Bhopal tragedy, Delhi haze, Assam mine deaths: One thread binds them all

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on January 16, 2025

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/01/16/bhopal-tragedy-delhi-haze-assam-mine-deaths-one-thread-binds-them-all

A haze hangs over many cities in India, including New Delhi. It contains poisons that can permanently debilitate millions of people; in fact it has already done that.

But it is nothing like the haze, the cloud of poison, that enveloped Bhopal, the capital of Madhya Pradesh late night on December 2, 1984. That night thousands died even as they tried to escape the cloud to avoid breathing in the poison. And they fell as they ran, because the poison entered their lungs. Those who survived continue to suffer the consequences of that night.

What links the current state of Indian cities, some of the most polluted in the world, and that night in Bhopal are several factors: negligence, indifference of those with the power to make things right, and the fact that the worst hit are also the poorest.

We have been compelled to remember the Bhopal disaster, when deadly methyl isocyanate (MIC) escaped from the fertiliser plant run by the Indian subsidiary of the US-based multinational company Union Carbide because after 40 years of campaigning and judicial intervention, some of the poisons that remain in the soil of the abandoned site have now been moved out, 337 tonnes to be exact.

The fact that this waste had to be moved out of Bhopal to the outskirts of another city, Indore, tells us a story that has not been reported. That the long-suffering population of Bhopal, that has lived with the consequences of being present when one of the world’s worst industrial accidents took place, would never have permitted a waste treatment plant in the city to deal with these poisons. So accompanied by high drama, the waste was transported to Pithampur outside Indore. Only to be met by stiff resistance from the population living there. And with good reason as explained here.

For the media, the Bhopal story reached a crescendo in the immediate aftermath of the terrible catastrophe but then ebbed and almost disappeared. Thereafter, it raised its head only when the victims of the disaster spoke up, demanding the disbursal of compensation and medical assistance, or to expose the fact that the poisons in the abandoned factory site were polluting the ground water in the areas around, and affecting the health of more people.

The problem with reporting only events, such as the moving out of waste from the Bhopal plant, without informing readers about the context, is that our understanding of what the Bhopal disaster really represented remains limited. At a time of distraction and diminished attention spans, there are generations that have grown up without knowing anything about the Bhopal disaster. 

The Bhopal Gas Tragedy, as it is often called, was not just another accident. It was a story of negligence, exposed by brave local journalists like the late Raj Kumar Keswani, of the indifference of the state government in allowing people to inhabit areas around a plant using hazardous chemicals, and the shameful manner in which the central government reached a settlement with Union Carbide for what was considered even then a pittance: US $470 million. A powerful multinational company escaped criminal liability because it operated through a subsidiary in India. In the country of its origin, the US, it would not have escaped so lightly. 

Meanwhile, the media has dropped the ball on tracking hazardous industries as it did in the years immediately after Bhopal. Then you would see some investigative stories about hazardous industries. These reports exposed how many of these industries were getting away with discharging toxic effluents into local water bodies without being monitored or checked. Journalists asked questions of pollution control boards. They exposed how inspectors were paid off by small and bigger industries to give them a clean chit. Some of this did result in pressure on hazardous industries to conform.

Forty years later, we do not read such stories. Does this mean industrial pollution has disappeared? Are our water bodies, especially in rural areas away from the media spotlight, free of such pollution? If people in these areas ask questions, or protest, do we hear about it?

These questions appear almost rhetorical because the answers are obvious. In small print, inside the city pages of some newspapers, you sometimes read stories about how in industrial estates, surrounded by settlements, there has been an explosion, or a leakage of hazardous chemicals. The locals protest. There is minimal coverage. And then nothing more. Was the company fined? Taken to court? Who inspected the factory? Why was the leak not detected? Who is responsible for the negligence? Was there any accountability? 

Once again, the answers to these questions are obvious. Forty years after Bhopal, we have laws like the Environment Protection Act 1986. We have systems to check hazardous industries like pollution control boards. But essentially, it is business as usual.

Apart from the continued indifference of governments, at the state and central level, what remains true today as it was 40 years ago is that without civic activism and an empathetic media, nothing changes.  

The other incident that ought to set off some introspection in the media is that of the tragic accident in Dima Hasao in Assam where nine miners were stuck inside a flooded “rat-hole” coal mine.

The description of such a mine, a “rat-hole”, illustrates the callous, almost murderous method, of retrieving coal because using machines is too expensive. Men are pushed down these holes with barely space to move and must manually dig out the coal, the black gold that will make some people rich. But in the process, these men, desperate for any kind of work, risk life and limb without much by way of compensation.

In 2014, the National Green Tribunal banned such rat-hole mines. There were no ifs and buts. They were banned. And yet, today we are reading about yet another disaster. As with Bhopal, in the post ban period, were there investigative stories to expose whether the ban was being observed at all? Were state governments doing anything to stop it? 

Does the media always need a disaster, or the intervention of the court, to report on such environmentally dangerous and callous methods of mining? Will our media take its gaze away from politics and politicians for a moment to think about the continuance of rat-hole mining and what this means for the families of the men who drowned in the Dima Hasao rat-hole coal mine? 

This column has asked questions because I believe that is the media’s job, one that it is barely doing today. The absence of such questioning reflects the same indifference for which we blame governments. 

As always, there are honourable exceptions. But glance at your daily newspaper, and if you have the stomach for it, watch news on any television channel, and you would have to ask: Is there nothing else happening in India for the media to report apart from elections, politics and the exhortations of politicians? 

 

Joshimath’s story dates back decades. That’s why media must dig deep

Broken News 

Published in Newslaundry on January 12, 2023

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/01/12/joshimaths-story-dates-back-decades-thats-why-media-must-dig-deep

A small town in Uttarakhand has made it to the front pages of newspapers, and as the top story in many television news shows. Joshimath, a town of a little under 17,000 people in Chamoli district, is already well-known to trekkers, those wanting to explore the Himalayas, and Hindu pilgrims. But today, its claim to fame is that it is sinking.

It is also in danger of becoming an adjective – a descriptor of what happens when we ignore concepts of sustainability as we pursue so-called “development”. 

Predictably, when the cracks in Joshimath’s buildings could no longer be ignored, the government moved on a “war footing”, as did the media. We watched videos and saw visuals of distressed residents pointing to huge cracks in their homes, read about a hotel tilting onto another, and listened to experts who said they knew this crisis was imminent.

Yet, the roots of the current crisis – of a town literally sinking – have probably not yet sunk in, either to the lay media-consuming public with an increasingly diminishing attention span, or to the people who pushed through plans to build power plants and blast the fragile mountains for roads, despite adequate warnings from experts. 

There is a message here for the media – a message it continues to ignore. Even if you report on a disaster, integrate the perspectives that explain the reasons for it. It’s not difficult to do this. And if it’s done, chances are that more people will understand why many of the projects being pursued in the ecologically fragile environment of the Himalayas spell disaster.

Of course, as always, there are exceptions. Newspapers and digital platforms have carried excellent explainers that an interested reader can plough through (see here and here). But useful as this is, it is not enough. The facts tracing this disaster to earlier policies are clear. They need to be repeated, they need to be integrated in the reporting. 

Few can explain more simply than Dehradun-based veteran environmentalist Ravi Chopra, who headed the high-powered committee looking at the environmental impact of the Char Dham project in Uttarakhand. He resigned last February because their recommendations were ignored. Read his interview in Down to Earth and his op-ed in Hindustan Times that say all that needs to be said. 

Another article in Down to Earth also reminds us that what’s happening in Joshimath today could happen in a number of other towns in Uttarakhand, including the popular tourist resort of Nainital, before too long. The reasons are the same: unsustainable development that pays no heed to the carrying capacity of the natural environment.

The new year has begun with another environment-related story on the front pages, one that gives all of us a sinking feeling. In 2021, of the 50 most polluted cities in the world, 35 were in India. The situation today is likely to be no different, perhaps even worse. Not just Delhi, but in dozens of other small and big cities in this country, residents are choking from poisonous air. You don’t need a viral infection to get lung congestion these days. You only need to breathe the air.

According to the World Health Organisation, 90 percent of the world’s population breathes air that is worse than acceptable limits. But within that, it is people in low- and middle-income countries like India that suffer the most. In any case, India has diluted WHO standards for air quality although revising them is being discussed. At present, what is considered “good” air quality here in India is actually “moderate” or even “poor” air quality according to WHO standards.

Like the Joshimath story, the reports we read do not adequately explain the current air pollution crisis in India. Even as the air quality index climbs higher in city after city, there are some reports explaining the possible reasons: vehicular pollution, construction dust, industrial pollution, etc. 

The factors contributing to air pollution, such as vehicular pollution, have been known for decades. Most readers today would not be aware that in the 1990s, one man fought determinedly for a change in the fuel used in public transport in Delhi. That was Anil Agarwal, who set up the Centre for Science and Environment. The air pollution levels in Delhi at that time were nowhere as bad as they are today. Yet, Agarwal, who suffered from chronic asthma and later succumbed to cancer, campaigned through CSE for a change in fuel used in public transport in Delhi from petrol and diesel to CNG. Several other cities implemented this in later years. The 2010 CSE report, Slow Murder: The deadly story of vehicular pollution in India, is worth revisiting even today.

But despite campaigns by CSE and other environmental groups about the polluted air in our cities, there is little to no outrage about the many projects being implemented that do nothing to address the problem. Instead, more roads are being built to accommodate a greater volume of vehicular traffic using fossil fuels, there is little to no compulsion on the building industry to implement dust alleviating strategies, and the system to keep a check on levels of pollutants emitted by industries and thermal power stations in the vicinity of cities remains impaired despite decades of debate about it.  

Every year during the winter months, we see photographs showing us what we can see when we look out of our windows. Yet those with the power to take hard decisions – such as suspending all construction activity during the worst days, or restricting vehicular movement – choose to ignore what stares them in the face and invades their nostrils as much as those of ordinary citizens. Could this be because there is no public outrage?

Unlike in Joshimath, where the buildings with cracks face demolition, and the anxious and angry owners of these structures are out on the streets protesting, India’s urban residents seem to have accepted a slow death from poisonous air with apparent equanimity. 

One reason for such a passive response can be attributed to the class factor. The people most affected by the poisonous air quality are the homeless and those who are compelled to do outdoor physical labour – basically the poorest in our cities whose voices are rarely heard. The better-off have windows they can close, with air-conditioning in their cars and homes that allows them to insulate themselves. Possibly, this is one reason why the problem of air pollution has rarely moved the powerful, nor led to drastic changes in the way we view urban development. For instance, as Shoaib Daniyal points out in this article, bus commuters who are the majority in any city rarely get their voices heard over private car owners. 

In this gloomy scenario, here’s a suggestion for the media. What if in all the 35 cities on the top of that list of polluted Indian cities, local newspapers, radio stations and TV channels ran a daily count of not just the poor air quality, but of the number of people hospitalised and dying from respiratory infections? In the last three years of the pandemic, many media outlets did this, tabulating daily the number of people afflicted, hospitalised, or dead due to Covid. Surely, such a proactive step by the media would play a significant part in building up public opinion that could then put pressure on decision-makers to act. 

That’s another item for my wish list for 2023.

From climate change to healthcare: Why is there no space for these issues in Big Media?

 Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on September 3, 2021

Link: https://www.newslaundry.com/2021/09/03/from-climate-change-to-healthcare-why-is-there-no-space-for-these-issues-in-big-media

So, "the longest war", as the US media insists on calling their country's engagement in Afghanistan, has ended. But is this really the end of the story? And has war and conflict really ended in a country ravaged by both for decades?

As you scroll through the extensive coverage in the international media leading up to the American withdrawal, there is next to nothing about another war that Afghanistan has been facing well before the takeover by the Taliban.

Of course, the repatriation of Afghans wanting to move out of the country will continue to engage the international media and, to some extent, what happens to women's education and employment. But alongside this is the humanitarian crisis that has been unfolding in the country even before the Taliban took over on August 15. How will Afghanistan's economy, so heavily dependent on foreign aid, survive? Who will be hit the hardest by this drastic downturn?

Apart from the economic crisis, according to this Reuters report, Afghanistan has been reeling under a severe drought. An estimated 12 million people, out of a population of 36 million, are facing “a food security crisis of not knowing when or where their next meal will come from”. This is in addition to rising food costs across the country. So, irrespective of the political developments or the kind of government that is eventually formed or whether it is recognised by the world, the harsh reality facing millions of Afghans will be finding food for their next meal.

The healthcare system in the country is also close to collapse. A representative of Médecins Sans Frontières is quoted in this report saying: “The overall health system in Afghanistan is understaffed, under-equipped and underfunded, for years. And the great risk is that this underfunding will continue over time.” As a result, the existing health facilities are already running short of supplies, even in the cities. One can imagine how much more dire the situation must be in the rural areas.

With the media restricted, will we ever know the suffering of ordinary Afghans who live away from the cities? According to Reporters Without Borders, less than 100 of the 700 women journalists in Kabul are still working. “Women journalists are in the process of disappearing from the capital,” it notes as many Afghan journalists, women and men, are leaving the country. At the same time, the international media have drastically reduced their presence. So, who will write these stories?

It is perhaps inevitable that geopolitics and speculation about what the Taliban will do will continue to dominate the news. This is, in any case, a given in most countries, including in India. Here, political news and government pronouncements hog news space while reports about drought, floods, hunger, and environmental crises are barely reported, if at all.

For instance, even as newspapers were spilling over with advertisements and sage pronouncements about “India at 75”, marking the beginning of India's 75th year of independence, an estimated 2.25 lakh people in 15 districts in Assam were affected by floods. Just going by numbers affected, this is newsworthy. And even if floods are an annual occurrence, in the past, such natural disasters would be reported and featured in the "national" pages of newspapers. Today, you have to work hard to find such news except in the newspapers of that region.

Then take healthcare. One of the positive outcomes of the Covid-19 pandemic has been that health coverage in the media has been given importance. In the past, reporters assigned the health beat scarcely got any recognition. Today, many of them, the majority of them being women journalists, are names we recognise for the excellent and persistent coverage they have done of the pandemic.

But there are other diseases too that afflict and kill Indians at all times. Many of these diseases, such as malaria, dengue and encephalitis, are closely linked with the appalling sanitary conditions in which millions of people live in cities and villages. The boastful advertisements and statements about the success of campaigns like Swachh Bharat, etc have failed miserably to make a dent on innumerable fetid open drains and sewers around which poor communities live because they have no option to move elsewhere. These are the people who struggle each monsoon with vector-borne diseases, and the poor state of our health infrastructure makes their lives even more precarious.

This distressing report in Newslaundry of an apparent “mystery illness” that has already killed 34 children in Firozabad, Uttar Pradesh, is just one of similar reports you can find in the media if you look hard enough. The media's neglect of these stories compounds the crisis as governments, like that of Yogi Adityanath in UP, can get away with boasting about what a superb job they are doing in looking after the health of people living in their states.

Then take another perennial, the impact of global warming. This is drawing considerable attention worldwide, partly due to the increase in forest fires in Europe and the US, as also flash floods and now hurricanes. The environmentalist Bill McKibben, who has been writing and campaigning on the links between global warming and the continuing burning of fossil fuels with extreme climate events, reiterates yet again in a piece in the New Yorker that the latest hurricane to land on the shores of the US is the result of simple physics. No one can put it better than he does when he writes:

“Hurricanes...draw their power from heat in the ocean. If there’s more heat, the hurricane can get stronger. Physics. Warm air can hold more water than cold air can. So in warm, arid areas you get more evaporation, and hence more drought, and hence more fire. Physics. The water that’s been evaporated into the atmosphere comes down: more flooding rainfall. Physics. The earth runs on energy. We’re trapping more of it near the planet’s surface because of the carbon dioxide that comes from burning coal and gas and oil. That energy expresses itself in melting ice sheets, in rising seas, in the incomprehensible roar of the wind as a giant storm crashes into a city of steel and glass. It’s not, in the end, all that complicated.”

But in India, our coverage of the impact of climate change remains sporadic. In Mumbai, for instance, the municipal commissioner is quoted as saying that 80 percent of Mumbai's Nariman Point (a business district), and Mantralaya (seat of the state government) will be underwater by 2050. He was speaking at the launch of the Mumbai Climate Action Plan website. He also said that in the last 15 months, Mumbai had been hit by three cyclones.

Yet, the city's municipal corporation that he heads is hell-bent on building a coastal road that will increase fossil-fuel guzzling privatised transport, benefit only a small percentage of the population, and add to the city's existing burden of air pollution besides contributing to global warming. There has been practically no discussion in local media questioning the municipal commissioner or debating how India's financial capital will survive if large parts are submerged in just 30 years.

Apart from the impact of global warming, a report by the University of Chicago's Air Quality Life Index finds that India is the most polluted country in the world. Air pollution, it states, could cut life expectancy by nine years in north India and 2.5 years in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. While organisations dedicated to environmental issues like the Centre for Science and Environment have been campaigning for action, mainstream media also needs to find ways to illustrate how this will affect the lives of people, particularly the poorest and most marginalised. Without that, there is little hope of policy makers feeling any kind of pressure to take action.

Even if subjects like climate change, pollution, health care, sanitation, and nutrition don't grab headlines, they affect the survival of millions of people. And just on those grounds, they are “newsworthy”.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the dominant media India, namely television news, the concept of what constitutes news has been so distorted that not just the subjects that I've mentioned, but entire regions and populations of this country, are being permanently obscured. Unlike in Afghanistan, there are plenty of journalists in India who can cover these stories. But the space for them to report on these issues is shrinking by the day.

The smog that India and Pakistan share

It is a crisis that requires our politicians to become statesmen, to think of the future generations rather than the next elections, to rise above petty point scoring to sitting down and working out feasible solutions. 

Writing in the Indian Express on 14 November, Nirupama Subramaniam writes about the fog that India and Pakistan share as it spreads its deadly footprint across the border, and envelopes towns, cities and the countryside on both sides.  She concludes: "Had Saadat Hasan Manto been alive, there would have been a short story by now on how India and Pakistan had agreed to exchange smog as a confidence-building measure."

But this is no laughing matter.  Pakistan and India share not just history but also geography. We share mountains and rivers, we grow the same crops, and the air we breathe is also the same.

Today, as dirty polluted air chokes people living in Lahore and in Amritsar and Delhi, we should remember that there are no border check posts that this filth has to cross in either direction. 

It is a crisis that requires our politicians to become statesmen, to think of the future generations rather than the next elections, to rise above petty point scoring to sitting down and working out feasible solutions.  It also means India and Pakistan must talk about polluted air and water even if strategic issues have to be set aside for the moment.  At this rate, there will be no Indians and Pakistanis left to do the talking if we continue to allow our cities and the countryside to become gas chambers.

It is easy to forget, but there was a time when India and Pakistan did talk to each other on these matters.  In 1989, there was an India-Pakistan Conference on the Environment in Lahore which I was lucky to attend.  It was initiated by the Pakistan section of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), headed then by a remarkable woman called Aban Marker Kabraji, a Parsi with family in Mumbai and Karachi.  On the Indian side, one of the main movers was the late Anil Agarwal, who headed the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi.

In their joint Preface to the report that emerged from the conference titled, "Beyond Shifting Sands: The Environment in India and Pakistan" (IUCN and CSE 1994), Kabraji and Agarwal wrote: "The 'environment' that we met to talk about...remains as ever, beseiged.  Under attack by those same forces of greed, ignorance and mismanagement as before. There is a crisis of governance in both our societies, and the ideals and values implied in the sustainable development paradigm appear urgently and relevantly as the only way forward. "

What they wrote then could not be more relevant today.

Both our societies face a crisis of governance when it comes to the environment.  Every crisis, such as the current smog, is dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, as if all one wants is one clear day without smog.  Yet it is the cumulative actions and mismanagement of resources spanning over decades that have led to the current crisis. 

Undoing the wrongs of past policies must necessarily mean acknowledging what and why things went wrong.  No one is willing to sit down and address that, or to heed those who are pointing out the long-term correctives that can still be put in place.  Instead every authority -- whether a state government, or a court -- is busy undercutting and criticising measures suggested by the other without any constructive alternative. 

The problem we face is not SMOG -- it is the fog in our minds, and our inability to rise above the clutter to see the clear light of day.

Gasping into 2014

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, January 5, 2014

The Hindu Photo: V. Sudershan

It was a strange year. 2014 could be stranger. I use the word ’strange’ because when you look back, you cannot describe it within the binary of good and bad. Some good perhaps, but much more that was depressing.

So given current trends, both political and social, what will the next year bring? If you are a resident of Mumbai or Delhi and were to try and look into the future, you would not see very far. The quality of the air — fog in Delhi, smog in Mumbai — obscures everything. This state of affairs, I am afraid, is the future. Unless something changes. So my New Year wish is that in the next five years, we can breathe cleaner air in our cities.

Many people are hopeful that there can be change, given the spectacular performance of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi Assembly elections. What is clear now is that you cannot take the voter for granted. However, in this age of single-issue obsessions, driven to a large extent by the media, the beginning of a new year is a good time to remember that there are many more areas that require urgent attention than those emphasised by the shouting brigades on our television channels.

So even as we discuss the quantity of water that every individual living in an Indian city should have or the price to pay for electricity, thanks to the promises made to Delhi’s citizens by AAP, I would suggest that equally important is the quality of air we breathe.

Every winter, when the temperature drops there is a sense of resignation, as if smog and fog are inevitable. But is that true, or have we brought this situation on ourselves by not thinking ahead? We are a land of emergencies. Only when there is a crisis is some action taken. And more often than not, it is too little and too late.

The need for affordable and efficient public transport for our cities is a no-brainer. The most liveable cities in the world are those where people can commute comfortably using public transport. This is a consequence of policies that make public transport more efficient and cheaper than driving a car. The result is cleaner air that all can breathe.

Yet only eight out of 35 of India’s bigger cities have a reasonable bus system. In the smaller towns, the situation is much more dire. Public transport is being built in many cities. But there is randomness in the planning, most visible in a city like Mumbai where despite the impossibly over-crowded local trains and buses, an estimated 88 per cent of the population uses public transport.

In fact, in all the major cities, including Mumbai, the majority of people use public transport not because it is necessarily efficient but because it is cheaper than driving a car. Thus in Kolkata, 76 per cent use public transport, in Chennai 70 per cent and in Delhi 62 per cent. Also, despite the absence of pavements and safe ways to go from one point to another on foot, anywhere between 16 to 57 per cent of trips are on foot. Yet, the 10-15 per cent who commute by car and who use 90 per cent of the road space succeed in contributing a large part of the noxious pollutants that the rest of the population is forced to breathe.

Of course, those driving the cars avoid inhaling the poisons because they have the ability to insulate themselves within air-conditioned houses, air-conditioned cars and air-conditioned offices. The poor and the middle class have no such options. Think of the men who pull handcarts, those who drive auto rickshaws, the traffic police who have to stand for hours at traffic signals, those who commute on bicycles, and the people who live and sleep on pavements in so many of our cities, despite the weather.

Although more studies are needed to make the connection between this pollutant-laden air and disease, it is evident that it has contributed to an increase in asthma and respiratory ailments as well as damage to the heart in the urban population. The most vulnerable are children and the elderly.

So as we launch into 2014, a year that is likely to herald some dramatic political changes, and a year when political parties will be bending over backwards to win the urban vote now that AAP has shaken them up, why not add clean air to the list of demands that we make on those whom we elect to govern us?

(To read the original, click here.)