Bhopal: On the night of December 3, 1984, Jageshwar Soni was 12-years-old when the Union Carbide pesticide factory began spewing toxic fumes into the air.
Dangerous amounts of water had entered a tank of methyl isocynate (MIC). The chemical reaction tore into the lungs of Bhopal within minutes.
Jageshwar was lucky- a plant worker rushed him to the plant's dispensary for help. He was greeted by the night attendant. "We were made to stand in front of a basin and water was sprayed into my eyes. 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."
Outside - where thousands of residents of the city were fainting, gagging, choking. Dr D K Satpathy was at the time in the state's Forensic Department. When people started arriving at the Hamidia hospital, some of them already dead, he was called in. At the hospital, he called the medical officer of the Carbide plant. "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. Later it turned out to be MIC. But what was its antidote, what was its impact on people...nothing was known to the Carbide people. Till today, no one knows."
In the days after the leak, doctors treated the results of exposure among patients - acute breathlessness, eye injuries, vomiting and skin burns. But without an antidote, the toxic substances that caused the problems were not arrested. And that meant victims would suffer lifelong ailments.
The pathological lethargy of successive governments in Madhya Pradesh in tackling the aftermath of the gigantic disaster means that this crucial link is still missing. The government has made no attempt to uncover whether an antidote did exist with Carbide, and if so, what was it? It has also ignored the data collected in multiple studies by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) that show the long-term impact of the gas leak on the residents of Bhopal.
Seeta Devi explains, "These are the medicines that I have to take even now...but nothing has improved. See, I can't breathe...my eyes are also affected."
A study concluded in 1994 by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on victims showed 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 by either the Central or state health agencies.
The poverty of assistance provided to victims was furthered by the fact that six hospitals funded by the central government remain ill-prepared to treat them. The hospitals were found so wanting that on 17th August, 2004, the Supreme Court appointed experts to investigate them. One of the two committees set up reported that after 50 visits and 50 meetings and six reports filed with the Supreme Court, the condition of the hospitals show no improvement. In its seventh and final report in 2008, the committee said that even now, the registration of victims is not handled correctly, which means their records are hard to trace. The funds that are allocated for buying medicines are not being spent, and so a shortage of drugs is inevitable. The diagnosis is no secret locally: severe corruption, bad administration.
Abdul Jabbar has fought a tireless campaign for the rights of the victims of the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. "If you look at the entire exercise, its end result is nil. On medicines, even after spending 80 crore, they can't even produce 80 patients who are completely cured. What can be a bigger failure than this?" he asks.