Before the commencement of the
2012 Olympic Games in London, 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 has 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.
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. 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,
these 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 fouled up
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. It 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 , though hardly could ever be expected from him at least in India, should
be music to the ears of environmentalists.
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. Its 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 them 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 ethical act and appropriate way of
discharging its corporate social responsibility. That would, perhaps, also have
endeared it to Indians who would have become more welcoming and offered it
greater opportunities for industry and commerce. Sadly, this never seemed to
have occurred to it!
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