The Bhopal gas disaster
Union Carbide plant, Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh
On the night of 2-3 December 1984 methyl isocyanate leaks from Union Carbide's pesticide plant; thousands die in the crowded settlements around it.
About 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate escaped from a storage tank and drifted over the settlements around the plant and into the old city. The Madhya Pradesh government puts the deaths from the gas at 3,787; independent estimates run far higher, and hundreds of thousands of people were injured.
In 1989 the Supreme Court approved a settlement of 470 million dollars between the Government of India and Union Carbide, criticised then and since as too small. In January 2025 the 337 tonnes of waste stored at the plant were moved to an incinerator at Pithampur, but the contaminated soil and groundwater around the site, which campaigners say hold far more poison, were not part of that removal.
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