Ravi Rojan goes through the causes and aftermath of the 1984 disaster in Bhopal, India, which killed thousands of people and left the survivors with lingering health problems that persist even today. Despite coverage at the time the disaster has become invisible to the public and Union Carbide faced almost no consequences for the accident. On the contrary; after successfully laying blame on UCIL, their subsidiary in India, and the victims themselves, they were able to restructure the company in a way that benefitted management and shareholders; the eventual settlement came to $.43 a share. This despite a long history of negligence both in Bhopal and sites in the US.
As horrifying as this event was it as not, as Rojan stresses, a case of “a multinational gone wild”. Rather, it was an extreme example of the consequences of corporate culture. Union Carbide behaved logically with every action they took, given that their first priority is their shareholders. As well, corporations are structured in a way so that no one person has direct control, thereby limiting the impetus to act ethically.
It is important not to see the Bhopal disaster as simply a one-time tragedy but as a structural problem resulting from the values of our economic system. Though Rojan does not specifically mention economics he does point out that Bhopal is situated within the context of corporate power. Neoliberal capitalism values efficiency and maximizing profit over quality of life. The Bhopal disaster shows where that can lead.
- Rojan, S. Ravi. “Bhopal: Vulnerability, Routinization, and the Chronic Disaster”. From Anthony Oliver Smith and Susannah Hoffman, eds., The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective, pp. 257-277. 1999