As we near the Bhopal anniversary, youth activists from Chennai and residents of fishing villages are embarking on a 5-day 280km cycle tour from Cuddalore to Chennai. The tour will leave Cuddalore on 28 November and reach Chennai on 2 December.
Created around the time of Bhopal, the SIPCOT chemical industrial estate is notorious for its pollution. More than 19 chemical companies in the area spew poisons into the air all day long. Nestled among these industries are hapless villages that are trapped in what can only be described as gas chambers. Pollutant levels, including of carcinogens such as ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride, are known to shoot up several tens of thousands of times above safe levels.
The cycle tour will wind its way along the villages of Cuddalore, Pondicherry, Tindivanam, Madurantakam, Chengalpattu and Chennai districts to reach Urur Kuppam -- a fishing village in Besant Nagar at around 5 pm on 2 December, 2006.
The intellectual activists behind the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) who sit in New York are making sure the goals will remain unreachable. Over the last 34 years, having lived and worked with the rural poor earning less than a dollar a day in India, I have ceased to be surprised by the incredible ignorance, stupidity and hype that’s generated to tackle extreme poverty. Ever so often, jobless politicians find themselves heading Commissions. There is no shortage of funds for travel and workshops preparing pointless recommendations and action plans no one reads or follows. But how many have actually involved the poor in the making of these action plans? Adviser to the UN secretary-general Jeffrey Sachs with his promises of ending poverty is just another one of the many getting his bit of temporary glory and he will fade away like Clare Short (remember her?) and her White Paper which promised the eradication of poverty by 2015.
We are outraged that survivors from the Union Carbide (now Dow Chemical) gas tragedy in Bhopal have been stripped, beaten and arrested by the Indian police in Madhya Pradesh. Instead of meeting their demands and making Dow Chemicals clean up the contaminated factory site (one would have thought the 24 years that have passed since were enough time for this to have been done) which is adversely affecting the health of local residents, the Bhopal survivos protesting for the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to meet them (isn't over 100 days of walking to and camping at Delhi enough to get an audience with his highness), have been ignored, beaten and jailed. They have started an indefinite fast. Would you like to express your solidarity by joining them by fasting for a day or more at your home? Click here
Background
On the night of Dec. 2nd and 3rd, 1984, a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, began leaking 27 tons of the deadly gas methyl isocyanate. None of the six safety systems designed to contain such a leak were operational, allowing the gas to spread throughout the city of Bhopal.[1] 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. These ailments include blindness, extreme difficulty in breathing, and gynecological disorders. The site has never been properly cleaned up and it continues to poison the residents of Bhopal. In 1999, local groundwater and wellwater testing near the site of the accident revealed mercury at levels between 20,000 and 6 million times those expected. Cancer and brain-damage- and birth-defect-causing chemicals were found in the water; trichloroethene, a chemical that has been shown to impair fetal development, was found at levels 50 times higher than EPA safety limits.[2]Testing published in a 2002 report revealed poisons such as 1,3,5 trichlorobenzene, dichloromethane, chloroform, lead and mercury in the breast milk of nursing women. [3] In 2001, Michigan-based chemical corporation Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide, thereby acquiring its assets and liabilities. However Dow Chemical has steadfastly refused to clean up the site, provide safe drinking water, compensate the victims, or disclose the composition of the gas leak, information that doctors could use to properly treat the victims. Source: ICJB
[1] Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal. (Warner Books, 2002)
[3] Surviving Bhopal 2002: Toxic Present Toxic Future, report published January 2002 by the Fact-Finding Mission on Bhopal (FFMB).
Bhopal advocates denounce Indian government back room dealing with Dow Chemical
Aug 13 2007 -- Huge banners and loud protest-slogans rocked the Indian government
building during rush hour Friday evening. If you guessed the location
was Singur, Delhi or Narmada valley, you'd be surprised – it is
Washington, DC. The Target: Indian Embassy in the United States
Volunteers of Association for India's Development (AID), and supporters
of International Coalition for Justice in Bhopal, ICJB, used 18-foot
high banners and placards to protest the Indian
Government's unjust and callous attitude in pursuing a possible
out-of-court settlement which will clear Dow Chemical Corporation
regarding the criminal and civil cases it faces in Bhopal. Dow was asked to make a deposit of 100 crore rupees or about 25
million dollars toward the cost of the site clean up, by the Madhya Pradesh
High Court. It has not done this so far. Read More
