If Bhopal Happened Today, Would the World React Any Differently?

Thirty years ago, on Dec. 3, 1984, an enormous 40-ton plume of poisonous gas escaped from a Union Carbide insecticide plant in Bhopal, India. Three thousand people died within days, tens of thousands over subsequent years. An estimated 500,000 suffered lung cancer, kidney failure, and other diseases.

Union Carbide, one of the 30 companies then in the Dow Jones industrial index, became a symbol of corporate irresponsibility. In the U.S., that ignominious distinction faded with time. On Sept. 29 of this year, Warren Anderson, who headed Carbide during the crisis, died at the age of 92 in a Florida nursing home. Neither Anderson’s death nor the passage of three decades has erased the disaster from Indian memory, according to Suketu Mehta, an Indian-born journalism professor at New York University who’s done extensive reporting in Bhopal. In the less media-saturated, pre-Twitter 1980s, the disaster didn’t make the impression on Westerners it would today, notes Mehta: “From the Indian point of view,” though, “it was 9/11.”