Anywhere between JP Colony in front of the Union Carbide plant and Hamidia Road in Old Bhopal, one cannot miss the beeline of private clinics.
It is like a sick city, with people carrying pouches full of pills in their pockets — either for respiratory problems, backaches, knee pains, or incurable stomach cramps. For Bhopal survivors, even 25 years after that night when 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanade streamed into their bodies what they have inherited is a legacy of breathlessness, and denial of responsibility by governments.
About 10 km from the worst-affected area, in a remote location stands the Bhopal Memorial Hospital, set up with a corpus raised by Union Carbide by selling its shares. But it is said to be unpopular among the poor and getting admitted is not easy. It permits only those gas victims who are registered, and according to NGOs, only a lakh people have been registered though hospital authorities claimed that they had over four lakh patients.
The OPD is almost empty, while the PRO said theirs were the only cardiological hospital in the city and every day two gas victims are provided free surgery.
The hospital lacks gynaecology and paediatric departments. The pulmonary section has just one doctor though most patients have respiratory problems.
Said gas survivor from Puta Makabra, Lala Ram, wheezing uncontrollably in the OPD, “I got free treatment, but it was ineffective. Private clinics are better but expensive.”
The Sambhavna clinic set up by leading Bhopal NGO and activist Satinath Sarangi is an option. But Ram said it was overcrowded.
The hospital runs a research centre but hardly any document on the tragedy has come out of it, a fact that R C Bhandari, who was medical superintendent of Hamidia Hospital at the time of the leak and principal investigator in five of the 24 studies commissioned by the Indian Council of Medical Research on the impact of the gas on the survivors, admits. The hospital also faces flak for lack of transparency and for splurging on buildings rather than opening small clinics in the colonies.
“We have been demanding transparency for long, on what it (hospital) does with the interest from the Rs 1000 crore corpus and fees from private patients,” said Nityanand Jayaraman, a Bhopal activist of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.
Bhandari, who is also on the committees of the hospital said it was better to blame the fumes rather than the hospitals. “Most of the ailments are chronic. The cure would have been possible if the cause had been researched and cases followed up,” he said. But ICMR is yet to publish four of the five studies he led.
“The only study that was published covered 24,000 pregnant women among 86,000 survivors and the same number in another group. It found that while congenital malformation was low, incidence of still-birth was high among the survivors. The idea was to follow up on children for 14 years but ICMR cited court cases and stopped the studies. It did not publish the ones that were done, too,” said Bhandari, revealing that one of the unpublished studies found 50 per cent decline in pulmonary functions in children. He blamed the state government for not asking Union Carbide for the money to treat and research.
Said Bhopal gas relief principal secretary SR Mohanty, “We have spent Rs 250 crore on medical treatment for the last 10 years. The Centre has not given us a penny.”
“Why ask the Centre? Ask Carbide,” argued Bhandari.
The hospital website tells almost nothing about the trustees or the corpus handed through the Supreme Court orders. All that one sees from outside is a large campus with directions to the doctors’ quarters, swimming pool and other spaces for the staff. A breathless Bhopal has to walk a good kilometre to the reception from the main gate.
The apathy turns apparent as the commissioner in charge of Bhopal gas relief J T Ekka put it to this reporter, “Why do you want to write about it? Write about Dubai World, instead.”
