The story of the Sambhavna Clinic, a non-profit holistic health clinic in Bhopal, India, built to treat those injured by the Union Carbide toxic gas release in 1984. enlarge video
Dow Chemical Is Hit With Demand for Bhopal Payouts
By Geeta Anand and Arlene Chang
India's attorney general asked the country's supreme court Friday to force Dow Chemical Co. to pay an additional $1.1 billion in victims' compensation and environmental-cleanup costs related to an industrial accident that killed and injured thousands of people in Bhopal in 1984.
In the "curative petition", Attorney General Goolam E. Vahanvati asked the court to intervene "to cure gross miscarriage of justice and perpetration of irremediable injustice being suffered by the victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy," which was caused by a toxic-gas leak at a pesticide plant in central India.
The attempt to boost compensation follows an uproar in India earlier this year, when a district court handed out only two-year jail sentences to executives of Union Carbide India Ltd., a subsidiary of Union Carbide Corp., which owned the plant where the accident occurred. In June, the court found seven executives of the company guilty of negligence leading to death, the first and only verdict in an Indian criminal case related to the disaster.
Union Carbide, which divested itself of its Indian subsidiary's stock in the 1990s, was acquired by Dow Chemical Co. in 2001.
The public furor over the sentences led the Indian government to set up a committee headed by Home Minister P. Chidambaram to review the compensation paid to victims. The committee recommended seeking more money, prompting the attorney general to file the "curative petition" on Friday.
In 1989, a civil court ordered Union Carbide to pay $471 million to the victims. The lengthy process of verifying the claims led some victims to receive payment as late as 2007, according to Devadatt Kamat, a lawyer for the attorney general's office.
Dow Chemical, based in Midland, Mich., denied responsibility for any additional payments. "The 1984 gas release in Bhopal was a tragedy of such immense and unprecedented scale, it is understandable that anger and grief remain more than a quarter of a century later. It is extremely disappointing, however, that the government of India has chosen to seek legal action that would be both unjust and contrary to law," the company said in a statement.
The company argued that it had no involvement in the Bhopal tragedy, which occurred 17 years before Dow acquired stock in Union Carbide, and that "the rationale for holding Dow responsible is apparently based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between Dow and Union Carbide Corp.–which are, and have always been, separate companies."
Mr. Kamat said the claim filed Friday is largely based on the fact that many more people were injured and killed in the accident than was estimated in 1989, when the civil court calculated compensation.
The court assumed there were 2,000 deaths, he said, but 5,300 people were actually killed in the gas leak. And, while the court calculated in 1989 that 50,000 people were injured, it turns out 520,000 were injured, the lawyer said, adding that "it was an obvious error in computation by the court."
Because many more people were killed and injured, he added, the compensation ordered by the court was spread over a lot more people and individual victims received less money than the court intended.
India's government also seeks $387 million in reimbursement for payments it has made to victims for relief and rehabilitation over the years, Mr. Kamat said. "Taxpayer money should not be used to meet the liabilities of Union Carbide," he added.
The 1989 settlement also didn't address environmental hazards tied to the leak, Mr. Kamat said. The Indian government estimated it would cost $70 million to clean up the hazardous waste Union Carbide left at the site, he said, and it is seeking that from Dow Chemical, too.
Mr. Kamat said the attorney general offered the court several calculations for reparations owed to victims. They range from $666 million to $1.3 billion, based on different inflationary indexes, among other things.
The attorney general's petition will be heard in chambers by three senior supreme-court judges, who will decide whether the case merits a review. The hearing is unlikely to occur before the court recesses Dec. 16.
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