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Bhopal - 30 years on

18th Feb 2016
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A couple of months ago I played a free gig organised by BBC News 24 anchorman Mike Embley for a cause close to his heart. Mike is passionate about raising awareness of the ongoing tragedy and injustice of the Bhopal disaster.

The gig was, which was filmed was a great success. Here is a message from Mike about Bhopal and a clip of my band performing at the event

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuW1ScavoAE

If someone asked you to name the world's "worst" industrial disaster, you might already know the answer. Standing out a mile, in the grim league table of lives lost or badly affected, the sheer scale and duration of the impact ... it's the gas leak at a pesticide plant at Bhopal in central India, in 1984.

But you might be astonished to know that, 31 years later, the Bhopal disaster is still going on.

At least half a million were injured. The death toll is now more than 23,000. About 150,000 are still chronically ill. The abandoned Union Carbide factory, now owned by the US-based multinational Dow Chemical, is still full of toxins. Even today children are born damaged, because of contaminated groundwater, or their parents' exposure to the gas.

Unlike so many of the world's current horrors, it's a problem that actually could be "fixed". More compensation, better healthcare and a clean-up for the toxic site would do wonders. But all that is still mired in decades of legal wrangles - complicated by the Indian government's reluctance to deter foreign investment. Bhopal's city fathers are also keen to distract trade and tourists from their local running sore. 

Local people battle on: a group of Bhopali women walked nearly 500 miles to Delhi, to lobby the then Prime Minister. He wouldn't see them, but promised to visit, to see for himself. They walked back again. He never came. But local fury has at least fired international support - an under-funded but articulate campaign is particularly active in the UK and US, much of it aimed at stirring shareholder unrest. More information here:

http://bhopal.org

Mike Embley

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