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Mainstream media narratives and the official historiography of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Tragedy have overlooked the testimonies of disaster survivors, culturally discounting the authority of witnessing in both scholarly discourse and public arenas. This has left a space for novelists, as writer-activists, to trace the socio-political, economic and ecological injustices of post-colonial disasters like the Bhopal gas leak. Indra Sinha's Animal's People bears witness to such accounts and recreates the night of December 2–3, 1984, through the testimonies of the people surviving the gas disaster. This article identifies Sinha's narrative technique as 'eco-testimony', which strategically revives hitherto undocumented survivor testimonies and their experiences of eco-social exploitation in the post-disaster environment and forges a voice of dissent against the uneven, attritional and necropolitical violence of multinational companies and their chief ally, the neocolonial nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, as part of the Indian Feminist Judgement Project, we reconsider the decision of the Supreme Court of India in the Charan Lal Sahu case that followed the Bhopal gas leak tragedy. We present a dissenting opinion on the case, finding that the law empowering the State to supplant the victim-survivors as plaintiffs was unconstitutional. Alongside, we offer a brief commentary on why this finding comports with what a feminist judge on the bench might have decided. We consider a variety of ways in which feminist criticism of the majority decision might proceed, and how this criticism informs our rewriting. We also consider a set of persistent questions about feminist judging, and ways in which our rewriting, in turn, might be subject to further feminist objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of the article "Environmental Surprise, Expecting the Unexpected," by Robert W, Kates and William C. Clark, which appeared in the March 1996 issue is presented. It explores the environmental surprises such as the Legionnaire's disease, the Bhopal disaster, and the depletion of stratospheric ozone layer. It also explains the systematic ways of thinking about and classifying environmental surprises to improve the ability of society to anticipate and respond to environmental surprises.

This article explores the way in which Indra Sinha’s (2007) novel Animal’s People showcases the challenges of evidencing mass suffering in an increasingly global arena. Finding that the globalized context of international law is grounded in a discourse of comparison, it argues that Sinha’s representation of the Bhopal Gas Disaster veers between authenticating atrocity by evidencing its universality, putting it within the legislative purview of international human rights, and simultaneously evidencing its uniqueness, thus taking it outside the global economy. The article shows how the fallout of atrocity in Bhopal, the product of globalized corporation gone terribly wrong, gets caught between local and global spheres of legal redress, and it enquires into the ways in which a body of postcolonial literature navigates between the universal and the particular to make the experience of one local atrocity legible to a global audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the politics of scale in the commemorative work undertaken by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB), a coalition of social movement organisations (SMOs) seeking justice for the victims of the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984. The argument traces how the ICJB attempted to contest the localisation of the disaster by the Indian state and the transnational corporations involved. I outline how the disaster, which had been scaled down from an extraordinary global event to a private non-issue, was re-scaled successfully across multiple scales of meaning and regulation through ICJB's mobilisation of the frame of 'second/ongoing poisoning'. This contestation over the scaling of the disaster crucially involved multiple processes of memory-work. Drawing on archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reveals how the remembrance of the disaster functioned as a key site of the discursive and performative re-framings required to reinstate multi-scalar accountability for the disaster. Overall, the paper establishes the utility of the politics of scale approach in mapping the dynamics of the transnational mobilisations of memory by SMOs in pursuit of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost 30 long years have been passed since the World's worst disastrous industrial tragedy at Bhopal but its havoc still upsets our memories and pains our heart. This article gives a detailed overview on the possible causes of the accident and state of affairs of the city on the ill-fated night of 2 December 1984. Since the article is incorporated in the special issue “Science, Responsibility and Governance,” attempts have been made to keep the subject matter of the article within the framework of the journal theme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses Indra Sinha's 2007 novel,Animal's People, as a critical lens to analyse the discourse of scenario planning. I argue that scenario planning, a strategy of speculation about possible futures, elides history—specifically the intertwined processes of colonialism and capitalism—in favour of the idea of globalization as an inexorable unfolding of the world as a complex system. Following a brief genealogy of the discourse of scenario planning that highlights its Cold War origins, and ongoing function in imagining, and helping to secure, the future of global capitalism, I offer as counterpoint a postcolonial reading ofAnimal's People. A fictional exploration of the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide factory gas leak in Bhopal, India, the novel contests (thematically and formally) the hegemonic temporality of globalization that informs scenario planning and the model of risk management it inspires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the use of profanity and the grotesque in Indra Sinha's 2008 novel Animal's People, which fictionalizes the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India. I argue that Sinha's text utilizes the profane to strip away the artifices separating the international readership the novel targets from the subaltern figures upon whom it centres. In doing so, it calls into question attitudes like those employed by Union Carbide when the company's case came to trial, which alleged that US courts and juries would be unable to comprehend the different standards of living accompanying the poverty of Bhopal's citizens. Through readings of Mbembe and Derrida, I discuss the question of what is human, as well as what constitutes human rights, across national and class boundaries. I contend that Animal's process of self-abjection, through frequent sexual references, vulgar language and references to bodily fluids, renders his readers abject as well. Sinha's use of profanity and the grotesque invokes readers' horror and often our laughter, thereby blurring the boundaries between us and involving us and implicating us in complex ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the midst of concerns about diminishing political support for human rights, individuals and groups across the globe continue to invoke them in their diverse struggles against oppression and injustice. Yet both those concerned with the future of human rights and those who champion rights activism as essential to resistance, assume that human rights – as law, discourse and practices of rights claiming – can ameliorate rightlessness. In questioning this assumption, this article seeks also to reconceptualise rightlessness by engaging with contemporary discussions of disposability and social abandonment in an attempt to be attentive to forms of rightlessness co-emergent with the operations of global capital. Developing a heuristic analytics of rightlessness, it evaluates the relatively recent attempts to mobilise human rights as a frame for analysis and action in the campaigns for justice following the 3 December 1984 gas leak from Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Informed by the complex effects of human rights in the amelioration of rightlessness, the article calls for reconstituting human rights as an optics of rightlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates frameworks to conceptualise, monitor and compare corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance at individual conference venues, and provides a new comparative framework that organises and communicates information detailing business performance on 10 environmental policy initiatives (EPIs) (expressed by the acronym “GREENER”) using a CSR scale (expressed by the acronym “VENUE”). This GREENER VENUE framework reduces the gap in the CSR literature by accentuating discretionary practices, and by exhibiting conceptual and psychometric properties enabling the framework's application to broad and diverse contexts. Its use is grounded in theory: the framework is practical, simple to implement, easily understandable and highly relatable. Applying the GREENER VENUE framework to data collected via a self-administered internet questionnaire of 191 UK conference and meeting venues reveals that the biggest groups of such venues are classified as “Eager” on a rising scale from Eternal denial (11%), through Unmotivated (16%), to Nonchalant (30%) and so to Eager (36%), and finally, the top group, Venerated (7%). The paper also investigates the relative influence of all 10 EPI variables of the GREENER measure – considered simultaneously – towards enhancing firms’ behaviour on an inventory of 18 well-known environmental best practices (EBPIs). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2008, survivors of the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster in India undertook a 500-mile march to New Delhi, protesting a long history of governmental neglect of the survivors of the event. This is one episode of a 25-year-old organized international campaign that continues in the present. This article examines the ways in which three bodily substances – blood, hearts and ketones – were produced and circulated through the 2008 protests. Placed within a broader history of substance-politics in the region, this article suggests that these protests produced an imagination of bodily substances that surfaced messy contradictions that became difficult for the Indian State to disregard. This article also shows how these protests distanced themselves from the cynicism attached to similar modes of corporeal activism in the contemporary Indian landscape. In sum, this article traces the production of an activist corporeal counter-discourse that, for at least a time, contaminated the procedures through which the Indian State disregards the health of its marginal citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The worst chemical industrial disaster occurred in Bhopal, India at a pesticide plant on the night of 2-3 December 1984 killing approximately 2500 people immediately and many more subsequently as a consequence of the toxic effects of the methyl isocyanate released from the plant. The main toxic effects were observed on the lungs, the eyes and on reproductive health. A wide spectrum of lung diseases varying from obstructive airways disease to interstitial lung fibrosis has been reported to occur in the gas-exposed subjects, many of them leading life as respiratory cripples. Corneal opacities and early onset cataracts in younger populations were also observed. There was a high incidence of spontaneous abortions and still-births in gas-exposed pregnant women and there were also significantly higher perinatal and neonatal mortalities in the affected areas. Many gas-exposed individuals suffered from psychiatric disorders. There is inadequate compensation to the victims considering the severity of the recognised consequences of the disaster. The punishment meted out to the guilty can be considered trivial in relation to the adverse human outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of industrial disasters, the chemical release at Bhopal and the long-term production and use of asbestos products are two of the largest and most controversial cases. Both events backfired on the companies responsible, namely Union Carbide and James Hardie (which, in Australia, largely controlled the asbestos products market). Yet in the case of Bhopal most victims have not been adequately compensated and, while compensation seems more assured for Australian asbestos victims, it has been a long and bitter battle for justice. How, in a globalised world, can we ensure that corporate negligence backfires and victims receive justice? This paper presents a framework for understanding how global corporations attempt to inhibit outrage and how to counter their tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with a description of the Bhopal disaster, when a leak at the Union Carbide company killed thousands, this essay turns to the issue of the politics of discursive practices. The discussion focuses at first on a genealogy of environmental discourses— ranging from conservation to sustainability and then proceeds to a treatment of the way various dimensions of political economy constitute events of ethnic exclusion. The essay ends with a juxtaposition of traditional ethics and a politics of aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the human health effects of methyl isocyanate gas exposure that leaked from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Increase in the mortality rate of the people living in the area; Indications of acute irritant effects; Observation of significant neurological, reproductive, behavioral and psychological effects.

In addition to dealing with all the pollution problems familiar to the West, India is still struggling with problems that are now virtually unknown in the industrialized world. Since the disaster at Bhopal, new legislation and the growing interest of grassroots organizations in environmental issues are a promising antidote to bureaucratic apathy.

Discusses how a cloud of methyl isocyanate from a Union Carbide plant killed and injured thousands of people, animals, and plants in the Bhopal area of India in Dec. 1984. Implications for safety management, hazard communication, and technology transfer; Failures associated with the emergency response teams that had to cope with the disaster; Efforts of the Indian leaders in Madhya Pradesh to attract companies such as Union Carbide by offering incentives; Investigation of what triggered the contamination of a storage tank to cause the violent chemical reaction. INSETS: Is Safer Safe Enough?;Major Findings of Union Carbide Corporation Investigation Team.

Discusses the nature and implications of the Bhopal's Union Carbide Corporation United States of America accident and its implications and lessons derived from the accident and its aftermath. What causes Bhopal accident; Why organizations should have a permanent, well-trained, interdisciplinary crisis management team; Why enforceable international standards are urgently needed for hazardous industries; Conclusions.

Discusses the Bhopal Group for Information and Action (BGIA), a group of Indian activists working to support victims of the Bhopal disaster in India. History of the Bhopal disaster; BGIA support to the Bhopal Gas Affected Working Women's Union; Toxic gas leakage from a pesticide plant.

Deals with the call for 'continuing liability' for the Bhopal Union Carbide Plant Disaster case in Bhopal, India. Demand by victims of the disaster and by political activists working in response to the out-of-court settlement of the case; Constitutionality of the role played in the litigation by the Government of India; Appropriate response to disaster.

Editorial. Underscores the need for better disaster preparedness planning. Experience in Bhopal, India on December 3, 1984 during accidental release of methyl isocyanate (MIC) at Union Carbide factory; Injuries suffered by victims; Lack of disaster preparedness that complicated the tragedy.