New Delhi: More than two decades after the Bhopal gas tragedy, there is a renewed sense of hope that the government's Group of Ministers (GoM) will look afresh at various issues which have been lying buried all these years. NDTV has access to a note on the issues that the minister's panel on Bhopal will discuss.
The issue of former Union Carbide chief Warren Anderson's extradition is expected to come up. Also on the agenda is greater compensation for the victims of the gas leak.
The Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers has also asked the panel to discuss the cleaning up of the toxic site.
Ahead of Friday's meeting, the government said the GoM would address "concerns" on priority basis even as the BJP and the CPI continued to blame the then dispensations of Rajiv Gandhi and Arjun Singh for not handling the issue properly.
For a cornered Congress, Friday's meeting is the big chance to put out the fire. The urgency to do damage control is underlined by the Prime Minister's order to the group to come out with a report in the next ten days.
While the GoM was actually reconstituted before the verdict in the Bhopal gas tragedy case last week and its original mandate was only to look into the cleanup of the Carbide site, now the group will have to prepare a charter that will address several issues.
"The GoM will look at all issues, more specifically reaching out to those people who unfortunately have not got enough compensation, adequate compensation in last so many years," said Information and Broadcasting Minister, Ambika Soni.
She expressed confidence that it will "address concerns on a priority basis".
Some of the aspects the GoM will have to look at are:
• Legal aspect: The law minister now says that the Supreme Court judgment in 1996 reducing the charges from culpable homicide to criminal negligence reduced the tragedy to the level of a truck accident. So will the government back the curative petition being filed by activists?
• Extraditing Warren Anderson: The government is on the backfoot after historical accounts suggest that both the Centre and the state governments of the time guaranteed the Carbide chief's exit. Will the GoM revisit the circumstances of his bail, or make a fresh extradition plea?
• Raising the levels of compensation to those affected by the disaster.
• Some estimates suggest that the number of those who died was five times higher than what was estimated during the 1989 settlement.
• Corporate liability: Will Dow Chemicals and Eveready be made to cough up money? Who will clean up the Union Carbide site and who will foot the bill? In 2005, the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers gave an application in the Madhya Pradesh High Court demanding the new owners of Union Carbide, Dow Chemicals, deposit Rs 100 crore towards the clean up.
But Dow Chemicals claimed in a letter to the then Indian Ambassador to America, Ronen Sen, that the government had assured them that they would not be held responsible.
Eveready bought over UCIL, the Indian subsidiary of UCC, in 1994. It, however, says it has no connection to or involvement with the operations of the Bhopal plant as it closed down and even ceased to exist as an asset in the company's books.
A nation that had forgotten the world's worst industrial disaster on its own land, now wants answers.