 | On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate, which spread throughout the city of Bhopal. Half a million people were exposed to the gas and 20,000 have died to date as a result of their exposure. More than 120,000 people still suffer from ailments caused by the accident and the subsequent pollution at the plant site. |
Feeling the pain of slum-dwellers and poor people, Mr. Sathyu Sarangi launched a campaign to provide medical help to the needy and to fight for their right for just compensation. He has travelled throughout the world and given lectures to leading universities to create awareness for the Bhopal gas tragedy and the suffering of under privileged class resulting from it. He has written a number of scholarly articles about the tragedy and its tragic effect on the sufferers.
Sathyu is an IT-BHU alumnus (M. Tech. Metallurgy 1980). He is founder of Sambhavna Trust, Bhopal.
For Chronicle, Yogesh K. Upadhyaya talks with Sathyu Sarangi to learn more about the tragedy and the social service provided by his organization.
For biography of Sathyu Sarangi, please click here
This interview of about 3,600 words is condensed from the original full-length interview of about 5,400 words to match chronicle format. The original interview contains much more interesting details about Sathyu’s work for the service to Bhopal tragedy victims and other subjects, etc. To view the original interview, please click here
Q-1: Sathyuji, please tell us about yourself.
I was born in Chakradharpur, a small town in what is now Jharkhand. My father worked for the central government and he used to get transferred to a new place almost every year. My childhood was spent in small towns and a few big cities in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Because of my father’s transfers I went to 10 schools in 12 years. I was the youngest in the family and my elder brothers and sister went to boarding schools. Our family stayed in a place for too short a time for me to have friends so I had books as my best friends. A voracious reader of classics, travelogues, biographies and mystery novels I had little time for text books. But I always came first in the exams.
I joined Science College in BHU. There were troubles in the science and other colleges almost immediately after joining. Armed and vicious constables of the PAC raided our hostels and many students were badly thrashed. I joined the street battles on the days following this attack and went home when the University was closed “sine die”. I realized soon that the troubles were indeed engineered by political parties trying to get a hold on the students. I found that metallurgical engineering was as close to physical chemistry as one could get and planned my escape from Science College. I wrote the JEE and got in to BHU IT to study metallurgical engineering.
Except for Dr Khastagir who was an excellent teacher of physics there was little that was remarkable in the first two years. Being in the department of metallurgical engineering, once I was in my third year opened a whole new world of curiosity and learning. Here there were professors who worked hard, some times for hours, preparing for their lectures, labs where people worked all night and a library that remained open till late in to the night.
In my fourth year an article in an old metallurgy journal about steel making by indigenous communities in Jharkhand gripped my imagination. I was able to actually reproduce the four and half feet tall “blast furnace” the indigenous people used and managed to produce an impressive lump of steel from iron ore powder, charcoal and lime stone.
By the time I reached my fifth year I was convinced that I did not want to join a company and did not wish to go abroad. I joined M Tech to carry on with the work I had done on indigenous steel making which in its essence was steel making through low temperature solid state reduction with carbon being supplied by charcoal. I was able to produce more quantities of “indigenous” steel and to my great surprise found that the little pieces I used for testing strength and hardness did not get rusted even after being in the open for months. Scanning Electron Microscopy showed that there was a glassy (silicates?) coating all over the steel pieces.
In my M Tech dissertation I presented indigenous steel making as the technology that was most cost and energy efficient and the one that made the most environmental sense when compared to even the latest steel making technologies. I decided to continue doing more focused work on this after I passed M Tech and registered for PhD with Professor Gupta as my supervisor. By the time I dropped out of PhD I had worked for more than six years on a project that started from reading an article (the author one Moni Roy) in an old journal meant to be sold away for recycling.
Q-2: Why did you decide to work for the social cause and justice?
As I said above, the sixties were the years of my growth. During those years you had to be utterly dumb or insensitive not to be radically oriented. One of my earliest memories is that of participating in a celebration of the people from indigenous communities (adivaasi) who had recaptured land (after armed battles with the Bihar Military Police) that had been taken over by the British for commercial forestry more than 150 years back. The recaptured land was distributed to all descendents of the original settlers whose names and genealogies had been preserved in the songs of the ‘medicine men’.
In my third year in IT-BHU I started going out of the University campus in the east. I found the disparity between the world inside the campus and the world right outside of its perimeter to be outrageous. Most stark was the condition of the agricultural workers of low caste who were bonded to upper caste landlords. The first village on the way out from the University is the birth place of Ravidas, a well known rebel saint who was a low caste person.
I was quite impressed with the work of Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire, and along with a friend from mechanical engineering we stated running “adult education” classes in those villages. Every day after classes, we used cycle down to the harijan hamlets of Nayapura and Narottampur to hold these classes. We formed an organization called Society of Social Workers (SSW).We used run a tea stall during the annual “Kashi Yatra” festivals and ran our organizations and a magazine with the money we made from the stall. In late ‘70s there was a massive flood in Varanasi city and many villages around. The harijan hamlets were all destroyed by these floods. We gave a call to the students at IT-BHU and were happily surprised to find as many as 150 students volunteering for flood relief work.
We submitted our findings to the district administration but found that the people most deserving of government help were being denied assistance while the landlords were cornering all the government help for themselves. When communication with district officials failed to elicit any response we decided to march in a procession to the district collector’s office. This got us arrested and jailed. Thankfully, our professors visited us in jail and through their efforts we were released. As volunteers of SSW we continued to work till 1982 when the group was disbanded.
Q-3: Please explain the Bhopal gas tragedy and its after-effect to our readers.
On the night of 2nd - 3rd December 1984, during routine maintenance operations in the Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) plant, starting at about 10 p.m. a large quantity of water entered storage tank no. 610, containing over 60 tones of MIC. This triggered off a runaway reaction resulting in a tremendous increase of temperature and pressure in the tank and nearly 40 tones of MIC along with Hydrogen Cyanide and other reaction products burst past the rupture disc and in to the night air of Bhopal at around 12:30 a.m. Safety systems were grossly under designed and inoperative. Senior factory officials knew of the lethal build up in the tank at least one hour before the leakage, yet the siren to warn neighborhood communities was sounded more than one hour after the leak started. By then the poisons had enveloped an area of 40 Sq. Kms killing thousands of people in its immediate wake. Over 8000 people died in the first three days and over 500 thousand people suffered from acute breathlessness, burning in eyes and vomiting as they ran in panic to get away from the poison clouds that hung close to the ground for more than four hours.
There is ample evidence of "double standards" being followed by the American multinational, Bhopal's sister plant in West Virginia being far superior in storage, production and safety systems. There are enough documents to show that Union Carbide and its senior most officials knew that the factory in Bhopal was a ticking time bomb and did nothing because they did not want to spend money on a plant that was yet to yield big bucks. It was a directive from the head quarters of the company, in Danbury, Connecticut, USA that resulted in the retrenchment of workers and shutting down of safety systems.
A survey carried out by the International Medical Commission on Bhopal (IMCB), composed of 14 medical specialists from 11 different countries reported significant multi-organ symptoms persistent among the exposed population 10 years after the disaster. Clinical examination carried out by members of the Commission have shown significant lung impairment, marked reduction in control over limb movements, reduced memory function and a range of neuro-toxic injuries not studied by the ICMR.
Over 25,000 people, the majority of them gas victims, are routinely ingesting toxic chemicals as a result of the poisoning of drinking water sources in 16 communities. Union Carbide Corporation, USA who was in control of the factory when these toxic chemicals were recklessly dumped, is yet to pay for containing the toxic groundwater, rehabilitating the degraded land or make arrangements for alternate supply of drinking water. Dow Chemical the current owner of Union Carbide refuses to accept Bhopal’s environmental liabilities. Recently, Dow Chemical has offered to clean up the contaminated soil on the condition that it is not made legally liable.
Q-4: What was the aftermath of the tragedy? Why the victims are still not compensated?
The immediate response of Union Carbide Corporation was to deny its responsibility for the disaster. The corporation first blamed a fictitious Sikh terrorist group and then a worker as the saboteur who deliberately caused the disaster. It actually employed a consultancy firm Arthur D Little to fabricate a technical report along these lines. It withheld, and continues to do so, the information on the medical effects of MIC (which no other agency had) lest this information increase its legal liability. In court the corporation used a range of dilatory tactics and announced that it would cross examine every one of the half a million claimants – that would take 1, 500 years. The corporations also hired top PR firms such as Burson-Mosteller to peddle its lies on the Bhopal disaster and Brown and Nelson to set up a web site www.bhopal.com.
Ever since the disaster, the Indian government, irrespective of the political party in power, has always protected the interests of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical over that of its victims. While the victims of Bhopal have had to fight for medical care and rehabilitation, the Indian government has played down the health and environmental damages and death counts. The collusion of the Indian Government with Union Carbide is most glaringly evident in the settlement of 1989 when the government on behalf of the victims accepted to absolve Union Carbide of all past present and future liabilities in exchange of a paltry sum of 470 million USD. Earlier, the same government had sought compensation of over 3.3 billion USD. Recently, letters from the Prime Minister’s office obtained by us through the Right to Information Act, show that the cabinet secretariat is actively considering letting Dow Chemical walk of its Bhopal liabilities in consideration of the company’s proposed investment of 1 billion USD in India.
Q-5: Please elaborate the services provided by Sambhavna Trust and other social service organizations.
In the context of utter neglect by Union Carbide and the Indian Government towards the health of the exposed population, the Sambhavna Clinic opened its doors on September 2, 1996. The Clinic, run by the Sambhavna Trust (an independent, community-based, non-governmental medical initiative concerned with the long-term welfare of the survivors) offers an innovative blend of modern and traditional therapies free of cost to the survivors.
The Clinic is located in the middle of communities that were most severely affected by the December ’84 gas disaster. Being 400 meters south of the Union Carbide factory, the Clinic is also close to the communities next to the factory whose chemical wastes have contaminated their groundwater. The Clinic is built on a 2 acre plot including a herbal garden. The building incorporates rain water harvesting, solar energy, waste water recycling, solar medical waste disposal, non-toxic construction material and other eco-sensitive features.
Sambhavna's allopathic care team consists of two general physicians, a gynecologist and three consultants in psychiatry, ophthalmic care and pathology. Their work is supported by our in-house laboratory with facilities for biochemical, cytological and microbiological investigations. In providing care through modern medicine we adhere to the policy of "first do no harm" by screening out potentially harmful drugs.
More than 100 species of medicinal plants are grown on a one acre garden next to the clinic building. The garden provides fresh herbs for preparation of medicines and inspires people to start medicine gardens in their communities or grow at home. More than forty different kinds of Ayurvedic powders, oils, decoctions and pills are manufactured at the medicine making unit in Sambhavna.
Research on the health consequences of exposure to Carbide's poisons was wound up in 1994 by the Indian Council of Medical Research, and most of the findings remain unpublished till date. Sambhavna has made significant contributions to the scientific knowledge on the long-term health consequences of the disaster and medical interventions towards ameliorating these consequences despite its constraints of human and financial resources. Several of Sambhavna's research studies have been published in national and international journals including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Sambhavna maintains what is probably the most comprehensive collection of original source material related to the Bhopal disaster at the library in the Clinic. The library is frequently used by researchers, journalists, activists, survivors and Sambhavna staff.
Sambhavna's Community Health Workers identify people in need of care every day, follow-up on a thousand people receiving care at the clinic each month, and collect information on health in the community. They educate people about common health issues and their solutions, run a very successful TB control program, organize community based screening for cervical cancer, train people to be community health leaders, set up voluntary health committees in different communities, and help people organize to address local health threats like contaminated water.
The 41 staff members at the Clinic, 24 of who are survivors of the disaster, include doctors, therapists, data processors, laboratory technicians, gardeners, community health workers, researchers, drug dispensers, sanitary workers, security guards and others. The staff includes 18 female and 23 male members with an average age of 33 years. 25 of the staff members are graduates in medicine, science, arts, commerce and other subjects with 17 among them having post graduate qualifications. Volunteers from around the world contribute significantly to the clinic’s work.
The Sambhavna Clinic is run by a 8-member Board of Trustees who are scientists, doctors, editors and activists who have long been involved with medical and other aspects of the disaster. A Steering Committee elected by staff and a Coordinator look after the day to day running of the clinic. Decision-making, evaluation, planning and review of clinic activities is based on equality, full participation, and consensus at the weekly staff meetings. Complaints and suggestions are actively sought from the people coming for care at the clinic. A five-member International Advisory Group consisting of doctors, researchers, writers and activists from different countries provides support to the Trust.
Sambhavna does not accept money from governments or corporations. All funds required to run the Sambhavna Trust Clinic come from individual donations and from the royalties of the book, “It was five past midnight in Bhopal”, by Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro. A large part of Sambhavna’s funds come from over 10, 000 individuals in UK who respond to advertisements placed by the Bhopal Medical Appeal in British newspapers. Our contributors include people from all walks of life - school children, workers, lecturers, professionals, artists, writers and parents. Accounts of the Sambhavna Trust are audited annually and are open to public scrutiny.
Q-6: Please describe how you try to educate people about the Bhopal gas tragedy? How you manage your work?
In the last 23 years I have talked to various groups of people about the Bhopal gas disaster and its aftermath. I have modified my presentations depending on whether my audience consists of children, workers, communities affected by industrial pollution, academics, students, doctors, engineers or others. Most often I talk about the immediate and far reaching causes of the disaster, its ongoing social and medical impact and what individuals can do to ensure that justice is done in Bhopal and the victims have a life of dignity. I have also screened films, distributed pamphlets and exhibited posters in my educational campaigns on Bhopal. I have presented scientific papers on health impact and engineering issues and addressed national and international conferences. I have found that the story of the Bhopal tragedy is a very effective eye-opener to corporate crime and also a great inspiration to fight against injustice and apathy.
Except for one year, I have not held a salaried job in the last 23 years. Till Sambhavna was set up in 1995, I depended on friends and family for economic support. At Sambhavna I currently receive a monthly honorarium of Rs. 6, 500/- which is sufficient for me as I have no family.
I think that getting in to social work is hardly ever a cold calculated decision. You get in to such work because you are moved by things around you; and you have different life priorities than what you were taught to have at school or in your family. You see your achievements in a different light, not in terms of your bank balance or the make of the car you drive but in terms of the difference you have made in the lives of people around you. As we say jokingly, in this career, the pay is less and there are no perks, but job satisfaction is total.
Q-7: Please tell us about your days at IT-BHU.
I consider my days at IT – BHU to be the best years of my life. I have such vivid memories, so many stories to tell that I do not know where to begin. I remember the wild Holi celebrations, the long cycle trips to Wyndham Falls and beyond, the last minute cramming for the exams, early morning trips on the Ganga, late night music festivals at Sankat Mochan, all India “educational” trips with the entire class, fighting against the goons who terrorized IT students, Lavanglatas at a shop run by a man called Pehelwan and so many other colourful, eventful, soulful stuff.
I remember having an unthinkably active schedule – long jogs in the morning, cycle rides to the village after class and then late night music or gup-shup sessions when there were no exams to write the next day. I was part of gang that distinguished itself in playing pranks on other class mates. I am told that a class mate, who is now a corporate executive, whom we scared with ghost noises and a skull (we got it from the medical college students) in our fourth year still has to have the light on in his bedroom at night. I continue to be in touch with many of my class mates and several of our professors. After a successful 25-year reunion we are now planning to hold a 30-year reunion in Varanasi.
Q-8: Please tell us about your personal life.
My wife, an ex-IT-BHUe, and I split two years after our marriage. We continue to see each other as friends. We had no children and my parents died twenty years back. My brothers and sister have long forgiven my straying away from a professional career and are rather supportive. I am fortunate to have many friends. I usually work seven days a week for eight to ten hours a day. I like to fill my leisure hours with books. I also enjoy writing and one of my books for children “Anarko ke aath din” published by Rajkamal Prakashan is still doing well. I like playing table tennis and usually take an annual vacation when I visit the mountains or the sea.
Q-9: Thank you very much, Sir. It was nice talking to you.
Contrary to its projection in mainstream media the disaster in Bhopal is not an isolated event. There are slow and silent Bhopals occurring in a routine manner in almost every part of the world. Corporate crimes that lead to death and ill health of hundreds of thousands of workers and community people go unpunished as business goes “as usual”. This has become more institutionalized, more legitimate and more intense with the advent of globalization. If the agencies and individuals responsible for the worst industrial massacre are allowed to go unscathed the world [and in particular countries of the South] is that much unsafe.
www.bhopal.org, www.bhopal.net, www.studentsforbhopal.org, www.thetruthaboutdow.org
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You may contact Sathyu Sarangi at: sathyu[AT]gmail.com
Sambhavna Trust
The Sambhavna Trust Clinic
Address: Bafna Colony, Berasia Road, Bhopal 462 001
Madhya Pradesh, India
Telephone: + 91 (0)755-2730914 / 2743157
Email: sambavna@sancharnet.in
- Additional Links
They want to escape responsibility for this - http://www.studentsforbhopal.org
Mead 2001 Centennial Awards
2002 Award Winner
Sambhavna Clinic
Wins Fourth Margaret Mead Centennial AwardExcerpts:
The Bhopal People’s Health and Documentation Clinic, also known as "Sambhavna Clinic" or just "Sambhavna" is named for the Sanskrit/Hindi word meaning both "possibility" and "similar feelings” or “compassion.” This free clinic is run by doctors, scientists, social workers, researchers and volunteers who combine alternative therapies with Western medicine to treat people who are still suffering from the effects of the Union Carbide gas leak of December 2-3,1984, that killed 16,000 people in Bhopal.
Carbide Warning
Sathyu Sarangi, an engineer turned activist who helped found the clinic and currently serves as its managing trustee, originally came to Bhopal the day after the disaster. He immediately got involved with relief efforts. Later, recognizing that the need for sustained care was not being met after public attention to the disaster ebbed, he found common cause with organizations of survivors fighting for justice (punishment of the corporate culprits) and for a better deal for survivors: adequate medical care; and economic, social and environmental rehabilitation of the affected communities and individuals.