Bhopal
February 11
By the banks of the motia talab looking onto the tajul masjid, the dhobi‘s furiously pounding away at the ghat, the constant sound of the horns varying ever so slightly in their tone when say a truck passes by can almost be likened to the drone of a tanpura over the fabric of the city as it cascades out of reach below to the new city of Bhopal. In the Benazir college building, an old old building complete with stained stained glass wooden floors and strangely indo Islamic cornices and brackets, is the perfect setting for a conference on Bhopal’s most persistent and serious urban issue. I talk of none other than the disastrous gas leak from the union carbide factory in 1984. I was five years old then and oblivious to both Bhopal and the gas tragedy, but its unthinkable that nothing has been done about the place even till today. The chemical plant still stands, or as much of it as has been able to hold out against the weather over the decades, poisonous chemicals leech into the ground, the people living near the site who lost many near and dear ones all those years ago are still living in toxic waste, breathing and drinking it in.
The disaster site is really a beautiful place, an oasis in a filthy crowded city. The lack of human access has created a haven for the plant and animal kingdom. An eerie kind of a silence, through which the occasional owl hoot competes with the distant locomotive, for the perfect resonant pitch. I did the unadvised and climbed the monstrous MIC tower, though the view and sound from the top was awesome, a swarm of bees decided that I was not a welcome guest. I have seldom run so fast or so purposefully out of a place before as far as my memory serves me. Not without the complimentary dozen or so stings which serve as a fitting reminder that the site has a life of its own!
The daily review is all set to start . . . now’s when I find out what’s happening in this quaint lakeside urban consortium . . . well they’re all a bit obsessed with the idea of a memorial, and stake holders seems to include DOW, its all a bit confusing, maybe I need to take a closer look. On the face of things though there is very little talk about much outside the site or any real involvement of the communities. There was however a talk by Jeet Iype who has designed the Sambhavana health care centre cum community centre just outside the factory, which I was to see today if it wasn’t for the dratted bees. The institution has taken on the role of community reconciliation and provides the locals health care, refuge from the crowded city as well as a green clean model for future building. Truly a ray of light in the darkness.
Set in the planned part of town the administrative hostel, where we were put up, is a sprawling complex, green and laid back as only a government institution can be. A longish auto rickshaw ride got me to the bada talab (big lake) after a sumptuous breakfast I found a lakeside promenade to walk along to the base of the old town. The lake is huge, a favourite with migratory birds, it being a Sunday there were several amateur fishermen trying their luck. I spotted a kingfisher of Malaya fame. As I circumvented the old city to find a different route to the conference, I kept coming across pond after pond. The city has a profusion of them ranging from the dirty puddle up to the big lakes which actually extend way out of town. The lake by the tajul masjid is like the highest lake, and there are lakes at every level of the undulating landscape, much like the cascading lakes of chittorgarh fort. Bhopal itself is quite a novel city. It’s not small by any stretch of imagination, but it retains a certain character, which only small towns have. There is also a disproportionate amount of planning and infrastructure by Indian standards. All in all it seems like the city doesn’t have to contend with a large rural influx, the only reason I can fathom is that the tribal population of the state is more than happy with their forests and have left the city to migrants from UP, Bihar, and the rest of India.
To get back to the problem of the Union carbide factory . . . I have been getting everyone’s opinion on what they think is the way forward. The overwhelming common factor is that the government needs to be greased into motion. The inertia of two and a half decades is something that makes it very easy for the status quo to remain and that is probably the biggest issue. I haven’t really heard any ideas for how to take that forward. Ballu seemed to think that its best to let things play their natural course and some time or the other the government would come around as it always does. Krishna had an interesting idea, sell off a part of the site for say apartments and use the proceeded to empower the community to do what they will with the remainder of the land. This brings us to the second important issue. The involvement of the communities around the site. I would personally like to err on the side of giving them too much power. Turning the site over to them perhaps and letting the indigenous social structure evolve its own answer to the trauma, the land and the obvious lack of basic civic amenities in the area. But as Krishna rightly pointed out, what’s to prevent them from commercially exploiting the land to its maximum and ignoring the greater common good of the society. The rule of the fittest unfortunately is pretty much all the social structure that we really have left. That said there is bound to be a way to empower the different groups with say some major activists heading the council and a certain democratic order to keep things in the realm of the greater common good.
One thing that I think would be a good reference is the national rural employment guarantee act. Via this scheme employment is guaranteed to all rural folk for a hundred days a year. This has for the first time actually seen money percolate from the central government all the way down to the village household. As a system it is a revolution in India, but it lacks focus and much of the work undertaken is tangential and pointless. From my visits to the union carbide site the biggest issues are fresh water, sewage and garbage. Now the problem with finding solutions to these issues is that our governance is based on a top down approach. A landfill far away, a prohibitively expensive and impossible to maintain sewage line and tankers carrying water from presumable a deep bore. These are the solutions that form the standard set. Using the site and the revenue generated from land it seems to me very possible to take the current activity of recycling which forms the main business of the site surroundings and extend it to garbage and solid waste. By creating the infrastructure for waste recycling, the area could be turned into a profitable urban farm where the waste of the surrounding areas is transformed into a resource (food) and brings revenue to the people as well as employment. The key in Dr Bhawalkar’s words is to understand that what we call waste is actually a resource that we just don’t want to (or don’t know how to) deal with. This outlook would also turn the focus from the past to the future, instead of letting the factory stand and making a memorial that will always hold the weight of decades of inaction. The site could be a model for urban centres across the developing world, showcasing the resilience of a people willing to get up and resurrect themselves from what was possible the worst industrial disaster ever.
Coming back to the site, there is all this talk of the pollution that has never been cleaned up. Jayaram Ramesh came to the site, picked up a fistful of mud and declared it clean. And though this caused a tremendous uproar at the time, I am inclined to go along the same lines, instead of fighting over a way forward, let the earth return to the tiller and lets see what the pollution holds for us. Believe in nature and her eternal inexhaustible powers of healing, and move forward. What drives this seemingly insane thought process is nothing but the state of the settlements outside the factory premises. Dirty is not the word, there are stagnant puddles of filth everywhere, garbage over flows bins where the rare bin appears, children muck about playfully in the stench. In the factory there might be pollution, but on the face of it it’s way cleaner!
I just got back from the factory, or more accurately a parikrama of the factory I was really curious to see what was happening around the boundary of the famous union carbide plat. It was surprising to say the least. “Dig at least six feet to bury your children’ proclaimed a sign by a dirty nala leading from the site. Right next to what obviously was a garbage dump but now seemed to double as a child cemetery were lush vegetable gardens growing cauliflower. The factory itself is surrounded by dwellings on all sides. Ranging from the tiny shack to the modern concrete house, the aesthetic though is unmistakably characteristic to the region. The wall itself though mostly standing is punctured in strategic points to allow cattle to go in to graze. There is sufficient open are in patches, but it seems to be full of small mounds every where. After the children’s graveyard I couldn’t help but wonder what the story behind all those mounds was. All in all the fact that there was a deadly chemical plant in the neighbourhood which had many years ago caused a catastrophic loss of life seemed very distant. Life in the shanty towns seemed happy and normal. If there was any problem due to pollution, it most certainly stems from the garbage and sewage that they are is inundated in. I seriously doubt that anyone would be able to find some 25 year old pollution in the middle of all that muck and chaos.
Bhopal needs to send a message to the world. In the words of Kai Weise, the memorial started to take a shape I could finally comprehend. The disaster and the following decades of inaction are possibly the most public face of the city of Bhopal. The time has come for the city to take its image and propel it unquestionably into the future. The concluding session of the workshop was indeed a fun day. From shadow boxing with the issue to GPS driven paths across the site. The methods and ways forward were as interesting as they were varied. The most important thing that emerged in my opinion was the need for a management body solely in charge of the disaster and its myriad effects as well as the memorial.
Any industrial disaster that we have inherited from an alien imperialistic capitalistic (read evil western) system of thought should be countered with equal force by a indigenous solution based on the vast traditional knowledge base which has sustained us for centuries before we were conquered by Persian planning and European civil work.
