Indian court issues notice to Dow Chem on Bhopal incident

12 January 2005 06:05  [Source: ICIS news]

SINGAPORE (CNI)--The District Court of Bhopal in India has issued on 6 January a notice to Dow Chemical Corp, requesting the company to state why it should not present Union Carbide Corp (UCC) in an ongoing court case relating to the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy.

 

The order was issued by Chief Judicial Magistrate Anil Kumar Gupta based on an application filed on 26 February 2004 by the Bhopal Group for Information and Action, an NGO that is campaigning for justice for the victims of the gas leak.

 

Dow, which is based in Midland, Michigan, US, is expected to respond to the notice on 15 February, the date for the next court hearing.

 

The NGO had requested in its application that as Union Carbide had merged with Dow, the court should serve a notice/warrant to Dow Chemical in the US. In April last year, a similar notice had been served on Dow International, Bombay, India. But the company had argued that it was a subsidiary of Singapore-based Dow Chemical International and not directly related to Dow Chemical Corp, US.

 

Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action told CNI that last week’s court notice marked a turning point in the 20-year-old case as this is the first time that the US company has been served notice to present UCC in court.

 

Dow Chemical and UCC officials were unavailable for comment on Wednesday. Dow had previously stated that it had never owned or operated the UCC plant at Bhopal, and held no responsibility for the disaster. It had also said that the issue of corporate responsibility had been resolved under a settlement reached between UCC and the Indian government, and approved by India's Supreme Court in 1989.

 

Twenty years ago on 3 December, around half a million people of Bhopal were exposed to methyl isocyanate (MIC), a toxic gas, after due to a gas tank leakage at an UCC pesticide plant in the city.

 

The official death count for the tragedy was 3828 although a latest report by Amnesty International estimates that more than 7000 people died within days of the gas leak and another 15 000 died in subsequent years.

By: Malini Hariharan
+65 6780 4359

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