mira Shiva, a doctor who heads the Voluntary Health Association, one of many groups pressing for Dow to take responsibility for the cleanup. “Dow was the first crime. The second crime was government negligence.”
Dow, based in Michigan, says it bears no responsibility to clean up a mess it did not make. “As there was never any ownership, there is no responsibility and no liability — for the Bhopal tragedy or its aftermath,” Scot Wheeler, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail message.
Mr. Wheeler pointed out that the former factory property, along with the waste it contained, had been turned over to the Madhya Pradesh State government in June 1998, and that “for whatever reason most of us do not know or fully understand, the site remains unremediated.”
He went on to say that Dow could not finance remediation efforts, even if it wanted to, because it could potentially open up the company to further liabilities.
In a letter to the Indian ambassador to the United States in 2006, the Dow chairman, Andrew N. Liveris, sought assurance from the government that it would not be held liable for the mess on the old factory site, “in your efforts to ensure that we have the appropriate investment climate.”
The claims have divided the government itself. It is now in the throes of a debate over who will pay — a debate that might have taken place behind closed doors were it not for a series of public information requests by advocates for Bhopal residents that turned up revealing government correspondence.
It showed that one arm of the government, the Chemicals and Petrochemicals Ministry, entrusted with the cleanup of the site, has wanted Dow to put down a $25 million deposit toward the cost of remediation, while other senior officials warned that forcing Dow’s hand could endanger future investments in the country.
A senior government official, prohibited from speaking publicly on such a contentious issue, described the quandary. “Do you want $1 billion in investment, or do you want this sticky situation to continue?” the official said, calling it a stalemate.
The government is expected to make a final decision later this year.
Beyond who will pay for the cleanup here, the question is why 425 tons of hazardous waste — some local advocates allege there is a great deal more, buried in the factory grounds — remain here 24 years after the leak?
There are many answers. The company was allowed to dump the land on the government before it was cleaned up. Lawsuits by advocacy groups are still winding their way through the courts. And a network of often lethargic, seemingly apathetic government agencies do not always coordinate with one another.
The result is a wasteland in the city’s heart. The old factory grounds, frozen in time, are an overgrown 11-acre forest of corroded tanks and pipes buzzing with cicadas, where cattle graze and women forage for twigs to cook their evening meal.
The old factory grounds, frozen in time, are an overgrown 11-acre forest of corroded tanks and pipes. The toxic remains have yet to be carted away. At least 3,000 people were killed on Dec. 3, 1984, after a tank inside the factory released 40 tons of methyl isocyanate gas, killing those who inhaled it while they slept. Thousands more may have died later from the aftereffects, though the exact death toll remains unclear.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Since the disaster, ill-considered decisions on the part of local residents have only compounded the problems and heightened their health risks. Just beyond the factory wall is a blue-black open pit. Once the repository of chemical sludge from the pesticide plant, it is now a pond where slum children and dogs dive on hot afternoons. Its banks are an open toilet. In the rainy season, it overflows through the slum’s muddy alleys.
Hundreds of tons of waste still languish on the old grounds of the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India, nearly a quarter-century after a poison gas leak killed thousands and turned this ancient city into a notorious symbol of industrial disaster. Just beyond the factory wall is a blue-black open pit. Once the repository of chemical sludge from the pesticide plant, it is now a pond where slum children and dogs swim on hot afternoons. It has only heightened health risks for residents.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
The slum rose up shortly after the gas leak. Poor people flocked here, seeking cheap land, and put up homes right up to the edge of the sludge pond. Once, the pond was sealed with concrete and plastic. But in the searing heat, the concrete cover eventually collapsed.
The first tests of groundwater began, inexplicably, 12 years after the gas leak. The state pollution control board turned up traces of pesticides, including endosulfan, lindane, trichlorobenzene and DDT. Soil sediments were not tested. The water was never compared with water in other city neighborhoods. The pollution board saw no cause for alarm.
Nevertheless, in 2004, complaints from residents led the Supreme Court to order the state to supply clean drinking water to the people living around the factory. By then, nearly 20 years had gone by.
“It is a scandal that the hazardous wastes left behind by Union Carbide unattended for 20 years have now migrated below ground and contaminated the groundwater below the factory and in its neighborhood,” wrote Claude Alvares, a monitor for India’s Supreme Court, who visited here in March 2005.
He tasted the water from one well. “I had to spit out everything,” he wrote in his report. The water “had an appalling chemical taste.” Neighborhood women brought out their utensils to show how the water had corroded them.
As his report went on to point out, the government was long ago made aware of the likelihood of contamination. A government research center warned more than 10 years ago that, if left untreated, the toxic residue on the factory grounds would seep into the soil and water.
A guard on duty in the remains of the Union Carbide plant. No one has examined to what extent, over more than two decades, the toxic remains have seeped into the soil and water, except in desultory checks by a state environmental agency, which turned up pesticide residues in the neighborhood wells far exceeding permissible levels.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
Around the same time, under public pressure, state authorities finally scooped up the toxic waste that had lain in clumps around the factory grounds, and stored it inside the tin-roofed warehouse. The warehouse was padlocked only about four years ago.
The waste was supposed to be taken to an incinerator in neighboring Gujarat, but the government has yet to find a contractor willing to pack it into small, transportable parcels. There have been delays in acquiring transport permits, too, with citizens groups raising new questions about the hazards of transporting the waste.
Ajay Vishoni, the state gas and health minister, said he was confident that none of the waste was hazardous anymore, nor had anyone proved to his satisfaction that it had ever caused the contamination of the groundwater. “There is hype,” he said.
In 2005, a state-financed study called for long-term epidemiological studies to determine the impact of contaminated drinking water, concluding that while the levels of toxic contaminants were not very high, water and soil contamination had caused an increase in respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments.
In the Shiv Nagar slum about half a mile from the factory, there is a boy, Akash, who was born with an empty socket for a left eye. Now 6, he cannot see properly or speak. He is a cheerful child who plays in the lanes near his house.
In the Shiv Nagar slum, about a half-mile from the factory, Akash was born with an empty socket for a left eye. Now 6, he cannot see properly, nor speak. His father, Shobha Ram, blamed the boy's afflictions on the hand-pumped well from where his family drew water on the edge of the sludge pond for years. "We knew the gas incident took place," he said. "We never thought the contaminated water would come all the way to our house."
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
His father, Shobha Ram, a maker of sweets who bought land here many years after the gas leak and built himself a two-room house, said the boy’s afflictions were caused by the hand-pumped well from where his family drew water on the edge of the sludge pond for years. He said it had not occurred to him that the water could be laced with pesticides.
“We knew the gas incident took place,” he said. “We never thought the contaminated water would come all the way to our house.”
The stories repeat themselves in the nearby slums. In Blue Moon, Muskan, a 2-year-old girl, cannot walk, speak or understand what is happening around her. Her father, Anwar, blames the water.
In Arif Nagar, Nawab and Hassan Mian, brothers who are 8 and 12, move through their house like newly hatched birds, barely able to stand. They have no control over their muscles. Their mother, Fareeda Bi, is unsure of exactly what caused their ailment, but she, too, blames the water.
Fareeda Bi sitting with her two sons, Nawab, 8, in her lap, and Hassan, 12, in their home in the Arif Nagar slum near the factory. The boys have no muscle control and are barely able to stand. "There are more children like this in the neighborhood," she said, "who cannot walk, who cannot see." To compound the tragedy, there is no way to know to what extent the water is to blame. The government suspended long-term public health studies many years ago.
Photo: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
“There are more children like this in the neighborhood,” she said, “who cannot walk, who cannot see.”
To compound the tragedy, there is no way to know to what extent the water is to blame. The government suspended long-term public health studies many years ago.
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June 28, 2008
Bhopal Victims Still Seeking Redress
Madhur Singh, Time Magazine, June 28, 2008
Survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas disaster and activists take part in a protest march in New Delhi on May 13, 2008. Manan Vatsyayana / AFP / Getty
The sad truth facing the victims of the natural disasters in China and Burma is that they will soon disappear forever from the headlines and awareness of the international media, inevitably crowded out by more current and pressing stories. The same thing happened to the survivors of Bhopal, where, in December 1984, 40 tons of mostly methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas — one of the deadliest chemicals invented by man — escaped from a Union Carbide factory, immediately killing some 8,000 people, and eventually being linked to 12,000 subsequent deaths. The biggest industrial disaster ever, many times deadlier than the Chernobyl nuclear accident, made headlines around the world, but soon receded into the remote corners of public memory.
But Nafeesa Khan cannot forget the night her life became a living hell. Aged just 18 then, she was married to railways worker Jabbar Khan and expecting their first child. They lived a little over a mile away from the Union Carbide factory, where the gas leak occurred shortly after midnight on December 3, 1984. "We woke up to the sound of screaming," she recalls, "We thought we were breathing fire. There was fire in our eyes and our bellies. People were running helter-skelter, confused, and it seemed the night would never end. By the time it ended, my unborn child was dead."
Like the other survivors, Nafeesa and Jabbar were left enfeebled by exposure to the poison gas, and developed lung, skin and digestive disorders. Too weak to work, Jabbar lost his job. All of the couple's five children — who were not yet born at the time of the disaster — suffer from multiple ailments that doctors blame on their parents' exposure to MIC and other chemicals. "I'd never thought my life would turn out this way," says Nafeesa, "What hurts more is that those responsible for ruining my life have got away."
Two decades on, a criminal case charging Union Carbide and its officials with culpable homicide is still dragging on in a local court in Bhopal, because none of the accused have been available to the court. In 1985, the Indian government had filed a $3.3 billion claim in a U.S. court against Union Carbide, but eventually settled out of court for $470 million — which amounted to less than $500 for each of the 500,000 people harmed by the accident. In addition, Union Carbide never cleaned up the accident site, which continues to leech highly toxic chemicals into the soil and groundwater of the surrounding area, affecting even people born decades after the gas leak. In 2001, Dow Chemicals acquired Union Carbide, but has refused to accept any liability for Bhopal.
For Khan, the injustice continues to rankle, and she joined 50 survivors on a march to New Delhi where they have been staging a sit-in protest for nearly three months now. They are demanding that India's government ensure medical and other help to the thousands of survivors, and that legal action be taken against Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide. Earlier this month, the organization spearheading the march, the International Campaign for Justice for Bhopal (ICJB), released official documents demonstrating that India's Law Ministry shares the legal view that Dow is legally bound to accept the liabilities of Union Carbide.
The ICJB are demanding that Dow pay $1 billion to the survivors, in addition to paying for the cleanup. "But Dow has got the government eating out of its hands," says ICJB's Satinath Sarangi, claiming that a complex web of corruption and politics has been denying the Bhopal survivors of their rightful due. The ICJB claim that Dow's promise to invest $1 billion in India has won over senior ministers and officials to its side, who have been lobbying to have Dow absolved of Union Carbide's liabilities. He displays letters from the Indian ambassador to the U.S. as well as official communication from the offices of Indian officials to this effect. He also points out that Dow's counsel in a case pending in the High Court is also the spokesperson of the ruling Congress party.
Meanwhile, the controversy has slowed Dow's plans to invest in India. In January this year, construction of Dow's proposed R&D facility in Pune in the western Indian state of Maharashtra was stalled after local villagers dug up approach roads to the site. Six Indian Institutes of Technology have refused to work with Dow until it cleans up the accident site and reveals the composition of IMC — a commercial secret — so that survivors can be properly treated. Last year, Dow had to pay a $325,000 penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission of the U.S. for bribing Indian officials to expedite licenses for four pesticides produced by Dow — one of which, Dursban, is banned in the U.S. Action from the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation may follow. "If Dow were not afraid of the liabilities, it would've invested much more in India," says Sarangi, "The geopolitical logic of its acquisition of Union Carbide was to expand to big markets like India. And we've managed to stop it from doing that."
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June 23, 2008
Tragic Tales
Mwatima Issa, Express India, June 23, 2008
A dialogue between Raghu Rai’s photos and a play by Parnab Mukherjee juxtaposed to bring home the unforgettable horrors of the Bhopal gas leak and its implications
Continuing their cultural activities with social messages that dessiminate awareness among common people, city-based NGO Lokayat recently organised a play titled A dialogue between Raghu Rai’s photos of Bhopal Gas Tragedy and curated performance by Pranab Mukherjee and friends on June 19. Rai, being a great photographer, is well- known for his deep emotional and spiritual images that rely heavily on optimism. After bearing witness to the Bhopal disaster, Rai, along with several other people, saw a very different phase of Indian history - that of pain, despair and pessimism.
Mukherjee, an excellent theatre performer presented a 14-minute non-verbal play which transformed the entire backdrop to the time of the tradegy through 30 of Rai’s Bhopal pictures and by sharing emotions which attached them emotionally with the pain of the tragedy victims.
The prominent feature of the play was when Mukherjee explained about how a street play is made from scratch and put together the works of Rai into a play. He said, “The only way to feel the pain is to represent the pain and not to imitate pain.” In his performance, Mukherjee presented each movement and experienced the pain of each victim presented in Rai’s photographs - from an aborted foetus, the burial of an anonymous child, the multiple heart surgeries to the human skeletons coming out from the cemetery they were collectively buried in.
24 years after the Bhopal Gas tragedy, which killed thousands of people, the victims are yet to see the changes in their life as they are haunted by the memories of the tragic day. The whole purpose of the play was to let the people know that even though the incident happened in the past, people are still living the same tragic life the memories of which they tried to erase, but in vain. Making the message clearer, Lokayat presented 30 black and white images and each of the pictures presented more than one story of the victims. Sunil Verma, a social activist and Bhopal tragedy victim, who committed suicide two years ago, inspired Mukherjee’s play. Mukherjee said that Verma’s story summarises the whole Gas tradegy and the implications that it has had.
“I must have performed more then 20,000 autopsies so far. No relative of a gas victim can get a compensation claim for a death without my certificate and it has been a nightmarish experience especially those initial first days, when we hardly came out of the morgue,” said Dr Sathpathy, the forensic expert at the State Government Hamidia Hospital, who lived through the disastrous night.
Alka Joshi, Lokayat convener stated, “There are more than 60 of Raghu Rai’s photographs on Bhopal Tragedy. There are some which were taken two days after the tragedy, some after twenty years and we have mixed them all together today because when you look at them you can’t differentiate between them as they are all telling the same story even after so many years.”
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June 22, 2008
'The govt must stop obstructing justice'
As Gandhi once showed the world, the hunger strike is a powerful moral weapon of the weak. It took decades but it worked, where lawsuits in colonial courts or armed resistance to imperial strength might have failed. But do hunger strikes have any power today?
Indra Sinha, former ad copywriter, author of Animal's People, and most recently hunger striker, is convinced they do. The France-based writer went on a week-long fast recently in support of Bhopal gas survivors who are on hunger strike in Delhi demanding, among other things, that the government let the law take its course against Dow Chemical and Union Carbide.
Sinha recalls the immense global response to the 1981 Irish hunger strike, in which 10 prisoners died demanding that Britain treat them not as criminals but as political prisoners. "Even those who disagreed with their politics could not ignore the powerful response," he says.
Twenty-four years after the Bhopal disaster, major issues remain unresolved. Many victims weren't even born in 1984 when the Union Carbide factory-now owned by Dow Chemical-leaked 27 tonnes of lethal gas over the city. Thousands died within hours, and tens of thousands survived-many as orphans-condemned to a lifetime of health problems, some crippling, some fatal, and many passed down through generations. Thousands drink poisonous water daily, because the groundwater is contaminated from the toxic factory, which still awaits a clean-up.
Fifteen years ago, Sinha had no connection with Bhopal. Mumbai-born and Cambridge-educated, he was living in the UK, raising money for Amnesty International. "Someone in Bhopal got wind of my work. A community worker from Bhopal, Satinath Sarangi, came to see me in England in 1993. He asked if I could help the gas victims, because in 10 years, they had got no help. I had heard about the disaster, but thought it must have all been sorted out." Sarangi told him about the lack of medical care and other problems, and said he wanted to start an ayurvedic clinic in Bhopal.
Sinha says, "I thought it was inconceivable that after nine years, survivors had no medical care. Here, this sort of thing would have been dealt with right away." Using another powerful weapon-words-he created a double-page ad, and convinced The Guardian to publish it. He recalls, "It was a huge risk, but readers responded generously." And so the Sambhavna Clinic in Bhopal was built.
But today, survivors are still waiting for the safe water supply, promised only after they agitated in 2006. Sinha is outraged that survivors are treated like this, while the government bends over backwards to accommodate a company that assigns unequal value to Indian and American lives. He reminds you that the compensation to the victims averaged US $500 (Rs 21,400) per person-barely enough for a cup of tea a day-for a lifetime of sickness. He quotes Dow Chemical public affairs specialist Kathy Hunt as saying in 2002, "$500 is plenty good for an Indian." Contrast this, he says, the $10 million that Dow paid an American child who suffered brain damage caused by its Dursban insecticide. Dursban, banned in the US in 2000, is marketed aggressively in India. Dow has even admitted, Sinha notes, to bribing agriculture ministry officials to expedite its registration.
Sinha is hardly alone in his outrage: 287 people have fasted or are fasting-more than 20 of them indefinitely-in Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, the UK and the US. A couple of weeks ago, 16 US Congresspersons wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, urging him to bring Dow and Union Carbide to justice. The issue has drawn the attention of British and Scottish MPs, Amnesty International, and dozens of eminent writers and artists. Seventeen US-based NRI organisations have written to the prime minister, seeking urgent resolution of survivors' demands. Supporters have sent over 5,000 faxes to the prime minister's office this month alone.
Sinha sums up their demands: "The government must ensure proper medical treatment for not just gas victims, but also those suffering from the contaminated water. Secondly, the factory should be cleaned up using the world's best expertise. And thirdly, let justice take its course-stop obstructing it."
Bhopal survivors insist that Dow pays for the clean-up. Sinha points out that the law ministry has said in a private note that Dow is liable, regardless of the technicalities of its merger with Union Carbide. But at the same time, he notes, Dow is negotiating with the government to be freed of its liabilities. "I have no words strong enough for the politicians in Delhi," he says.
Sinha's passionate commitment to the cause led him to write Animal's People, shortlisted for the 2007 Booker and winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The novel highlights the human aspect of Bhopal survivors' lives and loves. It is going to be made into a movie. Sinha says, "I've been asked to write the screenplay. I'm thrilled." TNN
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GoM not in favour of letting Dow off the hook
Akshaya Mukul & Nitin Sethi, The Times of India, June 22, 2008
NEW DELHI: Even though senior UPA ministers as well as deputy chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia have supported absolving Dow Chemicals of any legal liability in the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy case, the group of ministers on Bhopal headed by HRD minister Arjun Singh is not in favour of showing any leniency towards the chemicals giant.
Sources told TOI that while agreeing to set up a commission to address the issues of cleaning up of the gas leak site and public health, the GoM has rejected Ratan Tata's offer to lead a trust of India Inc to pay for the clean-up.
The GoM, sources said, was of the view that Tata's proposal was not merely an issue of funding the clean-up but contained an implicit condition that Dow be absolved of its liabilities. Rejecting Tata's proposal means that the legal liability of Dow shall be dealt in courts and not by an executive order as the cabinet secretary had earlier suggested in a note.
Tata had suggested in 2006 to the finance minister and Ahluwalia that he was ready to head a Rs 100 crore fund to take care of the residual pollution and contamination issues. The letter came after an interaction of Dow officials with Tata at the US-India CEO Forum.
Dow wants the Rs 100 crore notice sent to it by the Indian government as a contingent payment for cleaning up of the tragedy site to be withdrawn as a precondition to it investing in India.
While several key Congress ministers had suggested resolving the issue in favour of Dow, the government has not been able to take a clear position.
Meanwhile, even as Prithviraj Chavan, MoS in the PMO, is in touch with protesting groups, the government has failed to ensure release of 23 Bhopal activists, including 21 women, who were arrested on June 9 after a demonstration outside the PMO. Chavan told activists that the PM has decided to set up a commission and carry on with the litigation against Dow.
Though Chavan has said the issue of extradition of Union Carbide officials is yet to be decided, the GoM, sources said, was of the view that extradition of Carbide officials would not yield anything more than two decades after the leak.
''They should not have been allowed to leave India then. In that case, we could have dictated terms. There is no point in extradition now,'' a source said.
However, the GoM is yet to decide on the transfer of intellectual property of UCC that the commerce ministry had permitted despite court orders.
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