The Bhopal Tragedy

This hard-hitting report to the Citizens Commission on Bhopal was the first book-length account of the Bhopal tragedy and its implications for American workers and communities exposed to similar risks. It addresses the key question of who was responsible for this catastrophic accident and probes the health and environmental, impact of the disaster which killed at least 5,000 people and injured more than 200,000. This book presents an entirely different view of the whole compensation question and what is true justice for the victims involved, with a detailed calculation of $4.1 billion (in l985 dollars) in compensation for economic losses alone. The authors gave what was then an up-to-date picture of the tangled web of litigation in U.S. and Indian courts, involving billions of dollars in claims. The later chapters in the book explore the implications of the Bhopal tragedy for U.S. workers and communities, drawing heavily on presentations made to the March 1984 Newark NJ conference on Bhopal organized by the Workers Policy Project. The book concludes with an agenda for citizen action and a series of appendices providing key facts about this tragedy.