Bhopal disaster (2001): Dow acquires UCC

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.

A leak, a settlement and a thin conviction Bhopal is the public-record industrial disaster that industrial-accident law still cites when parent companies, host states and neighbours do not share a courtroom. UCIL, majority-owned by Union Carbide Corporation, made carbamate pesticides at Bhopal. The MIC unit dated from the late 1970s. By 1984 the plant sat beside densely inhabited wards. Safety systems on Tank 610 — refrigeration, scrubbing, flaring — were not in the state the design assumed, according to later Indian investigation and civil discovery.