Bhopal tragedy: Victims still coping with aftermath

Bhopal: The deluge of information around the Bhopal gas tragedy clearly establishes that everyone let down the victims. But perhaps the biggest failure has been on the part of the state that did not provide proper treatment that the victims deserved.

But right from the day of the accident to now, victims and their families have received very little healthcare support despite specific orders by the Supreme Court.

"I asked the medical officer of the plant, he said it's like tear gas. Wash it with water and it will go away. But I said so many people were dead and so many were gasping for breath, tear gas doesn't do that. Then he told me that he didn't know what this gas was," said Dr D K Satpathy, former Director, Medico Legal Institute.

On December 3, due to a malfunction at the Union Carbide plant, huge amounts of poisonous Methyl Isocynate (MIC) gas, used to produce pesticides, was released into the atmosphere.

The night the gas leaked, the company refused to divulge any details of the antidote needed to treat the gas leak victims. From then to now, the government has made no effort to find out what that antidote was, nor has it incorporated the research data collected by Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) to treat survivors.

But some have now come forward to claim that the company did have an antidote which they did not share with anyone.

"We were made to stand in front of a basin, water was sprayed into my eyes and a tablet was given to stop the breathlessness and vomiting. So their dispensary had the treatment but they didn't give it to anyone else outside. If they had then the others would be like me - with no symptoms," said a man who was treated at the Union Carbide factory.

So doctors continued to treat the symptoms caused by the deadly gas like acute breathlessness, eye injuries, vomiting and skin burns. But since the toxic elements that caused them were not treated right at the onset, victims were left struggling with lifelong ailments.

"I take a lot of medicine even now, but nothing has improved. I can't breathe and my eyes are also affected," said one of the victims of the gas tragedy.

The key reason why this could have happened was shown by a study done on the victims which found that MIC broke down in the body into cyanide which circulated in the blood stream continuously because it bound itself to haemoglobin particles. However, this data was not used to create treatment protocols for the sick.

The criminal negligence did not end there. Funds meant to provide for healthcare for the Bhopal victims was used to build six hospitals, but none of them had proper facilities.

One of the two monitoring committees set up by the Supreme Court to oversee medical care for the gas tragedy victims said that after 50 visits, 50 meetings and six reports to the apex court, there has been no change in the working of these hospitals.

In its seventh and final report in 2008, the committee said

Even now registration of gas victims was not being done properly
Health books of patients containing investigations and prescriptions were not being maintained
Health records of patients prior to the issue of health books is difficult to trace
Funds allocated for procuring medicines were not being spent and therefore, the supply of drugs was likely to dry up soon

"If you look at the entire exercise, its end result is nil. On medicines, even after spending Rs 80 crore, they can't even produce 80 patients who are completely cured. So what can be a bigger failure than this?" said Abdul Jabbar.

More than 25 years later, there is still no relief for those who survived one of India's worst industrial disasters. They know that along with Union Carbide, which denied them primary treatment, their own government let them down by its callous indifference.