Open Forum
New Delhi, 22 August 2012
Of Bhopal & Olympics
DOW DENIES SUCCOUR
By Proloy Bagchi
The curtain
may have come down on the 2012 Olympics, but a key player continues to stand
out. In fact, like a sore thumb from the very beginning. Much before the
commencement of the London Games, the gas-affected people of Union Carbide, Bhopal and their several
organisations mounted a protracted campaign against the Dow’s sponsorship of
it. The Dow funded the £7 million wrap around the Olympic Stadium and also
negotiated a 10-year £100 million sponsorship with the International Olympic
Committee. The Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) is now a subsidiary of The Dow
Chemicals, the latter having bought it in the late ‘90s.
It is
well-known that in December 1984 a lethal gas, methyl isocyanate, leaked out of
the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal
and killed thousands and maimed many more for life. The protesters’ contention
was that while the company poured millions in the Olympics it did not
sufficiently compensate the victims of the gas leak. It has also refused to
clean up the factory site on which its subsidiary had dumped toxic material
which polluted the soil, the environment and the ground-water in the area
inflicting misery on the people.
Interestingly,
while there was muted support for the Bhopal
protesters from the Indian politicians, those in Britain went after the matter more
seriously. Senior Labour Party leaders demanded an audit of Dow’s sponsorship
of the Olympics and the Chief of its Ethics Committee, Meredith Alexander,
resigned over Dow’s sponsorship. Five different protest groups presented London
Olympic Games communications director Jackie Brock Doyle with five boxes of
signatures – a 28,000-strong petition on Change.org and a 30,000-strong petition
on SumOfUs – calling for a public apology from Games organisers. They also
demanded from Dow a financial contribution of £7 million to help remediate the
contaminated land and water supply.
The Dow,
however, steadfastly denied its responsibility in the tragedy as, it contended,
it bought the UCC 15 years after the tragedy and that by then all legal claims
were resolved. The UCC had paid $470 million as compensation to the Indian
Government and that the matter was settled at the highest court of the land which
after the settlement had exempted the Indian arm of the Corporation from any
further litigation in the matter. It went on to say that the responsibility for
the clean-up of the site now lay with the Indian Government. Paul Deighton,
Chief Executive of the Games and Sabastian Coe, Chairman of the London
Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG) found no substance in the
protests and the Games went on with the Dow connection.
One cannot
really fault the Gas Affected for their persistent campaign against the Dow as
they, numbering thousands, continue to suffer the consequences of the lapses of
the UCC and its erstwhile Indian subsidiary. Its system of waste disposal has
proved to be lethal. Not only it left barrels of wastes in the complex, it dumped
toxic wastes around it. These have leached into the soil not only contaminating
it, but have also contaminated the sub-soil water which the inhabitants of the
nearby settlements use, inter alia, for drinking purposes. A recent test report
of the ground water has revealed excessive amounts of dichloro and hexachloro
benzene, mercury and lead in the drinking water used by the residents of the
adjoining colonies. The complications these could cause in human systems on
regular ingestion need hardly be mentioned.
The entire
row of the sponsorship of the Games by the Dow brought forth its
uncompassionate, uncompromising and indifferent attitude to human misery. It
has also displayed its callous indifference to the environment which its
subsidiary happened to have polluted harming the people and their habitat. That
would truly be a justifiable conclusion. However, the truth now is different.
Of late, Dow has turned a new leaf. Bryan Walsh, a senior writer with the Time magazine, recently reported that
the CEO of Dow Chemicals negotiated with the head of The Nature Conservancy
(TNC), one of the biggest green groups based in Washington, a collaborative effort to
maximise the environmental value of the Corporation’s operations with a view to
enabling it to go green.
The Dow has
announced “a five-year, $10 million collaboration with TNC to eventually tally
up the ecosystem costs and benefits of every business decision” and to make
environmental factors part of its profit-and-loss statements. The Dow chief
Andrew Liveris is reported to have stated: “Our planet’s natural resources are
more and more under threat” and “protecting nature can be a profitable
corporate priority and a smart global business strategy”, a statement that
could hardly be expected from him, at least
in India.
The change
of heart has not come just like that. It has a lot to do, as Walsh said, with
the threat of government action on emissions on which a price has now been
fixed, insistent share-holder pressures on green issues and a growing concern
over the limits of available natural resources. In a well- researched piece
entitled “Three faces of Dow” in Garbage Magazine, supposedly a ground-breaking
environmental publication, Art Kleiner, a journalist and author of note, has
described three past and present identities of The Dow.
“First, there is the ‘traditional’ Dow: the
frugal, small-town chemical company founded a century ago... close-knit and
egalitarian, where chemistry PhDs stay from college until retirement... and
where the toxicology labs date back to the 1930s.” There is also the
"antagonistic" Dow – “the Dow of napalm and Agent Orange... the Dow
that bitterly fought Oregon housewives and Vietnam
veterans over herbicide sprays”. The third is the "learning" Dow, the
company with a change of heart about environmentalism. That is where the
collaboration with TNC comes in. TNC’s scientists, Walsh says, will advise Dow on how the
company’s business decisions impact the environment—and in turn, how the
environment affects Dow’s business. The ecosystem will become a new and major
component for Dow’s bottom line, putting environmental sustainability on par
with business sustainability.
Surprisingly, despite this change of heart the Dow did not
budge from its rigid stand that it had nothing to do with the Bhopal Gas
Tragedy. After all, whatever happened in Bhopal,
terminating and disrupting the lives of thousands of locals, was the result of
the callousness and indifference of its subsidiary, UCC, currently somewhat
like a kid-brother to it. True, a final settlement was reached way back in the
1980s but, like everybody, both Dow and the UCC are aware how and why a shoddy
settlement was arrived at with the Indian Government to the great disadvantage
of the victims of the gas leak.
Indeed, Dow’s new-found environmentalism has to have
elements of Humanism embedded in it. If it had millions to pour into the
Olympics, the Dow could certainly use a few of these to mitigate the human
misery authored by its subsidiary and to restore the destroyed human habitat in
Bhopal. That
would have been admirable and, perhaps, more an ethical act and appropriate way
of discharging its corporate social responsibility. Sadly, it never seemed to
have occurred to it! --INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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