Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (14 page)

“Eduardo, if this plant is built as it should be, there will be no danger,” declared the man in charge.

“Take New York, for example,” his assistant interjected. “Three airports surrounded by skyscrapers: La Guardia, JFK and Newark.
Planes take off every minute and logically they should crash into the buildings whenever it’s the least bit foggy, or collide
with one another.”

“And yet,” his boss went on, “New York’s airports are the safest in the world. It will be the same in Bhopal.”

Despite his doubts, Muñoz had little choice but to agree. He and his colleagues presented themselves at the Madhya Pradesh
government offices to submit their request for a one hundred and twenty acre plot of land on the Kali Grounds. The piece of
land in question had to adjoin the five acres of the formulation works. According to municipal planning regulations, no industry
likely to give off toxic emissions could be set up on a site where the prevailing wind might carry effluents into densely
populated areas. Such was the case with the Kali Grounds where the wind usually blew from north to south, in other words,
into the bustees, the railway station and the over-populated parts of the old town. The application should have been turned
down. But the Union Carbide envoys had taken care not to mention in their application that the pesticide they planned to produce
would be made with one of the most lethal gases of the chemical industry.

Clearly, Indira Gandhi had no great affection for her country’s maharajahs and nawabs. When the British left, her father Jawaharlal
Nehru and the leaders of the Indian independence movement had taken power away from them. She had then proceeded to confiscate
their last remaining privileges and possessions. Eduardo Muñoz saw their persecution as a providential gift. The imaginative
Argentinian dreamed of building in Bhopal, in tandem with the pesticide plant, a research center along the lines of the American
Boyce Thompson Institute. After all, the Indian climate and the diseases and insects that damaged its crops were all factors
associated with its particular environment. An Indian research center might come up with a new generation of pesticides better
suited to the country. It would be an opportunity for the future plant to diversify its production and, who knows, perhaps
one day hit the jackpot with new molecules that could be exported all over Asia. Indian researchers and technicians would
work for salaries ten or twelve times less than those of their American colleagues. All that was missing was a location. When
Muñoz discovered that the brother of the last nawab, threatened with government expropriation, was seeking to sell his Jehan
Numa palace, he leaped at the chance. Rising magnificently from Shamla Hill, one of the seven hills surrounding the city,
the edifice dominated the town. Its park, made up of ten acres of tropical vegetation, rare trees, shrubs and exotic blooms,
formed a sumptuous oasis of coolness, color and scent. The building would probably have to be demolished, but the estate was
vast enough to accommodate research laboratories, planetaria, greenhouses and even a luxurious guest house for passing visitors.
Convinced that an Indian would handle the purchase more adeptly than he, Muñoz placed his assistant, Ranjit Dutta, in charge
of negotiations. They were hustled through. Three days later, this jewel of Bhopal’s ancestral patrimony fell into the clutches
of the American multinational for the rock-bottom price of one million one hundred thousand rupees, approximately $65,000.
^*

T
he India of the naked
sadhus
,
^*
of sacred elephants caparisoned in gold; the India of devotees of a million gods praying in the waters of the Ganges; the
India of sari-draped women planting rice in the south or picking leaves in the tea plantations of the Himalayas; the immemorial
India of the worshippers of Shiva, Muhammad and Buddha; the India that had given the world prophets and saints such as Gandhi,
Rabindranath Tagore, Ramakrishna, Sri Aurobindo and Mother Teresa. The India of our fantasies, myths and dreams, had yet another
face: the country was, by the 1960s, a developing industrial and technological power.

Few people found this more surprising than the small group of American engineers sent to Bombay by Union Carbide in 1960 to
build a petrochemical complex. The venture united two vastly different cultures, with the magic of chemistry as their only
common denominator. This encounter proved so productive that Carbide took on a whole team of young Indian engineers to inject
new blood into the veins of the mighty American company. All those young men thought, worked and dreamed in English. They
came from great schools like the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute of Bombay founded by the British, or those created by
the young Indian republic like the Madras Technical College, the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the prestigious
Rajputi College in Pilani. Some were graduates of eminent Western universities like Cambridge, Columbia or Boston’s Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). Hindu, Muslim, Sikh or Christian, whatever their religion, they shared the same faith in science.
The mantras they chanted were the formulae for chemical processes and reactions. Living in an economy that modeled itself
on protectionism and socialism, they were only too delighted to have pried open the door of a Western company where they could
show off their talents, know-how, imagination and creativity. It was Carbide’s genius to play this Indian card and involve
the cream of local talent in its designs for industrial globalization.

“One good thing about this recognition was that it dispelled the archaic image many Westerners had of our country,” the engineer
Kamal Pareek would say. Son of an Uttar Pradesh lawyer, a graduate of the celebrated Pilani college, tennis champion and American
film buff, at twenty-three, this baby-faced young man was the embodiment of the youthful Indian energy Carbide was keen to
harness. “We Indians have always been particularly sensitive to the potential of the transformation of matter,” he confided.
“Our most ancient Sanskrit texts show that this sensitivity is part of our culture. We have a long-standing tradition of producing
the most elaborate perfumes. Since the dawn of time our Ayurvedic medicine has used chemical formulae borrowed from our plants
and minerals. The mastery of chemical elements is part of our heritage.” Pareek loved to furnish examples. “In Rajasthan there
is a tribe of very backward people called the Bagrus,” he recounted. “They make dyes for fabrics out of indigo powder, which
they mix with crushed horn from horses’ hoofs. To that they add pieces of bark from an ashoka tree and the residues of ant-infested
corn. These people who have had no education, who are completely ignorant of the chemical phenomena operating at the heart
of their concoctions, are on a par with the foremost chemists. Their dyes are the best in the world.”

The first chemical plant Carbide built in India was inaugurated on December 14, 1966. The blue-and-white flag hoisted into
the sky over the island of Trombay, near Bombay, was symbolic. A few miles from the spot where, four and a half centuries
earlier, the galleon
Hector
had unloaded the first British colonizers, it embodied the desire of a new set of adventurers to make India a platform for
its industrial worldwide expansion. After the island of Trombay, it was Bhopal’s Kali Grounds that were to see the same flag
fly over a highly sophisticated plant. The potentially deadly toxicity of its intended products had, however, sown doubt in
the minds of a few members of the New York management team. Was it wise to hand over technology as complex and dangerous as
that associated with methyl isocyanate to a third world country? In the end the excellent qualifications of the Indian engineers
recruited for the Trombay factory allayed their fears. The Indians were invited to South Charleston to have some input into
the plans for the Bhopal plant, an experience that the young technician, Umesh Nanda, son of a small industrialist in the
Punjab, would never forget.

“Encountering the Institute Sevin plant was like being suddenly projected into the next millennium,” he recalled. “The technical
center designing the project was a hive inhabited by an army of experts. There were specialists in heat exchangers, centrifugal
pumps, safety valves, control instruments and all the other vital parts. You had only to supply them with the particulars
of such-and-such an operation to receive in return descriptions of, and detailed plans for, all the apparatus and equipment
necessary. To mitigate the dangerous nature of the substances we were going to be using in Bhopal, bulky safety reports told
us about all the safety devices installed at the Institute. For weeks on end, we made a concerted effort with our American
colleagues to imagine every possible incident and its consequences: a burst pipe, a pump breaking down, an anomaly in the
running of a reactor or a distillation column.”

“It was a real pleasure working with those American engineers,” confirmed Kamal Pareek. “They were so professional, so attentive
to details, whereas we Indians often have a tendency to overlook them. If they weren’t satisfied, they wouldn’t let us move
on to the next stage.”

The pursuit of perfection was Carbide’s hallmark. The company even brought over a team of Indian welders in order to familiarize
them with the special acid and temperature-resistant alloys with which they would be working. “Going to America to learn how
to make up alloys as temperamental as Inconel, Monel or Hastelloy, was as epic a journey as flying off in Arjuna’s chariot
to create the stars in the sky,” marveled Kamal Pareek.

The stars! Eduardo Muñoz, the magician behind the whole venture, could give thanks to the gods. The pesticide plant he was
going to build on the Kali Grounds might not be exactly the one he had dreamed of, but it did promise to be a new star in
the Indian sky.

At the beginning of the summer of 1972, Carbide dispatched all the plans for the factory’s construction and development to
India. Unfortunately, this mountain of paperwork was not exactly the finest gift American technology could send to the developing
world. The design of Bhopal’s “beautiful plant” would not include all the safety equipment and security systems equipping
Carbide’s Institute plant in the U.S. Later, the precise reasons for these money-saving measures would remain obscure. It
seems that the sales of the Sevin formulated in Bhopal had not reached the hoped-for level. Disastrous climatic conditions
and the appearance on the market of a competing and less costly pesticide may have accounted for this reduction in sales.
Because Indian law severely restricted the involvement of foreign companies in their local subsidiaries, Union Carbide India
Limited suddenly found itself forced to reduce the factory’s construction budget. American and Indian experts assured, however,
that none of the cutbacks were to diminish the overall safety of the plant.