Bhopal disaster (1984): The night of 2–3 December · 269

On the night of 2–3 December 1984 a methyl isocyanate leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal killed thousands and left a mixed legal record that still shapes industrial-disaster law. On the night of 2–3 December 1984, methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from Tank 610 at the Union Carbide India Limited pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh. The official immediate death toll recorded in early government figures was 2,259. Later Indian government statements used about 3,500 deaths within days and more than 15,000 gas-related deaths over subsequent years; campaign groups have published still higher totals. This page dates those figures and does not describe injuries.

Union Carbide Corporation of the United States and the Union of India settled civil claims for US$470 million in February 1989, a sum the Supreme Court of India approved and later revisited. Criminal charges against Indian UCIL officials were reduced in 1996 from culpable homicide to causing death by negligence (IPC section 304A). On 7 June 2010 a Bhopal court convicted seven former employees and the Indian company, imposing two-year terms and fines. Warren Anderson, UCC’s American chief executive, was arrested in 1984, released on bond, left India and was never extradited.

Status is mixed because a civil settlement and limited criminal convictions sit beside an unfinished site-cleanup and unfinished arguments about parent-company duty. Dow Chemical’s 2001 acquisition of UCC inherited a legal dispute, not a closed moral ledger. English-language memory treats Bhopal as the type case of a poor neighbourhood next to a rich company’s tank.