A Legacy of Suffering


  • Photographer
    Amiran White
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    n/a
  • Date of Photograph
    10-12/2012
  • Technical Info
    Digital

Visiting the site of the world’s worst chemical disaster in Bhopal, India- photojournalist, Amiran White discovered that, 25-years-later, the story was far from over. The abandoned factory sits in total disrepair, with over 425 tons of hazardous waste leeching into the groundwater, and new generations are being born with disabilities and chronic ailments directly attributed to the water and soil around them.

Story

In December 2009, the Centre for Science and Environment, in Delhi, released a report acknowledging what those living in the shadow of the old Union Carbide pesticide factory already know; their water and soil is highly contaminated. Extreme levels of pesticides and hard metals like mercury and lead are being recorded in the aquifers, as far away as 3kms from the plant, leading to the chronic poisoning of thousands of residents living in the bustling neighborhoods around the factory.

“Oh, Bhopal’s different now,” said Anshul, 27, a native of Bhopal, sitting in the airplane seat next to me, “the disaster was long ago. Now there are new businesses, new houses, hotels- it’s beautiful around the lake and the park- you’ll find lots to photograph, but, I don’t think you’ll find much of a story there.”

I was traveling to Bhopal a couple of months before the 25th anniversary of what has been termed the worst chemical disaster in the world- when 40,000 tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from the Union Carbide Factory in Bhopal, India, killing 1000s almost instantaneously. I had heard some disturbing reports about the struggles of the survivors and wanted to find out what was happening first hand. Bhopal businesses and the local government were saying that though it was a tragic accident, it was all in the past- it was time to move on. Yet, there were local advocacy groups continuing to demand help- asking DOW Chemical Company who bought the factory from United Carbide, and the Indian government who own the land, to clean up the chemical plant and provide better health care. How bad was it and why was nobody paying attention?


There are two ways to visit the abandoned factory site- by filling forms out in triplicate and waiting several hours in a dusty, colonial building for the chai-drinking government official to stamp his seal of approval on each page, or by heading to the colonies that surround the plant. Here, the children play cricket, families graze their cattle and women collect firewood around the rusty, warehouse buildings.

“Some days there are nasty smells on the land,” said Satari, who’s daughter, Rukhsar is 10-years-old but with the mental capacity of a 4-year-old, “and the water is bad. Very bad.” Satari moved with her husband to the city for work, and now they live in a tin shack that sits on the edge of a toxic waste dump used by Union Carbide for years before the factory closed. Satari, 28, says she suffers from severe headaches, stomach cramps, dizziness and very uneven menstrual cycles.

“I curse the day we moved here, I love my family, but what is to come of us?”

Om Prakesh, 57, was a policeman near the railway station on the night of the explosion, and has since been detailed by the government to guard the Union Carbide factory where he works 24/7 for several weeks at a time. He was waving from a rooftop as I wandered the factory grounds with Sadhna, a young, local college graduate who was helping me with Hindi translations when needed, and so we climbed the rusty stairs to say hello. Prakesh was sitting on an old plastic chair near the edge of the roof and yelling every so often to some kids that were gathering below.

“Come, come,” he said, “you must see my world.” To one side of his rooftop was the iconic flare tower, designed to burn off any MIC escaping from the gas scrubber- however, it was turned off the night of the accident, waiting for the replacement of a corroded piece of pipe- on the other side, the railway tracks, and the cheap homes where hundreds of families still live. And across the roof, a washing line, where parts of Prakesh’s uniform hung to dry.

"You couldn't walk on the railway platform without stepping on dead bodies," he said of the disaster, "if I had been working at the factory then, I'd be dead for sure, but now it is OK. The government says it's safe."



Sadhna and I spent many weeks walking through the various colonies that run along the outskirts of the factory. Meeting family after family. Many stories were similar, some particularly heartbreaking. There was only one woman who would not talk to me.

“Why should I?” she said. “Other foreigners have come through, they said telling our stories would get us help. But my life hasn’t changed. 25-years and it only gets worse.”

I could promise her nothing. I apologized and moved on.

"It was like chili powder on our faces, our eyes were stinging," said Bivi Jan, "we were coughing and choking and people were falling down everywhere. It was hard to run and not trip over the bodies.”

As she spoke, she stared out of the window of her shack toward the overgrown acres that lie across the street and house the now defunct pesticide factory. The memories are vivid for the 60-year-old grandma, as though the tragedy had just occurred. It may now be over 25-years-later, but she lives it everyday, in her coughing fits, her headaches, emphysema, the memories of her husband, and her 6-year-old granddaughter, Mavis, who still cannot speak, has curvature of the spine and demands attention around-the-clock. But so does Rajni, 25, who was born in a small village miles from Bhopal. After marriage, she moved with her husband into the cheap housing around the factory. She had several miscarriages, and then bore two children, one virtually blind as well as mentally challenged and the other suffering from cerebral palsy.

“What did I do?” Rajni asks, “my husband’s family will no longer look at me like a relative. They have abandoned me because of the children. They say it is my fault.”


Radha rests on the staircase while supporting her husband, Hemant, together with her brother-in-law, Maheesh, they slowly make their way to the rooftop. All three are breathing heavily, stopping often before eventually lowering Hemant onto a blanket. Radha wipes her brow and pours her husband a cup of water. Just as she sits, a cry comes from a few feet away, and she jumps to attend her son, Karan.

"Always something," she says as she brushes the flies off her son's face and drops water into his mouth, by way of a spoon.
Karan, 13, cannot talk and suffers from cerebral palsy and epilepsy, his spine is so twisted that he is unable to sit or move on his own. His father, Hemant, is 40-years-old and among his many gas-related ailments are failed kidneys. He desperately needs a transplant, but the specialist hospital built specifically to give free treatment to gas victims, the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Centre (BMHRC) say they do not have the facilities and have referred the family to a private clinic.

"Where do we find that kind of money?" asks Maheesh, who runs a spice store to support the entire family.

"We are all gas victims in this family,” says Hemant’s mother, Prembai, 70, “but we can't get the help we need," she says bursting into a coughing fit.

After Karan was born they went to a doctor at the BMHRC mini clinic near their home.

"He told us that nothing could be done and we should leave him for the Gods," remembers Radha who suffers from severe stomach pains and headaches, "I don't know what we're supposed to do. I feed him, bathe him, and take him to the toilet. He is very heavy." As she speaks, she holds out a tin cup and her nephew gets up to fill it with water. He limps back. Prembai tells him to roll up his trouser; he shrugs, sits on a chair and reveals a deformity in his knee that forces his right foot to protrude at right angles.

"We are all suffering," says Prembai, "every day."



The BMHRC with its marble interior and luscious, green grounds began functioning 10-years-ago with money allocated from the Union Carbide settlement- the company gave $470 million to the Indian Government for compensation, and those families that were officially registered as victims received 25,000 rupees ($540), no one under the age of 18 at the time of the accident were registered and many others didn’t qualify because their papers were not in order.

“We are a super-specialty hospital,” said public relations officer, Mazhar Ullah, “we treat all of the gas victims for free.”
The hospital has 8 mini units in various localities near the factory, where an average of 200-300 patients are seen daily, some are given medications, others are referred to their main hospital for more tests and treatment.
“We have more equipment than any other hospital here- we can perform open-heart surgery,” exclaims Ullah. He says that as long as a patient has a ‘smartcard’, a plastic ID card provided by BMHRC to prove that they are a gas victim- they are eligible for all the treatment they need.

But Radha, who’s husband was denied the continuation of dialysis because they don’t have enough machines, or Kamla Soni, who is now bedridden but still on a ‘waiting list’ for a smartcard, or the family of Mushtaq Ahmed who died on the waiting room floor because BMHRC wouldn’t admit him saying there was no consultant available, would all disagree.

“We went to the mini unit,” said Soni when talking about her husband’s heart condition, “and they referred us to the main hospital. We went to the main hospital and they referred us to the DIG hospital (a government run hospital for gas-victims) and they gave us a prescription, but said they didn’t have the medicines. We had to go to the market and buy them.”

At the government-run DIG hospital, medical officer Dr. Malik says they treat more than 1700 patients in any 24-hour period.

“There are not enough doctors,” says child specialist Dr. Pradeep Shasna who works 6-days a week at DIG. “Most cases are respiratory, heart conditions and eye problems. We give medications and refer bigger cases to BMHRC.”

After many years of looking for help, most victims give up on the hospitals run specifically for them, and try to pay for treatment themselves, going to the numerous private clinics and hospitals that have sprung up since the gas tragedy, but finding the money to pay for them is hard.

Hemant vomits throughout the nights now, he cannot walk on his own and needs to be on dialysis, but at 14,000 rupees ($300) a time, the family do the best they can to make him comfortable.

“What else can we do?” asks Hemant’s brother.


In the heart of some of the poorest slums in Bhopal, under the shadow of the factory, sits an oasis for survivors, Sambhavna Clinic- an acre of land where medicinal plants grow, wooden buildings house both allopathic and ayuverdic doctors, and medicines and advice are given for free to all gas-effected and water-contaminated victims. It is the brainchild of Sathyu Sarangi, who left his engineering studies in Varanassi to help the gas victims in 1984 and never left Bhopal, devoting his life to the survivors. The clinic runs solely on donations, attempting to help as many survivors as possible through the day clinic and with out-reach programs.

About half-a-mile away from the clinic, two women, who lost most of their families to the explosion- Rashida Bee and Champadevi Shukla, were jointly awarded the Goldman Environment Prize, for their grassroots efforts to bring attention to the plight of the survivors. They used the $125,000 prize money to open the Chingari Trust- a place devoted to the children of gas-effected and water-contaminated victims, offering free physical therapy, medicines and aid for the parents, and it continues to run on private donations. Most children do not receive any free treatment from the government, since they are not recognized as being survivors of the tragedy.

“So many children are being born with damaged brains and physical abnormalities- and there’s no help for them or their families,” said Bee, “nobody recognizes the children of those that survived the explosion, or the children who have been living in the water-contaminated areas. We are doing what we can.”


Sathyu Sarangi, Rashida Bee, Champadevi Shukla are just a few names in a long list of local activists who have devoted their lives to helping those around them. They have marched 500-miles from Bhopal to Delhi, twice, with hundreds of gas survivors, demanding help from the Indian government- a government that makes promises to appease the crowds, but rarely follows through. They have organized campaigns to stop DOW Chemical from building plants in other states, and have gone on hunger strikes to gain attention to the fact that what started as a gas leak in 1984 has continued to have a fatal impact on the community due to the abandoned, contaminated factory still leaking its poisonous toxins into the local aquifers.

Leela, 50, who remembers how even the trees went black and lost their leaves the night of the explosion, marches every year on the anniversary of the tragedy. One of her daughters, Renu, 26, suffers from stunted growth and has swellings over her entire body, and Leela’s son has diabetes and a growing disorder making him look like a 12-year-old, despite the fact that he’s 21.

"I will continue to march until we get justice, until we get some help. Jobs we can do in our conditions, clean water and healthcare,” said Leela.

I stayed in Bhopal until the anniversary, where literally 1000s of survivors marched from various points in the city to the factory gates, culminating in rallies and candlelight vigils. The strength and determination of the victims was incredible.

“Please don’t forget us,” I was told, over and over again.




The time I spent in Bhopal was quite possibly the most intense two-months of my life. Day after day I came across too many victims literally rotting away- it was very hard to photograph and yet, the longer I was there, the more important I felt the imagery would be. Out of context, some of these photographs could take on new meanings, which is why I think it’s essential to keep photo essays as whole as possible, and why it’s also very important to have words accompany the images- the viewer needs as much information as possible to create the whole picture.

Overall, it was the lack of help for the children that I found most disturbing. There are unfathomable numbers of children with mental and physical disabilities, and the fact that many could have been saved from their pain if there had been access to clean water, is atrocious. Can it be, that because they are poor, they are expendable?


I received an email recently from Sadhna, she has begun volunteering at the Sambhavna Clinic- she freely admitted that she had had no idea how people were living in the slums of her city, at school they briefly covered the Bhopal accident in a single history class. She has also stayed in touch with the family of Hemant, whose kidneys are failing:

“There is a sorrow news that KARAN son of Hemant is now no more.
I went there at their home but they were quite happy that now their
piece of heart is away from all the pains.”

You can create multiple entries, and pay for them at the same time.
Just go to your History, and select multiple entries that you would like to pay for.