LEARNING FROM THE PAST

For many, the arrest of 12 LG Polymers officials, seniormost among them being its South Korean Chef Executive Sunkey Jeong, could be like a moment of cathartic release. This time, the ones responsible will not get away, this time justice will not get lost in technicalities, corporate semantics and conspiracies. Naturally, this would stem from the fact that many have consciously or unconsciously compared the gas leak at LG Polymers in Vizag to the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The scale of the events was entirely different but there were some similarities. Once again, the Indian branch of a foreign multinational was involved. Once again, negligence leading up to the leak started from the very beginning, with the plant being set up too close to residential areas. Once again, the exact scale of the damage was unclear. And finally, once again, no warning was given to the community before this tragedy struck.

There were fears, perhaps, that those responsible for the Vizag leak would escape liability just as Warren Anderson had after the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. Indeed, the matter of Warren Anderson became a bit of a sore spot between India and the United States, with the USA refusing to extradite Anderson to India to face charges on account of ‘insufficient’ evidence. Indeed, Union Carbide followed a policy of denying any reasonable connection to the accident. They rested the liability on the Indian branch of Union Carbide, they attempted to — multiple times — forward the theory that it was not negligence or malpractice on the part of the operators which caused the tragedy but rather some kind of conspiracy revolving around sabotage. The company even avoided calls to pay compensation at first, claiming that any such payment would equal admission of guilt but later paid an out of court settlement of $470 million in 1989. Aside from this, the company made a big show of investing in building a local hospital, donating to the Indian Red Cross and developing new safety standards for the chemical industry to prevent such disasters. This did not end calls for justice but they were to no avail. In 2014, Anderson died of old age at a nursing home in Florida without answering for his crimes. Ultimately, the only punishment that was given aside from the settlement was the sentencing of seven Union Carbide India Ltd. executives in 2010. Most of them were over 70 and were given sentences of no more than two years each. Ineffectual fines were also slapped on them and the case was considered as having reached a conclusion, even if activists and those who continue to suffer would say otherwise. And so, India’s response to the matter, considered by many as being ‘too little, too late’ would haunt the conscience of the nation. Therefore, when the Vizag leak happened and there was little conversation on punishing the ‘guilty’, there was once again an uproar, one that stated that India had learnt nothing from the Bhopal tragedy of three decades past. LG Polymer officials had already started to point fingers in other directions, denying a

larger context of industrial malpractices and complicity, instead choosing to focus their narrative on individual, worker-level errors. There were times in the past that, despite protests, LG Polymers had escaped overt scrutiny regarding their operations but it would seem that this would no longer be the case. Cognisant of the public mood and the need for justice, the Andhra Government moved to swiftly form a dedicated committee that would ascertain the facts and the liabilities in the case. Just this week, the committee in question ruled that LG Polymers was guilty of negligence and that the warning systems in the plant were not functioning to the required extent. It recommended that the factory be relocated away from residential areas and that action be taken against the top executives of the company and its parent organisation, LG Chem. There have also been reports that related Government officials have also been suspended for negligence in the matter.

But while we appreciate such retributive acts of justice, we cannot forget that such actions are rarely any kind of a solution to the underlying problem. Perhaps, India and its authorities have learnt to not let the guilty go free after such corporate blunders but we have not learnt enough in regards to preventing such tragedies from taking place. While our safety guidelines and reporting mechanisms for industrial accidents are well-structured, shortfalls implementation mean that such guidelines rarely mean anything beyond instructive words on a paper. The fact that we make self-reporting the basis of how these accidents are logged is another problematic aspect. While we may choose to focus on cases with the greatest optics, industrial accidents are unfortunately common in India. Since Vizag, a few more of such accidents have already taken place with the most recent one in Ghaziabad where a candle factory burned down, claimed at least eight lives. The factory, which was illegally setup, flouted every rule of safety and was allowed to exist through negligence in enforcing the rules and regulations and not the absence of such rules. The ‘true’ learning here is to prevent such accidents in the first place and not to merely provide compensations and dole out punishments.