Five Past Midnight in Bhopal (27 page)

“Once drastic cuts became the sole policy objective, and one man’s say-so was the only authority, we knew the plant was inevitably
going to hell,” Kamal Pareek would confirm.

Once again it was Rahul who bore the news. In a matter of minutes it was all around the bustees.

“Carbide has just laid off three hundred coolies. And apparently that’s only the beginning.”

“Haven’t the unions done anything about it?” Ganga Ram asked sharply.

“They weren’t given any choice,” explained Rahul.

“Does that mean they’re going to shut down all the installations?” worried Sheela Nadar, afraid that her husband might be
among the men laid off.

“Not necessarily,” Rahul tried to be reassuring. “But it does seem the sale of plant medicines isn’t going all that well anymore.”

“It’s not surprising,” observed Belram Mukkadam, “the rains didn’t come this year and people are leaving the countryside.”

Sunil, the eldest son of the Kumar family whose rice fields had been obliterated by the drought, spoke up. “Plant medicines
are great when things are going well,” he declared. “But when there’s no water left to give the rice a drink, they’re useless.”

Sunil was right. The gathering around Rahul had increased in size. The news he had brought provoked widespread consternation.
After living so long in the shadow of the factory, after burning so many incense sticks to get jobs there, after being woken
with a start by the howl of its sirens, after so many years of living together on this patch of land, how could they really
believe that this temple of industry was crumbling?

“This year the rains are going to be very heavy,” said the sorcerer Nilamber, whose predictions were always optimistic. “Then
Carbide will take back those it kicked out today.”

Sheela Nadar gave the little man with the goatee a grateful smile. Everyone noticed that her daughter Padmini was wearing
a cotton sari instead of her children’s clothes.

“The trainees from the plant have stopped coming to the House of Hope,” Padmini added. The House of Hope was the training
center Carbide had set up in part of the building occupied by Sister Felicity’s handicapped children. “The classrooms have
been closed for several days. I don’t think anyone’s coming back—they’ve taken away all their equipment.”

Discouraged, the group fell silent, each one contemplating the mighty structure looming on the horizon.

“I tell you they’ve only sacked our men so they can put even more money in their pocket,” decreed Prema Bai who had come from
helping a new citizen of Orya Bustee into the world. “Don’t you worry: Carbide will always be there.”

The whole city adopted her opinion. Neither the death of one of its workers, nor the ensuing union unrest, nor the apocalyptic
predictions of Rajkumar Keswani had been able to tarnish the factory’s prestige in the Bhopalis’ eyes. The star that Eduardo
Muñoz and a group of impassioned engineers had constructed, was as much a part of the city as its mosques, palaces and gardens.
It was the crowning glory of an industrial culture that was completely new to India. The residents of Bhopal might not know
what exactly the chimneys, tanks and pipework were for, but they were enthusiastic participants in all the sporting and cultural
activities the plant could organize. There were some indications, however, at the beginning of 1983, that the honeymoon was
drawing to a close. Under pressure from Carbide’s top management, Chakravarty and Mukund devoted their energies to making
further cuts. “In India, like anywhere else in the world, the only way to reduce expenditure is to reduce running costs,”
Kamal Pareek was to say. “In Bhopal, wages constituted the primary expense.” After the three hundred coolies were dismissed,
many skilled workers and technicians were laid off. In the methyl isocyanate production unit alone the manpower in each shift
was cut by half. In the vitally important control room, only one man was left to oversee some seventy dials, counters and
gauges, which relayed, among other things, the temperature and pressure of the three tanks of MIC. Maintenance crews underwent
the same cuts. The plant went from a total of nearly a thousand employees to six hundred and forty-two. What was more, a hundred
and fifty workers were yanked from their regular workstations to make up a pool of manpower that could be moved here and there
as the need arose. The result was a drop in the standard of work as many specialists found themselves assigned to tasks for
which they had not been trained. The replacement of retiring skilled personnel with unskilled workers made further savings
possible at the risk of having key positions filled by inexperienced people. The latter often spoke only Hindi, while the
instruction manuals were written in English.

Kamal Pareek would never forget “the painful meetings during which section heads were obliged to present their plans for cuts.”
The most senior engineers were reluctant to suggest solutions that would compromise the safety of their installations. But
the pressures were too great, especially when they came from Carbide’s Danbury headquarters. That was how the decision was
reached not to change certain parts every six months but only once a year. And to replace any damaged stainless steel pipes
with ordinary steel piping. Numerous cuts were made along those lines. Chakravarty, the man primarily responsible for this
flurry of cutbacks, seemed to know only one metal, the tinplate used in batteries. He behaved as if he knew nothing about
corrosion or the wear and tear on equipment subject to extreme temperatures.

“In a matter of weeks, I saw everything I’d learned on the banks of the Kanawha River go out the window,” Pareek would say.
“My beautiful plant was losing its soul.”

Unfortunate Kamal Pareek! Like so many other young Indians whom science had wrested from the ancestral constraints of their
country and projected into the twentieth century, he had put his faith in the new values preached by the prestigious American
multinational. He was suddenly discovering that that magnificent edifice was founded on one religion alone: the religion of
profit. The blue-and-white hexagon was not a symbol of progress; it was just a commercial logo.

No ceremony was held to mark the departure of D.N. Chakravarty in June 1983. He left Bhopal satisfied that he had been able,
in part, to stem the factory’s hemorrhaging finances.

Jagannathan Mukund was left in charge, but with a mission to continue the policy of cutbacks initiated by the envoy from Calcutta.
He rarely left the air-conditioned ivory tower of his office. His June 1983 reply to the three inspectors from South Charleston
claimed that many of the defects had been corrected, but critical items remained to be addressed. Some of the faulty valves
in the phosgene and MIC units would not be able to be replaced for several more months. As for the automatic fire detection
system in the carbon monoxide production unit, it could not be installed for a year at the earliest. These grave infractions
of the sacrosanct safety principles would soon provoke another cry of alarm from the journalist Rajkumar Keswani. The factory
was continuing to go downhill. The maintenance men had no replacement valves, clamps, flanges, rivets, bolts or even nuts.
They were reduced to replacing defective gauges with substandard instruments. Small leaks from the circuits were not stopped
until they were really dangerous. Many of the maintenance procedures were gradually phased out. Quality control checks on
the substances produced became less and less frequent, as did the checks on the most sensitive equipment.

Soon the factory only went into operation when the sales team needed supplies of Sevin. This was precisely the method that
Eduardo Muñoz had tried, ten years earlier, to convince the engineers in South Charleston to adopt, in order to avoid stocking
enormous quantities of MIC. Now that the plant was operating at a reduced pace, Mukund stopped MIC production in order to
gradually empty the tanks. Soon they held only about sixty tons. It was a trivial quantity by the Institute’s American standards
but enough, if there were an accident, to fulfill Raj-kumar Keswani’s apocalyptic predictions.

In the autumn of 1983, Mukund made a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. Ignoring his predecessor’s warning,
he shut down the principal safety systems. In his view, because the factory was no longer active, these systems were no longer
needed. No accident could occur in an installation that was not operating. His reasoning failed to take into account the sixty
tons of methyl isocyanate sitting in the tanks. Interrupting the refrigeration of these tanks might possibly save a few hundred
rupees worth of electricity a day, and possibly the same amount in freon gas. But it violated a fundamental rule laid down
by Carbide’s chemists, which stipulated that methyl isocyanate must, in all circumstances, be kept at a temperature close
to 0° C. In Bhopal, the temperature never drops below 15 or 20° C, even in winter. Furthermore, in order to save a few pounds
of coal, the flame that burned day and night at the top of the flare was extinguished. In the event of an accident this flame
would burn off any toxic gases that spilled into the atmosphere. Other pieces of essential equipment were subsequently deactivated,
in particular the enormous scrubber cylinder, which was supposed to decontaminate any gas leaks in a bath of caustic soda.

There were many engineers who were unable to bear the degradation of the high-tech temple they had watched being built. By
the end of 1983, half of them had left the factory. On December 13, it was time for the one who had been there the longest
to go. For the man who had so often risked his life escorting trucks full of MIC from Bombay to Bhopal, the departure was
both heartrending and liberating.

Before leaving his beautiful factory, Kamal Pareek wanted to show his comrades that in case of danger, the safety systems
so imprudently shut down could be started up again. Like a sailor climbing to the top of his ship’s main mast to light the
signal lamp, he scaled the ladder to the immense flare and relit the flame. Then he headed for the three tanks containing
the methyl isocyanate and unbolted the valves that supplied the freon to the coils that kept them refrigerated. He waited
for the needle of the temperature gauge to drop back down to 0° C. Turning then to K.D. Ballal, the duty engineer for the
unit that night, he gave a military salute and announced, “Temperature is at zero Celcius, sir! Goodbye and good luck! Now
let me run to my farewell party!”