Suffering from the Bhopal disaster in India continues, 40 years on

SHORTLY BEFORE midnight on December 2nd 1984 methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly poisonous gas, began leaking from a storage tank at a pesticide factory in the Indian city of Bhopal. Over the course of the night 27 tonnes of the gas spread silently through the city, choking residents in their sleep. By dawn Bhopal’s streets were strewn with corpses, mostly those of residents of the slums surrounding the factory, which was owned by Union Carbide, an American company. The number of deaths is still disputed. According to Amnesty International, a human-rights organisation, up to 10,000 people died within three days of the accident, and another 12,000 perished later as a direct result of it. More than half a million people continue to live with injuries.