Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

by Dominique Lapierre; Javier Moro

  “I realized at once, I didn’t stand a chance,” Eduardo Muñoz would recount. “Even before they heard what I had to say, the management committee, made up of all the division heads and key members of the board of directors, had rallied enthusiastically in support of the Indian proposal.”

  “India has a market of three hundred million peasants,” immediately declared one of Carbide’s executives.

  “Five hundred million soon,” added one of his colleagues.

  “Don’t you worry, Eduardo, we’ll sell our five thousand tons, and more!” was the message unanimously delivered. “Moreover,” announced Carbide’s CEO, “to show you just how much faith we have in this project, we’re allocating it a budget of twenty million dollars.”

  “An extravagant sum that Mr. Hay’s point system was going to spread in a manner advantageous to everyone,” Muñoz would reckon after meeting the South Charleston engineers in charge of laying the plans for the factory. These men were high-level chemists and mechanics, respected leaders in the field of manufacturing processes, in charge of reputable projects; in short they were the elite of the workforce at Union Carbide’s technical research center in South Charleston. “But they were all little dictators,” Muñoz would say. “They were obsessed with just one idea, that of using their twenty-million-dollar bounty to create the most beautiful pesticide plant India would ever know.”

  Showing them his documents, the Argentinian tried desperately to explain to his partners the distinctive characteristics of the Indian market. His line of reasoning left them cold.

  “The Indian government’s license is for an annual production of five thousand tons of pesticide. So we have a duty to build a plant to produce five thousand tons,” Muñoz recalled the project’s chief engineer interjecting in a cutting voice.

  “Clearly my commercial arguments were of no concern to those young dogs,” Muñoz would remember. “They weren’t bound by any obligation to make a profit. They were simply itching to plant their flares, reactors and miles of piping in the Indian countryside.”

  In the face of such obstinacy, the Argentinian sought a compromise.

  “Wouldn’t it be possible to proceed in stages?” he suggested. “That is to say, to start by building a two thousand ton unit, which could then be enlarged if the market proved favorable?”

  “My question brought sarcasm from the audience,” recalled Muñoz.

  “My dear Eduardo,” the project chief went on, “you must appreciate that engineering work for this type of factory requires that we establish the size of production envisaged from the outset. The reactors, tanks and controlling mechanisms of a plant that manufactures two thousand tons of Sevin are not of the same caliber as those of a factory two and a half times larger. Once a production target has been set, it can’t be changed.”

  “I take your point,” Muñoz conceded, trying to be tactful. “Especially as I imagine it’s possible to slow down production in a factory that is larger than necessary to adapt production to demand?”

  “That’s exactly right,” the project chief agreed, pleased to see the discussion ending with consensus.

  Alas, this consensus was only an illusion.

  The Argentinian still had plenty of issues to take up with the men from South Charleston. The most important one had to do with the actual conception of the Indian factory. The Institute factory near South Charleston, which had been designed to produce thirty thousand tons of Sevin a year and which was to serve more or less as a model, functioned around the clock. In order to maintain this continuity, considerable quantities of MIC, methyl isocyanate, had to be manufactured and stored. At the South Charleston plant, three tanks made out of high resistance steel and fitted with a complex refrigeration system stored up to a hundred and twenty tons of MIC.

  To Muñoz’s way of thinking, stocking such a quantity of this highly dangerous product might be justifiable for a factory like the one at the Institute, which ran twenty-four hours a day, but not in a much more modest plant where production was carried out as the need arose. For his own peace of mind the Argentinian went to Bayer in Germany and to the French Littorale factory near Béziers. Both companies handled MIC.

  “All the experts I met went through the roof when I told them our engineers intended to store twenty-two to twenty-six thousand gallons of MIC in the tanks at the prospective Bhopal plant,” Muñoz would recount. “One German told me, ‘We only produce our methyl icocyanate as needed. We’d never risk keeping a single liter for more than ten minutes.’ Another added, ‘Your engineers are out of their minds. They’re putting an atomic bomb in the middle of your factory that could explode at any time.’ As for the Béziers engineers, the French government had quite simply forbidden them to stock MIC in anything but the small number of twenty-gallon drums that they imported directly from the United States as required.”

  Shaken by the unanimity of opinion, the Argentinian returned to South Charleston to try and convince Carbide that it should modify its plans for the future Bhopal plant. Rather than store tens of thousands of gallons of potentially fatal materials, Muñoz suggested producing MIC in batches, on an as-needed basis, a system similar to the one used at Béziers. This system eliminated the need to keep large quantities of dangerous substances on site.

  “I quickly realized that my proposal ran counter to American industrial culture,” Muñoz would recall. “In the United States, they love to produce around the clock, in large quantities. They’re besotted with enormous pipes running into giant tanks. That’s how the whole of the oil industry and many others work.”

  Nevertheless, the South Charleston team wanted to allay the visitor’s fears.

  “The numerous safety systems with which this type of plant is equipped enable us to control any of the MIC’s potentially dangerous reactions,” the project leader assured him. “You have absolutely no need to worry. Your Bhopal plant will be as inoffensive as a chocolate factory.”

  Other problems awaited the Argentinian on his return to India. His next priority was to find a site for the prospective factory. His superiors in New York and South Charleston had agreed upon the choice of Bhopal, which was already home to the Sevin formulation unit. But the new site would have to be completely different in size. The plant would be a hydra-headed monster. There would be the unit producing alpha naphthol, one for carbon oxide, one for phosgene and one for methyl isocyanate. Alongside these installations with their control rooms, works and hangars, the plant would also have a collection of administrative buildings, a canteen, an infirmary, a decontamination center and a fire station, as well as a whole string of surveillance posts. All together it would need at least one hundred and twenty acres and an infrastructure capable of supplying the enormous quantities of water and electricity that would be necessary.

  The Kali Grounds met all these conditions. But the Argentinian was against the site. “I’d lost the battle over the size of the factory,” he would say. “But at least I could try and stop it being built too close to areas where people were living.” The officials of the Madhya Pradesh government rolled out the red carpet. The arrival of a multinational as prestigious as Union Carbide was an extraordinary godsend for the town and the region. It meant millions of dollars for the local economy and thousands of jobs. Ratna Nadar, along with all the other residents of the bustees, would be kept in work for years.

  Together with Muñoz, the Carbide team who had come from New York examined several sites suggested by the authorities. None of them was really satisfactory. In one place the water supply was inadequate; in another the electricity was wanting; elsewhere the ground was not firm enough to bear the weight of construction. That was when the residents of Orya and its neighboring bustees witnessed cars mysteriously coming and going from the Kali Grounds. The vehicles frequently paused to let their occupants out. This activity went on for several days, then stopped. The envoys from New York had finally overcome Muñoz’s reservations. Of course the Kali Grounds, next to the formulation works, w
as the right place to build the plant. As for any risk to those living nearby if an accident were to occur, the New York envoys reassured Muñoz that his fears were totally unfounded.

  “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. *

  16

  A New Star in the Indian Sky

  The 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 instrument
s 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.